Ellaraine Lockie elockie@comcast.net Bio (auto) Ellaraine Lockie writes poetry, nonfiction books and essays She’s received a writing residency at Centrum in Port Townsend, WA, eleven Pushcart Prize nominations, the Lois Beebe Hayna Award from The Eleventh Muse, the One Page Poem Prize from the Missouri Writers’ Guild, the Writecorner Press Poetry Award, the Skysaje Poetry Prize, the Dean Wagner Poetry Prize and the Elizabeth R Curry Prize from SLAB, among many other awards. Recently released is Mod Gods and Luggage Straps, a poetry/art broadside from BrickBat Revue. Forthcoming are chapbooks from FootHills Publishing and Pudding House Lockie also teaches a poetry workshop for schools, libraries and writing groups, and she serves as Poetry Editor for the lifestyles magazine, Lilipoh Her home page is on Literati at: http://literati.net/ellaraine-lockie | | |
The following work is Copyright © 2009, and owned by Ellaraine Lockie and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.
Stiff The jaw drops after his last breath The nurse says hold it shut so it doesn’t freeze fallen And the eyes she says Finger force them closed Easier on the relatives A living look As though he’s resting in his beloved rose garden We wrestle with the ring Second-skin stuck on finger Already curled in death claw Rock hard but glass fragile I wonder if it breaks would blood still spurt Not so nice for the relatives We wash private parts with warm water Why warm I wonder on a cold cadaver The relatives won’t know And they won’t see the stiffened organ Old age flaccidity dilated in death I wonder do I hold that down too The nurse says maybe he’s too lifelike now But not alive enough for the daughter Who stares out the window At the rose garden An Act of Kindness She is one of the women who travels daily from her township Singing in the back of a pick-up truck with a chorus of others Come to clean the rooms in my B & B bordering Kruger Park She sees me walking a path parallel to the Crocodile River I see her running toward me Watch her fall to her knees before me Close the lowest five button holes that fashion the front of my ankle-length straight skirt She says something in Swati Looks up at me as a lilac-blue blossom drops from a jacaranda tree And under the kindness of shade she pats my calves I can’t interpret the words but I can read her body language There my dear I’ve closed the open invitation The accident that wrote itself across your womanhood I know this because here no woman would walk aware of bare thighs winking between the weave of khaki I help her up Hold her hardened hands Thank her by returning the sunshine of her smile And waddle like a knobbellied duck back to my room where I segregate the unbefitting skirt to a suitcase
The Whipping Woman The woman I hire to daughter my mother makes bi-weekly visits to the dementia ward Lies down beside the near-still waters Accepts the mouth kisses wet with drool From where gravelly words dribble down washed-out gullies Like a whipping boy she bears the brunt of each face-to-face flagellation that my rawhide flesh refuses And for twenty dollars an hour I purchase like the contraposition of a professional mourner Substitution for services I can’t supply First published in Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts
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F.J Bergmann demiurge@fibitz.com Bio (auto) F.J Bergmann frequents Wisconsin She has no academic literary qualifications, but hangs out a lot with people who do Publication credits include Asimov’s, DIAGRAM, Southern Poetry Review, Subtropics, and Weird Tales She is the winner of the 2008 SFPA Rhysling Award for the Short Poem and the author of three chapbooks: Constellation of the Dragonfly (Plan B Press, 2008), Aqua Regia (Parallel Press 2007), and Sauce Robert (Pavement Saw Press 2003) One of her pseudopodia can reach all the way from the bedroom to the refrigerator. | | |
The following work is Copyright © 2009, and owned by F.J Bergmann and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author. Dead of Summer After it happened the roads were like glass, shattered or molten and dripping We went about our duties, carefully skirting the craters without ever looking down Storms swept over us, and each day was hotter and more overcast The schools and libraries were rededicated to other purposes, but mail was delivered twice a day, due to increased numbers of emergency government bulletins The useless radio hissed like a rabid raccoon At the supermarket the empty shelves grew longer No one drove anywhere, but we sometimes heard faint sirens that remained a mystery Whole families moved in the dead of night, giving no warning to their neighbors and abandoning everything they owned We boarded up windows We never opened the doors after dark We said we liked it better before, but no one was listening. (appeared in Blue Unicorn) Gender Characteristics
so we had a few drinks and I was telling him stuff about my childhood and after a while he said that sounds like penis envy to me did you ever wish you had a penis and I said no but I wish I had an ovipositor so I could parasitize my enemies and infest them with my larvae and he decided to sit somewhere else in a different bar. (appeared in Pavement Saw)
Great Horned
All day I go hungry, listening My feathers ruffle in gusts of muted wind At nightfall I drift out over the prairie like the ghost of a last breath, scanning the black fields for faint stars of warm flesh I count my nights in vole skulls, my days in the muffled rustle of leaves, my years in empty nests tiled with broken shells Sometimes I am nothing more than an appetite with wings. (appeared in Hotel Amerika) Language Barrier
