Inheritance of the Sleepless Rodrigo Verdugo

INHERITANCE OF THE SLEEPLESS 61

under the jasmine,
there are beautiful sentences.

I search with hands of fog,
something in my bones.

And to my aid comes,
the girl who knows
read backwards.

TENIA

She had the profile of a raven
and she covered her navel
with a lotus

she in dreams
she drank beer
with Alejandra Pizarnik.

She wanted to rent a small apartment
in Latin American Union neighborhood
only to have parties or orgies.

An apartment where beer
will fly like a raven
and the girls in full frenzy
they will remove the lotus from the navel
and the men will arrive like castaways
and burst in at sunset.

then someone comes back
to rent that apartment
and before putting the furniture and inhabiting it
read aloud to Alejandra Pizarnik
and a lotus enters through the window
pushed by the evening air.

INHERITANCE OF THE SLEEPLESS 82

I
lightning strikes
the blood bans
the eyelids of a son confuse the stone,
he has spilled on his knees
that burning milk,
which they throw in the face of the lamb.

II
I was spawned
in full abyssal torture.
and I have shields
about all my children.

III
You have petrified aspirations
and you say that you will become
in wolf at noon,
and you will bite a blue breast.

IV
You moan from the preacher’s throat
and thorns appear,
you want to be and not be at the same time
under any sky
pleasure shatters the night
and your bones watch over you in the hunter’s house,
and he ash in orgy with lightning
it’s just the picture
of that mother that she said
please open the door for me
welcome me, my house is burning down
she will burn me
and all my children.

V
I forgive him, but he repeats
I forgive him and he tells me
I want all my children together
forming a tragic link.

VI
I’m the father,
I drag bags with abundant fruits,
vegetables and goat cheese
I visit all the markets
all vegas and slaughterhouses
at five in the morning,
he wore a marbled coat,
a split in the middle of the forehead,
the sea spends angels and demons
and I spend the gold
with what should I cover
the mouth of all the unearthed.

VII
And who wants to sit at my table
he can talk to me at sunset
about my old gold digger aspirations
while we bite fruits,
and goat cheeses.

VIII
my children say
I have minotaur feet
and that I’m crazy.

IX
They were distributed.
The first met lightning envelope
and he finished as server in fifths of recreation.
The second was tempted by alabaster prostitutes
and he ended up ripping the bones out of all the fish with his mouth.
The third was suckled by a mule
and he ended up inspecting faucets.
The fourth was confined in a monastery
and ended up transcribing dictations from a blind nun.
Suddenly I wanted to have them all with me
forming a tragic link
on the precipices of the species.

X
And the mother in the hunter’s house
hid in the meantime
she said: “for now I am safe here,
although everyone outside
see the ash in orgy with lightning
and that is the image that remains of me in them”.
I will put my children to shelter
I’ll get them up at dawn
they will have the plague of a wolf that bit a blue breast
and they will fall one after another
and I will put compresses on the body
and I will invade my mother’s house
and the living room will be enabled as a sanatorium
and I will wake up at dawn to serve them
like a blind nun
and I will fear that a few steps of minotaur
are getting closer.

XI
those were my kids
and they were my gold digger pride
Of that gold that I will ever find
to cover once and for all
the mouths of all the unearthed.

XII
Come and let’s continue biting fruits
and goat meats and cheeses
That’s why I’m at five in the morning
with a marbled jacket,
and a split in the middle of the forehead,
in all vega, slaughterhouse and market.
That’s what lightning goes for
against all the prohibitions of the blood,
That’s why I choose alabaster prostitutes for my children
and with ashes I increase the abyssal torture of generation,
and with shepherd’s throats, I increase the desire
of those who want to be wolves at noon,
and bite a blue breast,
and have petrified aspirations,
or pluck fish bones with their mouths
and from the confused stone I make a shield
under which the wolf will drink burning milk
in the snout of the lamb.

_{written by © Rodrigo Verdugo}

Rodrigo Verdugo Pizarro: Santiago, Chile, 1977. Poet and collagist. He was secretary of the Pen Chile and formed part of the Surrealist Derrame Group. His work has been published in national and foreign journals and anthologies being partially translated into: English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Arabic, Uzbek, Romanian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Dutch Albanian and Greek. He has participated in collective exhibitions in: Spain, Portugal, Czech Republic, Costa Rica and Egypt. He is author of: “Veiled Knots”, Ed Derrame, 2002, “Broken Windows”, Olga Cartonera, 2014, “Advertisement”, Rumbos Editors, 2017 and “3 Anuncios, 3 Annonces”, Plaquette, Coedition Mago Publishers, Home Notebooks Bermeja, and Hesperides Publishing House (Argentina), Hispanic Academy of Fine Letters (Spain),2019

