Spinozablue welcomes the poetry and fiction of A.J. Huffman and Charles Tarlton, plus new work by returning champions Donal Mahoney and Steve Klepetar.

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The Fiery Trial. By Eric Foner

I’m currently reading a fantastic history by Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial.  It’s a biography of Lincoln in a sense, but focuses on his relationship to slavery and its abolition. Two hundred pages in, I’m reminded of just how far we’ve come, and how incredibly, tragically long it took us to get here. I had forgotten, for instance, that Lincoln’s views — which evolved over time — were considered by many to be too radical, while actual radicals and abolitionists considered him far too accommodating on the issue. At least until 1863.…

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Midnight Walks

Pink elephants glitter through a memory
of a garden.  Soaked in rain,
we dance so carefully.  Echoing
each other’s indifference
regarding vision, we pattern a moon.
Dialed for futility,

invisible hands reached through
ghosts (broth present and unaccounted for).
Laughter lightening tongues
toward tales of fear and following.  Our hands
folding inside each other as we cross
a bridge no one built to come out.  Unscathed
is a fairy-told demon.  We find
only slightly scarred is more reality’s toll.

Electric Sunset

 
Flock of feathered followers
pierce the clouds.  Dollops of fuscia,
gold, and lime sizzle before igniting.  Clouds
crack, open a peep show of silver linings.
Lighting spotlights the mountains’ misery.
1… 2… 3… Thunder matches angry
growl of night, resigns, fades from dripping red
to black.…

The post A.J. Huffman: Midnight Walks Electric appeared first on Spinozablue.

The Lost Place

No longer home
or any other world,

this empty space
grows inside out

like time eating
its own flicking tail.

Have you wondered
where the strong

walls bent, sliding
back into earth?

Who has answered
your call or left

a message on your
empty, hanging pad?

Someday you may
call me “brother”

or forget my different
name.  Someday

you too may disappear
another breath of smoke

an absence rising
wraith-like to the snowy stars.

Copyright©2013 by Steve Klepetar. All Rights Reserved.

Steve Klepetar teaches literature and creative writing at Saint Cloud State University in Minnesota.  His work has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.  Recent chapbooks include My Father Teaches Me a Magic Word and My Father Had Another Eye, both from Flutter Press.  His book Speaking to the Field Mice was recently published by Sweatshoppe Publications.…

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THE NEW HIRE

This would be Hampton Davie’s third academic job in as many hard years since he’d got his Ph.D. in poetry at Winston. He started out prestigiously enough, teaching the introduction to American poetry and a seminar on Wallace Stevens at Bisby University, but that had not worked out. He’d quickly got another position, a little farther down the rankings, at Rolling Rock, but that, too, had dissolved in his hands. Now, he was at Button College, determined to hold on.
 
He had always loved the campus at Winston, with its old period stone buildings and the ivy on the walls. Even Bisby had evolved through various architectural trends, colonial with columns in one part, Victorian towers in another. Button was a different story.…

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Behind the Barn with Carol Ann
 
 
Back in 1957, kissing Carol Ann behind the barn in the middle of a windswept field of Goldenrod with a sudden deer watching was something special, let me tell you. Back then, bobby sox and big barrettes and ponytails were everywhere.
 
Like many farmers, Carol Ann’s father had a console radio in the living room, and every Saturday night the family would gather ‘round with bowls of ice cream and listen to The Grand Ole Opry. It was beamed “all the way” from Nashville I was told more than once since I was from Chicago and sometimes wore a tie so how could I know.
 
On my first visit, I asked Carol Ann if the Grand Ole Opry was the Mormon Tabernacle Choir of country music and she said not to say that to her father.…

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April showers us with new poetry and fiction by Cameron Gearen, Damien Healy and Donal Mahoney.

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The Death of Cleopatra, by Reginald Arthur. 1892

I’m currently reading a very interesting bio of Cleopatra, by Stacy Schiff, who also wrote a fine biography of Ben Franklin. She has range.

Cleopatra is a difficult subject for any biographer, but Ms. Schiff does a good job trying to sort truth from legend, and admits when she can’t be sure about certain events or years in the life of the Egyptian queen. We know when she is speculating, unlike many biographers. She actually tells us.

Through page 142, Caesar and Cleopatra take up the majority of the book, and it’s fascinating to discover the various intrigues in play.…

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Prayer

Little lake
earth’s thimble
glacial sink
take my ache
take the torn girl
the grieved woman
buoy her children
there where
the loon
calculates
its catch
where the
pickerel jumps
and the pocked
surface splits
or reflects
Black Mountain
I can’t contain
all I’ve got
to carry let me
leave it to your
silt muck reeds
and granite
to your white
lilies and their
leeches to the
streams that
feed you deep
pond stay
close today
I’m counting
on your volume
your powers
to dilute to be
your gracious
self to ask no
questions pond
absorb receive
ripple then that
lovely silence
will you take
a few of these
troubles pond
and positively
drown them?

Telling

That’s when blindness set
in.  Silent movie.  I knew
all those door hinges, their
capacity for swivel.  Ceded
my sight to the cornice’s
stare.  Do you know yourself
a vision veiled?  What
the throat felt: need
clamping (his) / a forced
yield.  It’s a marvel,
scientifically speaking;
it will succumb
unhingingly.  Whatever
wriggling resistance
I came with has been
quashed.  The light
changed, a strange cloudy.…

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Nightmares

Sleep without dreaming,
For fear the dreaming may bring her back.
A motionless snooze,
Congealing everything within a trance.
Slumbering eyes fully open,
To keep succubus at arms length.
Lethargic stillness,
Brought on by umpteen apparitions.
Insecure rest,
Owing to unrequited adoration.
Wayward napping,
Interrupted with unwanted visitants.
The night terrors which haunt me twenty-four seven.

Empty lot

Spirals in squares,
Confined to overgrow the pedestrian walkways of life.
Burrowing knee deep in a chipped teacup,
Excusing misinterpreted foliage for the inconsistencies of its shape.
Dredging through filters of fermented rotting undergrowth,
To find bliss in a sprout of new life, new beginnings and the promises that we haven’t lost all.
In the season of well intentioned nurturing,
Sprinkles of infused verve eclipses every failed beginning.…

The post Damien Healy: Empty Lot appeared first on Spinozablue.

      It’s Almost Sunday Morning

         In the summer of 1956, any Saturday at midnight, especially when the moon was out and the stars were bright, you would be able to see Grandma Groth sitting on her front-porch swing waiting for her son, Clarence, a bachelor at 53, to make it home from the Blind Man’s Pub. He would have spent another evening quaffing steins of Heineken’s.

         Many times that summer before I went away to college, I’d be strolling home at midnight from another pub, just steps behind staggering Clarence. But unlike Clarence, I’d be sober so I’d always let him walk ahead of me and I’d listen to him hum “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Sometimes, very quietly, I’d join in. I don’t think he ever heard me.…

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On this day when everyone is Irish, I think it’s good to remember how many of us got here, what it took, the tragedies overcome and the triumphs at the end of the road. Kathryn Miles has written what sounds like a moving, important book. I caught part of her interview today on NPR:

All Standing: The Remarkable Story of the Jeanie Johnston, The Legendary Irish Famine Ship. By Kathryn Miles.

You can listen to it here: On Point Interview with Kathryn Miles.

 …

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