I used to be ashamed of not being in touch with popular culture It was humiliating, like wearing the wrong clothesI did that too Of course, I was a teenager then, when these things matter I felt like an onlooker at an unknown game at a sports stadium in a foreign country, just sitting there in the stands, feeling uncomfortable It’s not very exciting The players move across the turf at forty-five degree angles and apologize when they run into each other The crowd starts to roar a slogan in a language I can’t understand, chanting the same eight syllables over and over, with a rising inflection Some of them are beginning to stand up on their seats, brandishing weapons Any minute now, the fans are going to riot But fortunately one of the men on the sidelines, wearing a green velvet bathrobe, grabs one of the little spotted goats I had assumed to be mascots, drags it struggling onto the field as a hush falls over the crowd, and eviscerates it on a spot roughly corresponding to the 40-yard line On the scoreboard, the numbers are replaced by an asterisk followed by a greater-than sign for one team, an octothorp and ampersand for the other The crowd goes wild Some well-prepared individuals are chaining themselves together across the exits. (appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal)
Libation
The man with the hat moved oddly through the night, with the immense dignity that came with having drunk on an empty stomach most of a bottle of cheap whiskey, which he still held in cold hands. In his coat pocket was another bottle, much more expensive, and a hardbound copy of The Gold Bug and Other Stories His shadow, fluttering like a lost raven, briefly deformed the marble saints looming above members of a family whose voices he could no longer recall. At the stone, fumbling the cap off with icy fingers, he poured the rest of his whiskey onto the frozen ground, centered the bottle of brandy against the inscription, and read a few lines where the book opened at random, savoring the golden, terrifying words. (appeared in MARGIE) |
Salvatore Buttaci buttashar@aol.com Bio (auto) Salvatore Buttaci’s poems, stories, articles, and letters have appeared widely in publications that include New York Times, U S A Today, The Writer, Cats Magazine, and Christian Science Monitor He was the recipient of the $500 Cyber-wit Poetry Award in 2007 and second-place winner in the 2008 Poetry Super Highway Contest Buttaci has lectured on Sicilian American pride and conducted numerous poetry workshops and readings Retired from teaching, Salvatore Buttaci lives with his wife Sharon in Princeton, West Virginia. | | |
The following work is Copyright © 2009, and owned by Salvatore Buttaci and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author. There Are No Words you insist somehow we could find the words, arrange them like blocks to spell what love is, and once we succeed, for all time we’d know the magic things to say, smooth incantations to lay low our fears that love will die away. you persist on how we should seek the words, exchange what smacks of shell and speak love beyond grunts and needs, seek the sublime that throws the tragic stings away, soothes lamentations that make flow our tears, or love will fly away. you resist it now but there are no words strange that nothing works to tell what love is, no hunch,no creed, no silly rhyme that shows what gladness brings to play only in silence is all love defined, what joins sky and earth: silence is the star kissing a flower. Still in Grief
the mouth of the Earth opened wide and then swallowed you down its throat it seems that way to us still in grief after all these twenty years how wonderful it would be if you could once more fill the spaces left behind in your departure come back and laugh with us again sometimes in dreams you visit me red hair bright as flaming fire it is as if you never died we’re at the table…brothers again!
For Vallejo On some downtown cobblestone nightmare street In ChileI hide in doorways that smell of cheap wine, watch la policia rush by in search of me, Listen to my heart boom towards implosion, And wonder how in God’s name will I find Csar Vallejo before the end of his next poem, before they come to close down his life These are my nightmares, the horrors of dream, That ride me in rios of blood, nearly blind To exit isles, to logic, to alarm clocks screaming me free of these concrete feet Vallejo,where are you hiding? Csar, If you can hear me thinking, trembling, Do not call out but let the litany of your poems rattle off mute lips Like monks at matins, repentant lovers, The condemned I have come a long distance To track you down in the past of your time, Hide you in the crook of my shirted arm, And let Dios grow wings for us, sail us To the future, a safe house in Brooklyn, A room with a bath, a place you can write, But when the police are all gone, your voice, A coda of silence, your body still as your pen Csar, your brother Miguel, tus amigos en revolucion, the woman you loved All of you creak open the door through which I run, stone feet on stone ground, to freedom. The Hunters Gone In quietwoods now dark with night, The forest creatures unafraid Now congregate and speak of day, Of deeds performed and what they’ve seen In light of day when sun was bright And sounds that frightened were man-made, How each with caution went his way In praise of God Who made woods green The hunters gone, they love the night, They let their footfalls fall away And each in turn now tells his tales From hunters holding them in sights There is no fear of risking doom. The forest once again for play, Released at last as if from jails Lift up the veils That darken the delicate moon!
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