Feature art photo Mercenaries at the neural pipelines Oil, collage 9inx12in Mitchell Pluto 2022

Five Poem Wounds Emilio Barraza Durán

RESURRECTION

They all ran away from him
and it was not strange
never in Jerusalem
they saw a dead man walking
even his friends
they reacted with fear
when he showed up
by the door frame
everyone looked at him suspiciously
people walked away
swiftly on your side
it was
a condemned ghost
for transgressing
the immutable laws of the grave.
the last time they saw him
I drank a glass of wine
to the health of his friend Lázaro
the only one who understood
the terrible loneliness of the resurrected…

BAR PEOPLE

a distilled wine
with gender grapes
baste slowly
the broken pieces
of my heart without a country.
Time
take a nap
at the exact point
where Christ
lost the nails of it.
Between the glass and the bottle
a forgotten cigarette
it makes me cry
tears of smoke
at the bar
alcoholic corpses
remember times gone by
they cry for their lost tombstones
They cry for their rusty dead.
outside it rains
Suspensive points
that fall from the sky
They are knives that stick
in exact and precise geometry
from the heart…

CHRIST THE ELECTOR

they will lower you
a few moments from the cross
and they will give you
a Pandora’s box
the Pharisees will say
that you are a good person
the sadducees will express
your good intentions
mark a + on the paper
they will say
and you can go back to your work
having said that
they will put you on the cross again
and they will keep hitting you
For ever and ever, amen…

PLASTER LOVES

Now
that I am a harlequin
wire and plaster
lying on a bed
now
that I am a sparrow
with concrete wings
I can still tell
I want to love
despite the irons
that cross my hips
despite
of streptomycin
that makes me vomit
I am the only statue
who looks with love
to the wax masks
that cross the corridors
in this hospital…

FABLE OF ASSES

The donkeys
they were losing power
they were not elected
for no public office
all
their political strategies
They inevitably failed.
Then
at an important party meeting
decided to paint stripes and make
a strong communication campaign.
Since then
the whole country votes for a zebra
that from time to time brays
the same broken promises
of their asshole co-religionists…

_{written by ©Emilio Barraza Durán}

Emilio Barraza Durán, Viña del Mar, Chile, February 28, 1955. He completed his secondary studies at the Industrial School of Ciudad Jardín, and his university studies at the Catholic University of Valparaíso, graduating as a Professor of Spanish in 1983.
In 1998 he obtained the first prize for his play “Las tristes primaveras del humo” and the publication of his poems in the Anthology “Versos de viento y desamor” published by the Department of Culture of Secreduc Valparaíso.
In 2000 he completed his internship “A creative approach to the Chilean Educational Reform” at the University of Alcalá de Henares, Spain.
In 2013 he published “El Callejón de los Corderos” (Editorial Magoeditores), a critical and anti-systemic book.
In 2014 he obtained the following distinctions:
Publication of his poems in two editions of the literary magazine The Word of the Arizona State University, USA.
-Publication of his work “The transgressed flag: a vision of the patriotic symbols in dictatorship” in the book “Memory and perspective: 40 years after the military coup” edited by the Editorial University of Playa Ancha de Valparaíso.
-Publication of her finalist work “Good night, Rossana” in the “Anthology L.AI.A V Ensueños” edited in New York by the Latin American Intercultural Alliance and Editorial Muse & Pen.
Anthology Verses from the Heart, Editorial Diversidad Literaria Madrid, Spain.
-Winner of the first national poetry prize in a contest organized by the Chilean publisher Verbo(des)nudo with the book “Sueño ecuacional” in January 2015.
2015, appears in the Latin American Poets Anthology of Editorial Imaginante, Argentina 2016
Anthology Do not invite me to heaven if there is no wine, Editorial La Gorra de Valparaíso.
September 2016, selected in Anthology Peace as Care of Creation with El Sueño de Nezahualcoyolt, Editorial United Peace Federation, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
October 2016, winner of the Life Lines contest of Editorial San Pablo. His work Only You appears in Anthology Los Tesoros del Alma 2016.
January 2017, selected and edited by Furman Magazine 217, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA.
2017: Anthology “Poetics of the Underworld” anthologized by Eduardo Embry Castro and Teresa Calderón in Editorial de La Gorra Valparaíso
2017: Anthology “Convergences” edited by the poet and editor Gino Ginoris, Editorial Verbo(des)nudo.
2018: Anthology “Without Borders” Editorial of the Valparaíso Cap.
2018: poet selected for Solideo Gloria act of adoration organized by the Pastoral Catholic University of Santiago de Chile.
2019: “Writing and Scarring: the poetry of Marcela Cortés Moyano”, prologue to the book Sangra Etérea Piel, presented at the Viña del Mar Book Fair.
2019: Anthology After Poetry The Barbones, Valparaíso, Juan Antonio Huesbe, editor and compiler.
2019: Review of the book Totemica Insular by the Cuban-Canadian poet Lídice Megla published by Amazon, Canada.
2020: Review of the book Dialogue with the Mirror by Julianita Cisne, Editorial Letras al Viento, Miami USA.
2020: Anthology of Light, Nedazka Pika and Entre Paréntesis editors, Santiago.
2020: Fragua de Preces, Ibero-American Poets Anthology, Alisios Cultural and Grupo Abra, Canary Islands, Spain.
2021: After Poetry II, Anthology, Juan Antonio Huesbe editor and compiler, Valparaíso.
2021: Necessary Words, Poetic Humanity International Anthology, Viajero Ediciones, Ramón Lizana editor
Valparaiso.
2021: Flight of Dreams Anthology, Dora Miranda and Regional Literary Association Editors.
2022: Reading of Poems at the Viña del Mar Book Fair.
2022: Reading of poems Tribute to Gabriela Mistral, Gam Museum, Vicuña.
2022: Newenke Kura, Anthology of Living Stones, Nedazka Pika and Entreparentesis Editores, Santiago, Chile.

