Friday, January 2, 2009

January 2009 page 2

One Poem by DubbleX

DubbleX has been writing his entire life and playing music. His artistry helps keep him sane. DubbleX teaches special education students in public schools.




HIDE AND SEEK!
by DubbleX

Thing get lost in my one bedroom apartment
I think somewhere there must be a hole
I have lost my toothbrush and flash drive
I stroll around the house and wonder where they went
My apartment is not big mind you about 650 square feet
a place to eat, a place to sleep, a place to peep and a place to leak
so it is quite the strangest thing when things just disappear
until I suddenly realize there must be a hole some where
How else can it be explained that in such a small place
so many things can remain unclaimed
To put it plain it’s a hide and seek game
that is slowly driving me and my lover insane
why just today all the lighters were gone
This includes two long black and red kitchen lighters
A light green and a dark green bic lighters
A Philips screwdriver, two nail clippers my lovers left
blue croak two cartons of sidewalk chalk Bob Marley talking CD
A million times one of the three remotes to plasma TV
has gone missing, still can’t find my flash drive
and my ipod disappears for weeks
my pens and pencils at least a squad and
Now a large sharp kitchen knife is gone for two weeks
Make me wonder if my lover wished to be my legal wife
or take my life in a fit of strife
Two weeks later the knife reentered the apartment in the refrigerator
In a salad in the vegetable compartment
my protein-shaking cup is gone plus twenty bucks
Joy’s make up disappears and a piece to my melodica is gone
With a Marijuana oz of exotica
Lately this game has gone deeply strange
My toothbrush appeared on the sofa
in uncooked turkey meat I was about to eat
I had to look all over then the usual piece of paper with a phone number
I have given in to this losing thing roll
And have step up my search for the hole









One Poem by Joy Leftow

“Poet Laureate” of Washington Heights, Joy Leftow is a double alumna at Columbia University and has her second Masters from CCNY in Creative Writing. Joy’s style is - in your face reality. When Joy is not busy doing people & cat rescues, she meets her muse & reflects on relationships with more sarcasm than you’d get in an entire season of Seinfeld.






ALIEN PLANET OF LESBIAN LOVERS
by Joy Leftow

SHE lived under the delusion that SHE was the Queened Princess of an Alien Planet of Lesbian Lovers. All the rules SHE lived by and all her behavioral responses provided evidence of this. Much of my life centered around helping her live out this fantasy, painful as it was to me. Besides, my Catholic guilt forced me to accept the proposition that sacrifice nourishes and purifies our soul.
Still, I was not so locked in to my servitude that all other devotions were excluded. I met Sue May as I was attempting to crawl from the claws of the newly crowned Queen from the Planet of Lesbian Lovers. But I kept losing energy in my battle to escape. When I came upon a new route, the Queen would crack her whip, blocking me. I could not break through.
I was lost in the spheres locked between fear, time, and oblivion when I met Sue May on the F train. I was carrying my sports jacket, an attache case and a shopping bag, while balancing a coke in one hand and my shades in the other. I sat down next to Sue May, also known as, The Speaker From The House of Discreet Charm, and proceeded to reorganize myself. My jacket slipped from my hands and I gripped it tightly to prevent its fall. As I grabbed it to crush it closer, I heard a highly toned, cultured voice, "exx, exxcuse me."
I turned and looked her in the eye, "God," I exclaimed, catching sight of my hand clutching her knee in my peripheral vision. "Sorry, I thought that was my jacket." SHE smiled the way Speakers from that House do, completely disarming me, compelling me to do her will. So I offered her an early dinner as SHE was wont to do.
Sue Mai thought SHE was Speaker of the House of Representatives from a small mid-western state where manners meant everything. The Speakers from this house pretended to live in a time when discreet words and charm, and all behavioral nuances were aimed at serving the vast quantities of man's needs.
YES! But behind that sweetly beckoning smiling face, and in perfect rhythm, was the firm grasp of her delicate hand. It was hard to see that Sue Mai possessed the same determined sharp focusing of energy as the Queened Princess. And I realize now, both were bent on making the world, and especially me, think of nothing else, but meeting their needs.At the time I never realized this. I don't mean that the thought never entered my mind that I was allowing them to control me.
But of course now in retrospect, I realize that I have realized this many times. But then, I was just so much Under the Influence. I have always lived Under the Influence. It's that way because I have always loved women, holding them in the highest regard. And I kept searching for the one for me. Not just the one for me, you understand, but the one who would save me from the Queened Princess and serve my needs.
Now I had the Newly Crowned, Queen Princess from the Alien Planet of Lesbian lovers in conflict with Sweet Sue May, Speaker from the House on Discreet Charms befitting maidens from places like Kentucy and Tennessee. Sad to say, they couldn't get along at all.There was just too much conflict of interest. Both were invested in controlling my subconscious.
For the Lesbian Queen I preformed sacrifice upon sacrifice, submitting to her will, making her wish my command. I lived under her delusion that this would provide peace to her Alien Planet of Lesbian Lovers and to me.
Meanwhile my sweet and tame Sue May exerted her control by doling out her loving commands, their sole purpose to provide her pleasure. I devotedly applied myself to make her every wish my command.
All for naught. Between the two, there was no respite. The Queen and The Speaker hated each other. But the truth was, that didn't matter. What did matter was, that ultimately, between the two, I was left with no energy to serve myself.









