by Maya Massar

So ripe
I cannot eat it
With any semblance
Of politeness

Gory with its black-red juice
I am an animal

Vibrant with the naked hunt
Lush with the kill

I return to the prayer of ancestors

Mother of the Cave
Make me your witness:
I am She who Lives

Pomegranate

Too bloody for the rest

Has saved my life

Amen.

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Maya Massar (website) is a poet who dances, loves Africa and sings to celestial bodies and stones. Her first book of poetry, Risk; A Month of Poems, is available on Amazon.com. Maya’s current painting project “Sacred” will be on display at Vancouver, B.C.’s East Side Culture Crawl on November 20-22, where she will also be reading from her upcoming book The Amen Poems.

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by Khadija Anderson

1. means god in Arabic

99 names

no eyes
no ears

Al lah
Al lah

AL LAH

alif lam lam hamsa

Allah is not male
NOT male

not a man
or he
or HE

or anything that
you

can imagine

 
2. Does your husband make you wear that?

I am a
wrapped piece
of candy a
swaddled jewel
I am perfect
woman under
my packaging
you may not see
my effusive gold mahr
my fruitful awrah

 
3. Does your religion make you wear that?

the woman
who does not
cover her hair
should have it
shorn
~ Corinthians 15:6

 
4. Tessellation

Middle Eastern Art Scheherazade veil sheikh
The Alhambra calligraphy Afghanistan burqa
Palestine hashish Morocco pyramids violence
hooknosed Arabic sword mosque haram thief
sand nigger Sinbad jihad camel whore infidel
Iraq belly dancing terrorist Aladdin barbarian
Sahara couscous hookah Rumi rag head bitch

 
5. last words

I see a woman covered
in a long dress, headscarf
and face veil
salaam aleykum, I say
and as she looks at my
bare head, tank top
and tattoos
she replies,
wa aleykum salaam sister
 

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Khadija Anderson (blog) returned last year to her native Los Angeles after 18 years exile in Seattle. Khadija’s poetry has been published in print and online. She has been a featured reader numerous times in the Seattle area. She is also a Butoh dancer and collaborates with her eldest son in their dance company, Tanden Butoh.

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by Susanna Rich

It takes nothing — talent nor courage —
to be a sleeping princess
in a house of glass — Tiffany doves
floating in door lights, gold

-camed windows, panes that mirror
interior lights over outer darkness.
Things break only from others’ use —
etched flutes and tumblers; the crystal

witch’s ball hung to ward off evil;
Murano lamps; silvered walls;
the central vacuum…
Glaziers come, like charioteers,

with ladders and Unrue racks
to unscrew old strike plates, bleed
the furnace, crawl on their bellies
amongst toads and kittens

transparent in the walls. This is living
in the sky, in the full neon of the sun,
glitter of stars, a store of Magic
Ginger Ale — phosphate bubbles

unreleased — the aspic mold of pansies,
the heart-shaped ice cubes for guests
who bear their envy, to the altar
of you… For a spell to be a spell,

it must be broken — the rescuer must be
disguised, the rescued must seem to sleep
in a life of liquid suspense — perfect,
cold — waiting to be shattered…

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Susanna Rich (website) is a 2009 Emmy Award nominee for the poetry she wrote and voice-overed for Craig Lindvahl’s documentary Cobb Field. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Television Daddy and The Drive Home (both from Finishing Line Press); the 2008 Featured Poet of Darkling Literary Magazine; and a Fulbright Fellow in Creative Writing. An internationally published poet and prose writer, Susanna tours the one-woman audience-interactive poetry experience Television Daddy, and is in production for The Drive Home (opening in 2010). She is Professor of English and Distinguished Teacher at Kean University in New Jersey, teaching such courses as Emily Dickinson, William Blake, and 20th Century Women Poets.

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by Marja-Leena Rathje

Click on image to view a larger version.

ARKEO #4
archival inkjet and collagraph on paper
81 x 61 cm. (32″ x 24″)

For more information on this print, please see Marja-Leena’s blog post about it, and visit her gallery to see the rest of the series.

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Marja-Leena Rathje is a Finnish-Canadian artist specializing in printmaking and photography. She is crazy about weathered rocks, prehistoric art and the archaeology of past, present and future. She lives and works near the sea and the mountains of Vancouver and has exhibited widely, both internationally and in her local region.

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by Allen C. Fischer

He uttered
tainted ellipses,
guttural sounds
empty of syllable
so his words
were other than
I had ever heard.
His yaw, jive and
garble mimicked,
it seemed,
a marred parrot.

Seated in the back
corner of the
subway car, he
was in continuous
self-rejoinder,
chortling,
purling, braying.
Everyone else
out of it.
We locked glances
as though at any

moment, madness
might commit fury
and send us
running for our lives.
But the man
paid scant attention
to us as he followed
the thread of his
conversation,
come 2nd Avenue,
out of the car.