Feature photo art Banner of power and hierarchy 9inx12in oil, collage Mitchell Pluto 2022

Poems by Claudia Vila Molina We Return to the Earth

(Unpublished texts from the Poemas de sur)

Oath

The flowers will throb in my silence
The eyes will hear the flames of the river
We’ll whisper at night
And nothing will be necessary
This accumulation of absences today fills our chest
And there are no more traces on the dry Sunday afternoon
Although the smoke witnesses some ordeals
The eyes release their huge blocks
But none of this will be necessary
Nothing will be noticed at the bottom of the lakes
Not even in the thickening of the clouds.

We Return to Earth

The sound of the night falls towards the earth
The pastures surround us with their white moans
Again we walk the bare earth
And we keep the secret
A word wrapped in unreality
My lost sunflowers are from autumn
When they wither in the shadow of the cliffs.

(Unpublished poems taken from the book Escritos para Beatriz)

Strange Certainty

The water rises to the hives
The brightness of the air stops my desertion
And the precipice of the birds is deep
But the route digs a new image
Where did we forget the road?
What drill did you lose my name in?

The moon is your own emaciated conscience
Climb towards the light the wormy face
They fill it with sounds in the jungle of the world
An image is that you in pain
That serpent coiled in the maelstrom of the waves

Who can love you from silence?

The flora of time cradles sad animals
And disintegrates in the ropes of the river
That temple opens their bodies towards the solitudes
And send us four different kingdoms

Your flight is a mirror in the mask of the world
Eyes conceive other authentic materials
We like to dye ourselves from nothing
Succumb to the harassment of existence

After the light has departed we only have
distance
And the objects thrown on the floor
But your being unexpectedly illuminates this corner
and flee to cold countries
where the last sailors go

That silence is part of our ancient voice
And bring down the places
Draw an island in the middle of everything
The moon rests in my female arms
And unwind four seasons

A sign disconnects my primitive bursts
And he starts to sing
The wave once again throws its homicides
The certainty of that shadow strangles us
That figure stopped at dawn.

(Poems taken from the unpublished book Ciénaga)

9
Unexpectedly I open my eyes towards you
I like to hear whispers from the outside line
Your eyes open other doors
And they stay sheltered from the shade.

10
Since that time I remember you
You slowly invade my landscapes
Cold voices bring the threads of that web closer
They surround the absent body.

11
I will open my eyes once more
When the stars dwell in our bodies
And a drop slipped through the skin
Suspend all reefs high.

12
Violet petals fall successively on us
The wind is gone, but the shadow remains
Water slides streams into the night
And the last fire extinguishes my stars.

_{written by © Claudia Vila Molina}

09-22-1969

Writer born in Viña del Mar, Chile. Professor of language and communication at PUCV, poet and literary critic. In 2012, she published her first book, The Invisible Eyes of the Wind. She has published in renowned Chilean and foreign digital media: Babelia (Spain), Letras de Chile (Chile), Triplov and Athena de Portugal, among others. During the year 2017 she participates in the Xaleshem group with poetic texts for the surrealist anthologies: “Composing the illusion” in honor of Ludwig Zeller and “Full Moon”, in honor of Susana Wald. In 2018, she integrates the feminist anthology IXQUIC released both in Europe and in Latin America. In 2020 she participates reviewing the conversation book “Shuffle poetry, Surrealism in Latin America” by Alfonso Peña (Costa Rica), also writes a poetic prose text for the book “Arcano 16, La torre“, by the same author. Likewise, she participates in the book “120 notes of Eros. Written portraits of surrealist women” by Floriano Martins (Brazilian surrealist poet, writer, visual artist and cultural manager). In this year (2021) she publishes her second poetry book Poética de la erotica, amores y desamores by Marciano editores, Santiago.