Two Poems by Nabina Das

Nabina Das lives two lives, shuttling between Ithaca, NY, and Delhi, India. Her short story “Tara Goes Home” has been selected to appear in a winning collection of fiction by writers from India as well as around the world (Mirage Books). Her poetry has appeared in the “urban” poems anthology SHEHER (Frog Books), in Kritya poetry journal, Lit Up Magazine, The Toronto Quarterly and Muse India. Earlier this year, she was declared one of the winners of the 2008 Book Pitch Contest at Kala Ghoda Literary Festival in Bombay. Nabina is also a 2007 Joan Jakobson Fiction Scholar from Wesleyan Writers’ Conference, Wesleyan University, CT., and a 2007 Julio Lobo Fiction Scholar from Lesley Writers’ Conference, Lesley College, Cambridge, Mass.






A Town in Catskills Summer
by Nabina Das


Standing maples
Perhaps singing
Next to white houses lined up on a hill crest where trees shouldn’t grow

Whistling hems
Likely swinging
Foxtrot on silken roads that belch loneliness where footsteps fall and melt

It’s a variable sky
Somewhat pale of hue
Unlike the indigo noon she knows where heady mogras motion themselves

There’s a corner park
Where old folks sit
Munching seeds with bubblesome coffee come from a faraway falcon land

Brownstones sneeze
Snooze in a sedated sun
Forgetting tongues they spoke when froths subsided from the Eastern Seas

Rusty pick-ups dream
For the corn season to dawn
Time they can leave silent streets, head for forgetful yawning rural roads

She sees a sad steeple
A couple of plaques
Houses with people, alien saints with fern-faces and gray everlasting seams

She spots a lively yard
Kids hop scotching as if
Nothing mattered after the last of the extant cargo trains had puffed and left

A gracious sidewalk
Holds her weary bags –
This is it, not so other, she says, walks in the surprised woods as the sun melts.





Essence of Exhibits
by Nabina Das


Most of the canvases – gouache or oil – are
Wide to the point of distraction, left or right
Most of it a rainbow garden or just too apparent
One appreciates them better with closed eyes

The terracotta is always standing, spirited
Arms or sabres raised, hooves high in the air
Ceramic orbs sport slithering lights on silken heads
After a while they too melt in our infinite stare

There are of course those perky glass forms, bright
Like our eyes scanning them, not seeking at all
They grow like vines on walls or kitschy pedestals
Forced to wait, until we finish skimming over the rest.










Two Poems by Don Schaeffer

Don Schaeffer established Enthalpy Press and has published 5 chap books including "Time Meat" and "The Word Cow and the Pig O' Love." ISBN series: 0-9687017 Recent poetry has been published in The Writers Publishing, Lilly Lit, Burning Effigy Press, "Understanding Magazine," "Melange," "Tryst," "Quills," and others. His first book of poetry, Almost Full" was published by Owl Oak Press early in the summer of 2006. He holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from City University of New York (1975) and lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba with his wife, Joyce.