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Allen C. Fischer, former director of marketing for a nationwide corporation, brings to poetry a background in business. His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Indiana Review, The Laurel Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, and Rattle.

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by cin salach

Spell for the Undoing of Prayers

Let go the sex that begins me, let go the veil that becomes me
the ground the breeze, they know, they will reveal me now

*

I leave my signs of leaving spread neatly across the floor announcing
I’m leaving

to architect my own body

in the smooth ache of arch and bridge the red belly of fly and seed green of water
gold of wind stillness of pine and stone crawl of light.

I’m leaving
to hear my own body answer:

she is a wave, all the rest is negotiable.

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cin salach has been performing and publishing in Chicago and around for over 20 years. She is both baffled by and grateful for online submissions of poetry. Actually, she is baffled and grateful by/for most things.

:: :: :: :: :: ::

We’re pleased to announce that submissions are open for the winter issue, which will begin publishing after the New Year. The theme this time is Health, broadly defined, and the editors are Susan Elbe and Kelly Madigan Erlandson (the links go to their works here at qarrtsiluni; see below for more about them). We’re having the submission period now, in November, to avoid the busy holiday season. The deadline is November 30th. As always, please refer to the How to Contribute page for general submission guidelines (and note that there have been several minor changes).

The editors have chosen a theme that should resonate far beyond the current health care debate in the United States:

We are interested in creative interpretations of health, which will of course include the health (or lack thereof) of the human body, but also of the mind and spirit, the environment, or the culture. How systems stay in balance, how one attains wellness, how we relate or respond to our own state of health and the health of others, and the extent of an individual’s physical, emotional, mental, and social ability to cope with his/her environment would all be fair game. Unusual health-related practices also intrigue us (serpents? psychic surgery?) as well as tales of spontaneous recovery. How much control do we have over our own health? Explore superstitions, regale us with symptoms, or simply make a well-written toast to our health — we’ll consider it. Keep in mind too that the etymological roots of health include “whole” and “hale,” but also “holy.”

Our limit is three poems or one prose piece per submission, with a 1,200-word limit on the prose.

Both editors hail from the American Midwest, and they’ve been friends for years. Susan Elbe is the author of Eden in the Rearview Mirror (Word Press) and a chapbook, Light Made from Nothing (Parallel Press). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including Blackbird, diode, MARGIE, North American Review, Ocho, Salt Hill, Smartish Pace, and A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-five Years of Women’s Poetry (Calyx Books). Among her awards are the inaugural Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize (Calyx), the 2006 Lorine Niedecker Award, and fellowships to Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Susan has served on the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission and currently serves on the Council for Wisconsin Writers Board. You can learn more about her and her work at susanelbe.com.

Kelly Madigan Erlandson is the author of Getting Sober: A Practical Guide to Making it Through the First 30 Days (McGraw-Hill). Her poems, stories and essays have appeared in Best New Poets 2007, Crazyhorse, The Massachusetts Review, Plains Song Review, Terrain.org and Prairie Schooner. She has been a writer-in-residence at Jentel Artist Residency Program and the KHN Center for the Arts. Kelly was awarded the Distinguished Artist Award in Literature from the Nebraska Arts Council in 2006, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2008. She has worked as a licensed alcohol and drug counselor in Nebraska since 1983. Visit her website at KellyMadiganErlandson.com.

*

Don’t forget to join the qarrtsiluni news group on Google if you want to receive these announcements via email. We’d also like to emphasize something we mention in the general guidelines which some contributors seem to overlook: if you don’t receive an acknowledgment note within two days after you send something, assume that we didn’t get it and re-submit. If you still don’t hear anything, try sending from another email. If you’re submitting via the Contact form, please be sure to type your email address correctly. Sometimes we can find the correct address by Googling, but there was one guy who submitted to the current issue who we never were able to track down — and we wanted to publish his essay, too! Finally, please make sure your email is set to accept messages from qarrtsiluni(at)gmail(dot)com. Getting an automatic reply telling us we have to jump through extra hoops to communicate with authors makes us very grouchy indeed.

If this is the first you’ve visited the site in a while, be sure to check out all the great stuff we’ve been posting for the Words of Power issue — and stick around, because there’s much more on the way. We look forward to hearing from you soon.

—Beth and Dave

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Music: “Solo Fumo Yerba,” by Doctor Inferno — find more of their music at the Internet Archive

This episode of the podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution – Noncommercial – Share Alike licence, in conformity with the requirements for using a “share alike” work.