Feature photo art by Enrique De Santiago

Daniela Sol Five Poems

OPEN SPACES

At 43 from Ayotzinapa

Those voices, those shadows
they are not dead
they declaim in every vital particle.

I’m tired of screaming thinking about them
to spit barks
to those sulfur parasites.
But I know that in every place, in
each breath in
infinite corners look for them
no horizontal lines.

The cornea of memory
it is not an embodied metaphor.
Hungry Sorrows Banners
of Justice.

Birds of uncertainties to
the vein, lip birds
like eyes.
Bodies that do not cease or
they quench by claiming their inherent freedom.
Since then there is no rest
nor borders that limit the
atoms.

The trampled dust is not in vain.
The stupor of conscience
nor the d(odor) of agony
and of silence.

There is a kiss on the forehead
and millions of intertwined hands
waiting for our own
skin down to the bone tray
to rescue them from oblivion.

LEGITIMACY OF BEING

To Stella Diaz Varin

death could not with me
nor with the erroneous tissues of my silence.
The attempts to turn off my singing were absurd
maneuvers of negligent glances
scandalized by the decline of my fingertips.

I have tattooed loneliness as a constant verse
a mantra that repeats, anarchic, the marginal hours
of my laughter, of my sex, of the pending hidden word
in bunches

Fifty stars receive my cry
that chapter that I moaned when I saw my children die
or when the senseless torture was drawn on my body.

death could not with me
nor with the deafening smoke that it gave
color to this voice of steel.
Time, on the other hand, comes slowly
to settle in my name
and wipe away the tarnished indecency in the mirror
that little by little vindicates my sorrows.

MAZURKA

I like that you remind others
I like to play to be the others of your memory
and I like to be someone in the memory of my others.

I like to heal you being the other,
the one from before,
that is claimed
that chews the past with erroneous flowers
that are reborn

I like to be nostalgic in my others,
body remembered,
because I got tired of opening
my legs to the swings of oblivion.

If you require it, masturbate your senses
remembering those others
like when I allow others
temporarily invade my dreams
to be the most whore and unfaithful,
unknown
alien
uprooted

If the past comes back
with the stench of laughter
Let’s face it, let’s show the colors
and we remain silent.

Sometimes it is necessary to take steps to the abject
silence the noise of the fruits
turn octagonal.

Let’s lull the past tense
vomiting it out of the body
and swallowing the tenderness that
yesterday he brought us together.

INSOMNIA

My feet went so far
in the whole core of
the foreign whispers
that the torrent dried up
of cough with which he fed
the desire, the endurance,
the certainty.

((Sometimes I lose the horizon
and I only wish a magnetic gift))

summon the silence
to silence the ego
the ataraxias of the ego
the chairs of the ego
attempts to give birth to a symmetric writing.

design a wish,
use the language
for something other than
put limits on principles
crimson deductive.

And breathe the constant ether
of the sun when it dawns.

NIGHT

Do you sleep
and in the fiery subtlety of your hair
the beats of your laugh are drawn
the silent breath
the arpeggios you sang before the sunset.
Your hand looks for me, I contain you
You ask me for a hug, I whisper the river
that feeds the herons.
Because you know that my shadow does not give up
before the burden.
my hand on your back
let you cross the threshold
of lavenders
about which you talk to me so much at dawn.

^{written by © Daniela Sol}

Daniela Sol (Talca, 1983) is a poet, mother and academic. Professor of Philosophy and Bachelor of Education, she completed her Master’s in Latin American Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She has a PhD in Hispano-American Literature from the University of Alicante, Spain.
She is the author of the collections of poems Wandering Sounds (Xaleshem, 2014), Postcards and Mirages (Helena, 2016), Fracture (Alauda, 2015) and Sabina (Marciano, 2021), and has participated in various poetic activities and meetings in Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Canada and Spain. Her work has been included in national and international anthologies in Latin America, Europe and the Middle East.
She is the compiler of the most recent anthology of Social Poetry in Chile: Verbo Latente (Helena, 2017), and of IXQUIC: International Anthology of Feminist Poetry, published in Madrid under the Verbum publishing label.
Her work has been translated into English, French, Portuguese and Arabic.
As a professor and researcher, she has carried out pedagogical and academic tasks in different institutions in Chile, Mexico and Spain, both at secondary, undergraduate and postgraduate levels. From this sphere she is co-author of at least five books. Since 2017, she is a member of the Chilean Society for Literary Studies.
As of 2019, she is part of the academic group Literature and School.