The Hope Laughter Dynamic
by Don Schaeffer


He seems very playful today
and everyone wonders why
with things going on in his life
that make younger people sad.
Does age give them some kind of
immunity from feeling? The younger people ask.
I would be a little put off by that.

If you take away hope,
he tells us eventually,
you are in toyland,
in a flippy care free game.
If none of the broken parts of life
can be repaired, you are free.
Hope is an easy sacrifice to make
as the screws of life begin to loosen;
and freedom lays before you along
a laughing path.





Jackie
by Don Schaeffer


The ambassador passed
from table to table
mending wounds and carrying
Transcona honey balm,
sweet especially in Winter.
Family miracles danced
side by side past the doors
toward the outer snow,
singing names,
sugar plums.









A Gratuitous Insertion by the Editor





the herd
by Bernard Alain


it's the fear of being
found out that makes
a wild horse run, I'm
not sure what the tame
ones have to lose

and I couldn't put a
number on the
soirees of 'drop by soon'
and 'great to see you',
where the snapping
point for etiquette
was 'how about Friday'
followed by a
short lapse of vertigo

I always thought that
if you meant it
you should say it,
be draconian, and
that timing was
a matter for old engines
and carburetors
in constant need
of tweaking,
and if you didn't mean
what you said you
were an asshole
for presuming and
not asking

I knew eventually
the herd of purebreds
would break loose like
they did, escaping to
the safety of the
mountains and pockets
of green pasture

I think about them from
time to time

I don't worry about
how or what they're doing,
knowing most of them
live roughly in the same
neighborhood, in roughly
the same houses with roughly
the same cars

and
I can imagine roughly
what they'd say if I dropped
in to say 'hello',
never doubting for a moment

they already imagined
on my behalf






The Cartier Street Review




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Contributors:

Gale Acuff
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Bernard Alain
RD Armstrong
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Michael Annis
Meme Arte
Kush Arora
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Dunstan Attard
CL Bledsoe
Lancillotto Bellini
Dave Besseling
Dianne Borsenik
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Bettina Burch
John Burroughs
Alex Bustillo
David Cheezem
Tasha Cotter
Ivan Donn Carswell
Sarah Cabrera
Dana A. Campbell
Brenda Cook
Don Coorough
Jeff Crouch
Aleathia Drehmer
James H Duncan
Demetrius Daniel
Tatjana Debeljacki
Michael Dickel 
Nabina Das
Janice Dayton
Renee Dwyer
DubbleX
Stephanie Edwards
Milton P. Ehrlich
AnnMarie Eldon
Dr. Kane X. Faucher
Adam Fieled
Emad Fouad
Tiziano Fratus
John C. Goodman
Joseph Goosey
Willow Gray
Will Hames
Nick Harris
Stu Hatton
Shell Heller
Kyle Hemmings
Charles Hice
Thomas Hubbard
Oritsegbemi Emmanuel Jakpa
Marco Kaufman
Penn Kemp
Ruth  Ellen Kocher
Engin Korkmaz
Dimitris P. Kraniotis
Yahia Lababidi
Chris Labrenz
Jackson Lassiter
Joy Leftow
Heller Levinson
Ira Lightman
Louis K. Lowy
Ross McCague
Stephen Murray
Ngoma
Carl Palmer
Helen Peterson
Kate Peterson 
Elaine Rosenberg Miller
Carolyn Srygley-Moore
Todd Moore
Steve Nash
Paul Niziol
Valery Oisteanu
Charles Potts
Nicoletta A. Poulakida
Casey Quinn
Barbara Reiher-Meyers
Randall Radic
Sadiq Rahman
Dibyajyoti Sarma
Don Schaeffer
Bobby Slais (R Jay)
Patricia Smith
Ruth Spalding
Edward Sobanski
Tanuj Solanki
Don Stabler
Ana Stjelja
Thiery Tillier
Paul A. Toth
C. Derick Varn
Rodrigo Verdugo
Teresa White
Sharon Boyle-Woods
Anne Harding Woodworth
John Yamrus
Changming Yuan