:: :: :: :: :: ::

by Jeneva Stone

I have gone back to ground
back to the fine root hairs
that lie along your skin

gone back to ground I have
in hand the world’s blue cup
faint musk of you within

back to ground I have gone
into murk of natal flesh
thrust of the child-wish

gone to ground for you I yearn
bound to you ever make return

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Jeneva Stone — poet, blogger, mother, federal employee, practical g/i nurse, interpreter of EOBs, queen of medical necessity letters, keeper of the family exchequer, unlicensed physical therapist, knowledgeable wheelchair mechanic — may also be found at Busily Seeking… Continual Change.

:: :: :: :: :: ::

by Robin Susanto

Click on image to view a larger version.

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Robin Susanto lives in Vancouver, Canada. He takes photographs not as proof of having been, but as a way to slow down the act of seeing.

:: :: :: :: :: ::

by Nathan Horowitz

from A Field Guide to Psychotropical Rainforest Birds

January 15, 2007

It was the weekend, and my young students had received a solid week of English, so I caught a ride down the river to go see Joaquín at his hut. A visitor was there, Jim Timothy from California. In his early 40s, he was slim and in very good shape. He had a receding hairline and a pencil-thin moustache like John Waters. He boasted of his ability to dance as many hours as boyfriends half his age. He described himself as an urban shaman and an organizer of rave parties with a spiritual focus.

“We always have a chill-out room,” he told me, “where there are always people on ecstasy having mellow conversations and giving each other backrubs. It’s better than having them out on the street drinking and fighting.”

He told me a dream in which he was in a natural history museum. In a dimly-lit corridor in the Egyptian section, he saw a diorama with a sphinx in it. She was alive and looking out at him through the glass. As he looked in her eyes he found that he was simultaneously himself and her, but more her than himself, because he was an emanation of her.

One day when he was a kid in Catholic school, he asked the priest, “We’re supposed to love our enemies, right?”

“That’s right.”

“And the devil is our enemy, so we’re supposed to love the devil, right?”

In another story he tells, he’s way out in the desert on an Indian reservation in the southwestern United States after having eaten peyote. He’s alone, naked, and playing a drum. A cloud of dust appears in the distance, gets closer. It’s from an approaching car. The car keeps getting closer and closer. It’s one of the tribal police cars. It drives up to him and stops. A big Indian cop wearing mirrored sunglasses gets out. Walks slowly up to him and says:

“You know you can’t do this.”

Jim says, “Yes.”

The cop says, “All right,” turns around, gets back in his car and drives away.

“Myths are computer chips,” Jim remarked in another conversation, “concentrated intelligence, survival information for hard times.”

I said, “One of my creative writing professors gave me a book of poems by the Serbian poet Vasko Popa called Homage to the Lame Wolf, named after an old Serbian tribal god. I found these poems astonishing because Popa was really operating from a different frame of reference than the other poets I were reading. The poems really were praise poems to this pagan god. I went to my professor and said this. He leaned back in his chair and said, ‘Vasko Popa knows a lot about wolves.’ I said, ‘Like what?’ My professor said, ‘And his grandmother knew even more.’ I said, ‘Like what?’ My professor said, ‘How to make love to them.’”

Jim replied, “This is a story about someone I don’t know well personally. We have a friend in common. This man works at an aquarium. They released one of their male sea lions back into the ocean. This man drives his car to the beach every Friday and picks up the sea lion and takes him home. He keeps him in the bathtub and feeds him fish, and they make love. On Sunday he returns him to the ocean.”

Joaquín made a ceremony with Jim and me. He chanted over cups of yagé and we drank and settled into hammocks and relaxed. For a long time we were quiet, listening to insects chittering and tweeting, and frogs honking and groaning, a thrilling music of wierdness. My mind took off and crash-landed in a realm of fragrant, burnt language, where mumbo jumbo, gibberish, and gobbledygook reigned.

Yagé’s not a bug or a slug, it’s a drug, but it’s way more than that, it’s a bat like a cat. It’s the distillation of the echo of gunflower elves. It’s green water in white rivers of blue oceans in the veins of bamboo. It’s subcutaneous calico lichen, vibrating neon gum that chews itself against the teeth of your mind, it’s an apparition of the face of Pan on a flower tortilla, it’s yellow blades of sunlight magnified by the black earth, orange skeins of spunlight delighting us through the perfect planet, red dreams of the One Light shaking us gently in the midnight morning saying “Hey, old friend, wake up, it’s time to BE, buddy. Time to be.” (Be, be, be, be, be, the verb reverberates off my lips.)

In a memory from my junior year in college, I’m lying on my back beneath a maple tree in October, blue sky above, and the intermittent cold breeze is shaking down the fantastic yellow red orange leaves, spinning against the sky as they fall. And I was thinking, “The tree is a natural clock that tells the time of the season. Each leaf that falls is another season second.”

What are the ramifications of this?

I chant silently, many times, the name of Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion.