Other data:
Daniela lived eight years in Mexico, so a large part of her career was carried out there by the hand of poets connected to the Mexican academy and women’s groups. In that country she held extensive poetry sessions with the Chilean surrealist poet Ludwig Zeller (+), to whom she dedicates her doctoral thesis.

Featured picture Astral Island 9inx12in oil, collage 2022 Mitchell Pluto

John Olson Five Poems

Here’s The Situation

Here’s the situation: the world is ending and people are singing their heads off. All the songs are raw. And all the melodies are unglued. How does grass become milk it’s a miracle. Mainstream is the prevailing mown lawn here except now the sidewalks are cracked and people want to sell their homes to get away from the homeless. Here I am wearing a crystal wig and a robe of baked potatoes. And yet you linger to ask me if I’ve ever been to Tucson. No, I haven’t. But I hear it’s the hummingbird capital of the world. I’m running down the runway trying to catch a plane called redemption. Clothes aren’t as silly as you might think. They hang in the closet awaiting fulfillment and keys. I can never get my shirt on right and my pants are always a size too big a size too small or no size at all just denim and plenum and dumb. Consciousness is always messy. Here I am dangling from a fever tree. It happened in Las Vegas. We gambled all night I had a royal flush in one hand and a sweet roll in the other. A bag of bread and water is everything kid it’s the whole show don’t let no one tell you different. The more you bend the more you spend and the more you spend the more you bend it’s an endless cycle with suspension forks and a bell. No thought is worth a penny. It’s worth the entire gross national budget. Of thought. The sound of a sturgeon is subjective to everyone except the sturgeon. This is the point I’ve been trying to make by avoiding it completely. That heron at the end of the pier is the essence of it. But if you need to ask what it is I can’t tell you I don’t know what it is either. But I can hear it in the dark.

Wings And Bats And Spines And Things

I wonder if hanging upside-down is good for you. All the blood rushing to the head. Maybe bats are on to something. There’s a practice called inversion therapy that involves hanging upside down. The idea is to reverse the compression of gravity on the spine. It may also increase the space between the vertebrae, which helps to relieve pain. There are, however, some risks. Blood pressure increases, the heartbeat slows down, and there’s increased pressure on the eyes, which is not good if you have glaucoma. So, like everything, it’s a blend of good and bad.
What about weightlessness? We should all have weightlessness devices in our homes. Wouldn’t it be a gas to have dinner on the ceiling? Better not light any candles up there though.
My legs feel so cumbersome and old when I got off the bed to go feed the cat or get a snack or another book to read. That’s when I feel old. I can maintain the illusion of youth while I’m running. My body lets me do that. Which is an odd way to look at it. I’m not separate from my body. I don’t think. Is it possible there’s a soul in this configuration of blood and bones?
Let reality be reality. Advises Lao Tzu. Ok, I can do that. Sounds simple enough. But where is it, exactly, this legendary reality? Is it the sponge in the sink? The cat on my lap? The books on the bed? I think it’s the clothes folded on the bureau. And the ache in my left leg. And the hard winter coming down the pike for Europe with the Russian gas cut off. It’s all the exorbitant fees and taxes for travel. Actors arguing about a scene from Hamlet. The till of a register filled with old dollar bills. People in glum silence checking their groceries. What’s next? People growing their own food? Take note: no one gets a discount for checking their own groceries. There is no reward for your subservience. None whatever. WTF!? Is that Lao Tzu checking a frozen pizza?
The bedpost is such a hand place to hang a mask. Two eyes, two ears, two lips and a nose. They all had them: Denis Diderot, David Hume, Baruch Spinoza, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
How do you get a hummingbird to pose? I don’t know how Audubon did it. Whenever I look into the eyes of Sitting Bull I see turquoise on a ridge of sage. Bullfrog in a North Dakota creek, a copy of The Brothers Karamazov in my hand. Buffalo grazing. Protoplasm contracting and expanding on a glass slide. Sentence contracting and expanding in a glass eye. Whenever I look into the eyes of Sitting Bull I see a sky darken with passenger pigeons. Beautiful dark sheen of a box containing the ashes of a beloved cat. September 1st. 1914, the last known passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo, aged 29, with a palsy that made her tremble.

Tarmac Sumac

Tarmac sumac. Way down there at the end of the runway. What is this world? An automotive jar embroidered with starving tornadoes. Ductile commodities. Petulant expeditions. I stayed up late one night listening to the geometry of quartz. This is where I learned how to retaliate without losing my urine. Cerebration means thinking. It’s a delicate operation. I’ve got shapes on my shoulder moving up and down. They’re wings. Tread softly, because you tread on my wings.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve fucked up. Forgive me if I deviate. I’m flying to Kauai. I hear they serve wonderful breakfasts there. And that it’s possible to see the universe get up and do the hula kahiko. I promise to behave. I’m going to wear a Jack Spicer wristwatch. It tells time by stitching railroads together with the thread of the dead. The time right now is 9:12 p.m. The light at the end of the tunnel is Puffing Billy. Two hundred tambourines tattoo the whistle. And bring us good fortune in the form of an incantation. We shall navigate by the stars. In thy orisons will all my sins be remembered. Bbbangbbang! The craving for love is the engine of the world.
There are forty-three muscles in the human face, most of which are controlled by the subterranean diesel poppy (also known as the honeysuckle nerve). The expression I’m using now is called the plunderer’s regret and involves a nook, a menu, and a table by the window. This is where I confess all my sins, then wash them down with a shot of Glenfiddich. I’m not catholic, but I could be, given the right circumstances and an upbringing in a socialist country. By catholic, of course, I don’t mean the religion, I mean the ability to resurrect myself as a syllabus, a course with universal intent and a pontiff in the cuff of my pants, where I keep my Vatican.
Some of us, it is true, have found life silly and meaningless. But the beauty is undeniable. Each stone is a rhapsody of form, a ray of sunlight in a glass of water. The fork moves with the tint of chrome and is a hive of chocolate fingers. I have sewn a sow with a sough of slow air and find that the phenomenon of living is compounded luxuriantly by each quintessence of dust. We are all comrades in life grimacing at one another, enjoying what remains of the wild tea in the surrounding hills and terraces, stubbornly boiling our gypsum as one pleads mercy from a king.
There are no answers. There are only armchairs for reading. This is plenty. Meaning narrows the spectrum, which is better served by selenium, Hollywood extravagance, and prescription glasses.

Kitchen Epiphany

I can sit and stare at a wall for a ridiculously long amount of time. Eventually, there will be holes I can crawl through. And this is called music. What we see is what we believe and wish reality to be. Music is different, music has a different source than aqueous humor, and as such, swerves past our cognitive bias, and dazzles the brain with its gargle and ooze, its trumpets and gongs.
I find makeup fascinating. But the curves on a cello even more so. And these are called accidentals. Changes in pitch are gracious. They feed on the fine-tuning of our perception. We regain control of our existence when we hold the thread of our desire. The satisfaction of seeing clearly, even when it is painful, is due to the exhilarating power that we draw from it.
I live on a hill. I’m a little closer to the sky than I used to be. Which is currently choked with wildfire smoke. Most of the smoke is from the Chilliwack and Pasayten fires to the northeast, and the White River fire northwest of Lake Wenatchee. The planet is bursting into flame.
I wish I could walk into Proust’s novel and persuade Swann to break his addiction to Odette, which is destroying him, but that would ruin the novel, which is driven by lusts for names, for language, for things that never exist as intensely and vividly as they do in expectation, or in the imagination, where the mind and external reality come together, and form a union, or skin.
The spirit feeds on pearls. The air is shattered by gun glass, said the sharp-mouthed hoodlum. I hooked these letters on ruby hooks but when I came back they’d formed a sentence which required me to wear embassy shoes. Where can I find a pair of embassy shoes? I shall ask the Ambassador of Clouds. They’ll be laced with lightning. And their soles will be a roaring bonfire balanced in the heart with a pole and a heap of spinning plates. I do this willfully to the west of language in an attic full of the kindness of the dead, who sit in the corners knitting God.
I took the high road to the gymnasium. The dwarf slumped by the ice machine woke up, brushed himself off and walked away. I heard a snowflake drop to the ground, uttered by a polar bear. I shook the hand of a storm on a metal welcome mat and bowed. Never play solitaire with a sparkling cognition. This is what it does. It slides out of a vagina and says hello world what’s up? And so I say unto you respect the bean. Walk through the dazzling mathematics of the peach. The kitchen empties its contents like grenades. And everyone explodes into conversation.