I’m in a sub-aquatic realm of blue and green… there’s something fierce about it… and it has many lizard eyes peering around. What I’m looking at is the fabric of lizard skins, and some gnomes in a workshop are cutting into it with instruments like cookie cutters, taking out lizard-shaped skins and sewing them onto lizard bodies. Of course lizards come into being through biological reproduction, I know that, but the natural process is mirrored by this supernatural one. This is simply how they fabricate lizards. The scene winks out and I’m in darkness again listening to the insect songs. Joaquín is snoring quietly.

I want to get rich selling fake wisdom, now that I know everything is fake. But then even my wealth will be fake, like Monopoly money. Sun, moon, and stars, all artificial—constructed like a stage set by elves attempting to convince us that this so-called reality is real. It’s built by the elves of Maya, by Maya’s elves, by My’selves—…. In this me-istic miasma of cells and selves, this self-same magnetic magma that is the body on yagé again. I’m in one of those places where everything one thinks of is true. So totally, undeniably accurate, and yet elsewhere it could be false. Truths have physical boundaries as much as countries have. I hold still, listening. Here the shamanic universe is infinitely vast and real. Elsewhere, it is not real, and other rules apply. And always, here, the crickets are singing, and my lungs are drinking this rich, clean air like a distillation of life itself.

More than yagé, I’m intoxicated by this divine, fragrant language of nature that keeps breathing within me and without me; I’m drunk on this plant animal language of squawks and whistles and humming and singing. An immense wave of nausea hits me, immediately followed by self-pity as I remember I will die someday, and then compassion as I remember everyone else will die someday too. With tears in my eyes I resign myself to pain, foreshadower of death.

And the crickets play their wordless songs with more intensity now, and I’m not sure whether the music is inside me or outside me, a language that reverberates through me until it’s all that I am…. And I stretch and shift, relieving a pressure in my back, and float once again in the delicate black water of the forest night, my head clear, resigned to nausea and to the lightness of my limbs as if I were the captain of a boat sailing through a calm sky of smoke high above a burning city. I’m cold, and I pull the light blanket up around my shoulders. What are Jim and Joaquín doing? Go slow, my soul. My stomach hurts; I listen. Joaquín is again snoring quietly.

I recall a line from an early explorer’s description of yagé customs: “Transported by the drink, the Indians dreamed a thousand absurdities and believed them as if they were true.” Yes, how compelling these absurdities are! It’s so easy to be transported by them! It’s like you never knew you were a sailboat, and then the wind comes, and off you go! We drink a thousand truths and believe them as if they were dreams. We dream of the myths of man and the dreams we learn to believe in when we’re dreamed into this world—night and day, something and nothing, here and there, now and then. We’re all tiny shoots of the human plant, reified and pulsating.

Dozens of gnomes march past me in the darkness carrying strange tools. Fireworks explode behind them. Transported by the drink, I’m borne into a 4^th of July memory from when I was a kid. It’s 1974, I’m six years old, my mom and stepfather take me to the fireworks display at Veterans Park. They greet an aquaintance, Stacy, then move to an open space and spread out the secondhand quilt on which old automobiles are printed. My mom remarks about Stacy, “She’s high as a kite.” The display begins. I love the huge firecrackers booming in the drunken velvety summer sky, the whistling-screaming yellowy-white fireworks that corkscrew as they fall, the huge green plantlike ones that hold still in the high air with their smoke lit up by their fire, and the blue starlike ones that seem like love messages from outer space, while the spectators lie on blankets underneath, saying Oooooo! Ahhhhh! In 1996, I breathe deeply, living in two times, appreciating the old familiar glorious beauty.

Nausea.

Eagles and stars whirl around my vision, arrows and olive branches, stars and stripes, red, white and blue. This is part of my design. We’re woven into each other. This is part of my totem pole. America the beautiful.

Nausea, increasing the beauty of the visions. My eyes run with tears, red, white and blue.

Nearby, in his hammock, my fellow American Jim Timothy clears his throat and sings, his voice ringing out like a bell in the darkness:

The creator is our savior,
Hey ney yo wey,
The creator is our savior,
Hey ney yo wey.

Take care of us, take care of us,
Hey ney yo wey,
Take care of us, take care of us,
Hey ney yo wey.

The creator is our savior,
Hey ney yo wey,
The creator is our savior,
Hey ney yo wey.

Take pity on us, take pity on us,
Hey ney yo wey,
Take pity on us, take pity on us,
Hey ney yo wey.

The creator is our savior,
Hey ney yo wey,
The creator is our savior,
Hey ney yo wey.

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Nathan Horowitz has three bright blue noses, six bright yellow tongues, 45 small, perfectly-shaped jet black ears, 95 hands, most of which are sleeping, and a long, long, long yellow and black stripy tail that wraps twice around the earth.

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