Abundance

Is it flamboyant to look international at a wedding? I do not spurn nurture nor nurture a spurning of spring. This is what I like to do I like to strap carriages to my feet and walk into weddings I haven’t been invited to and sit down and talk like a country. It makes me feel perforated, like a sock, or a sociologist. I like the way gymnasiums guzzle space. This is why everyone likes to run around in them and dunk basketballs and wave pompoms. Hazard is the wizard of zippers. Which is another way of saying car keys, or suitcase. Ontology is everything. One must always expect the unexpected to expectorate. Waterfalls interrupt my canoe ride with a splash, a hiccup, and a hi ho Silver! This turned into a song and sung at another wedding. Renditions reside in sound like desks help writing to come out of wood. Or Karen Carpenter, who was not an actual carpenter, but could sing the bejesus out of any random superstar. I learned everything I know in the knowledge that nothing is ever truly known. Especially Karen Carpenter. Could you lend me a million dollars? I feel my tongue move back and forth like a symbol. I think I should find an agent. I could take it on the road. We know what is said at mass but what is leaves of grass? Is it a form of plexiglass? Or a God particle spiraling in a forward pass all the way to Geneva? What happens in the esophagus rarely if ever stays in the esophagus. If you have a language in you, now is the time to let it out. Languages, like wine, need to breathe. It gives them abundance. It fuels proliferation. Proliferation is the perforation of the real by the unreal, which is sand to the goat and mud to the muddled. All else is mute resignation. Miscellany wanders the perimeter. When miscellany penetrates the barriers, we will unleash the kraken. We shall discard facsimile for filigree, put tinsel on the whiffletree and revel in calligraphy, where the fonts meet the fountains, the sky meets the mountains, and wanton possibilities step from the shadows to say hi.

_{written by © John Olson}

Mingled Yarn John Olson

All lives, it seems, are composed of multiple strands, multiple perspectives, multiple stories & yarns. This particular weaving of a life started as a simple autobiography, following my wife’s suggestion. I balked at first, since I’m neither a retired Civil War general or a former President of the United States. Nor am I a Hollywood celebrity, a Self-Help guru or a noted French chef. I’m just a writer. I enjoy writing, & I’m always on the watch for things to write about. That adage “write what you know” is true. So I decided to take the plunge & try to stitch a narrative together, using words as my needles, my life as material. That material, however, segued loop by loop out of strict autobiography into the variable disperse dyes of fiction. Fact & fiction are intermingled. How much is lived experience & how much is invention are stitched so closely they often overlap & become a surprising new color. Life is a continual purling of insights & observations into crazily stitched patterns. All you can do is put it on & wear it.

Olson writes as if language was his own invention — which of course it is. How else to explain the force-field of dark and joyous energy that he conjures out of words?
~ Andrew Joron, author of The Cry at Zero

Olson’s brilliant prose poetry lurks around the corner of every idle speculation and seething anecdote.
~ Andrew Bleeker, from his review of The Nothing That Is

John Olson is the author of numerous books of prose poetry, including Weave of the Dream King (forthcoming from Black Widow Press), Dada Budapest, Larynx Galaxy and Backscatter: New and Selected Poetry. Mingled Yarn is his fifth novel. His other novels include In Advance of the Broken Justy, The Seeing Machine, The Nothing That Is, and Souls of Wind, which was shortlisted for a Believer Book Award in 2008.

Featured picture Entanglement in a sombrero galaxy, a hummingbird ankoku butoh 9inx10-1/2in oil, collage on sandpaper 2022 Mitchell Pluto

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Diana Calabaza de Júpiter

I still don’t know if I’m an artist. I have always considered that calling oneself an artist is something pretentious. It is true that I create new things from an intellectual and also a subconscious act, but I feel more comfortable when I think I am creative. On the other hand, I have not studied Fine Arts and this fact makes me think that I am an outsider. However, I don’t care about everything because I’ve been painting since I was a child and I will always continue to do so. Painting has allowed me to pay rent and eat, other times it has not been like that. If I defined myself as an artist, would I change anything?

Above all, nature inspires me. I can paint something like a portrait of a person, but it will never be quite so. The animals, the plants, the mountains, the rivers, the universe, the water, the rain, all the elements and the stones, also the cells, scales, wings, spores. All of this is always present because it is Nature and I feel that humanity ceased to be a part of it a long time ago. That is why I try to bring these two worlds closer together through painting and dreams. It is like imagining a hopeful future for the planet, even though it is not actually possible.

I am not a tarot expert. I have many different decks, even an oracle of my own creation. My intention is to edit a deck of Major Arcana as soon as possible, it is a project that is taking me a long time precisely because I understand the tarot in my own way. And I think there is no universal way to understand it, so the fact that I am not an expert in tarot would not be a big problem because I would know my own tarot perfectly.

I think it is a language in itself, another kind of language. But I also believe that its divinatory character is a construction. When Visconti decks appeared in fifteenth-century Italy, their intention was not to guess but to memorize the hierarchies and their functions. Divination as such is much older. The current tarot brings together many characteristics of memoizable hierarchical archetypes that we now identify as tools for self-knowledge. I believe that the tarot can help us to know the things that we don’t know that we already know. It is like walking at night along a path full of brambles but illuminated by the soft glow of the full moon

I started a dream journal and loved the experience but didn’t have enough consistency to stick with it. I would love to be able to take it up again but I need a suitable environment and environment that I don’t have right now. I remember dreams from decades ago and from time to time they come back to my mind and give me the same sensations as at the time of the dream. Other times my dreams return to places I have already dreamed of, as if they wanted to finish telling stories. Somehow I keep in my memory the most relevant dreams, their sensations and what they brought me throughout my life. On the theories of dreams and their materialization in daily routines and in life, I would like to recommend the literary work of Julio Monteverde.

I try to make my relationship with the subconscious conscious when I’m awake. Creations are born from that place and we must remain attentive to their movements. For me it is like a call at any time of day or night that reveals other realities to me. Sometimes I know how to take advantage of that call and transform it into what you can understand as art. Other times it is too blinding a light that has the power to paralyze me and shows me through its light a deep and infinite darkness. It is what you can understand by anxiety.

Nature is the biggest influence I have. There are also some people and artistic movements in those influences, either because of the color in their works, because of the absence of color, because of their way of describing heaven and hell. There are too many but these are a very small sample of what I mean: Chagall, Redon, Remedios Varo, William Blake, Teresa de Ávila, El Greco, Goya, Diane Arbus, baroque music.

I’ve been under another the name Jupiter for quite a few years. This month (September 2022) I have started a new cycle that has been brewing since spring. I would like to get more light on the road and be able to keep my feet on the ground, something that has never happened in my life.

Alto Giove
è tua grazia è tuo vanto
il gran dono di vita immortale
che il tuo Cenno sovrano mi fà
Ma il rendermi poi quella
già sospirata tanto
Diva amorose e bella
è un dono senza uguale come la tua beltà

High Jupiter
it is your grace it is your pride
the great gift of immortal life
that your sovereign nod makes me
But then making me that one
already longed for so much
Loving and beautiful diva
it is a gift without equal like your beauty

For this reason, through Jupiter and almost by way of a “sigilo”, I intend to attract another way of seeing things without leaving aside my causality and gloom. I could have chosen Saturn and it really is what I wanted but we already know how Saturn treats already melancholic souls. I can’t afford that. Jupiter, as in the piece that Nicola Porpora (Alto Giove) composed to be performed by Farinelli, was a haven of peace in the stormy world of Felipe V. Leaving aside the stupid monarchy, Diana was a lunar goddess, daughter of Jupiter. In an astrological sense, Jupiter is associated with positive concepts such as abundance and optimism. And finally, I often say that “I live on Jupiter”, referring to the fact that I live in the clouds, that I am not attentive to reality and that I am a dreamer.

Lechuza is one of my music bands. We have started this summer of 2022 and we have just published our Demo. We are two friends making music, working with our hands on record packaging and trying to make nice videos of our songs. We are called Fantasmita and Ruda. Proceeds from sales go to an animal shelter. All the information is on our Bandcamp, and of course the music.

written by Diana Calabaza de Júpiter

Diana de Júpiter artistic training is intuitive and self taught. She prefers not to rely on any institution to interfere with her experience. Her themes hang between the dark and silent. She has worked for several Spanish publishers such as Aurora Dorada and La Felguera. Diana has had solo and group exhibitions in Spain, Mexico and the United States. She is currently preparing a complete tarot deck while painting daily.

Dianadejupiter

https://www.etsy.com/shop/Dianadejupiter

Hypnotic illustration and magical craftsmanship

Stitching Up Scars Alicia Lasne

I always knew that art would be part of my life. In one form or another. I was born in 1986 in Normandy, during my childhood I suffered from school phobia, then from anxiety disorder in adolescence. Imagination, poetry, drawing have always been a kind of protection against the chaos that reigns outside.

My father suffered from schizophrenia and my universe comes from this particular relationship with madness and disorder. In 2018 when my father committed suicide, I completely immersed myself in art. I still suffer from anxiety disorder, some days are harder than others, but one day at a time I am moving forward. Several months ago I started working with fabric. I sew human beings, nature, forests, rivers but above all I sew myself. This is what has changed in my new artistic work, I am no longer in the expression in traumas but in healing. It is much more than symbolic to sew. There is this idea of stitching up scars.

written by Alicia Lasne

In this work, which dates from 2019-2020, there is the representation of madness, of the depths.

In this work, which dates from 2020-2021, there is a kind of acceptance of madness, of the darkness of the human soul.

Then finally, my current work, where we really see the change with this desire for healing

Five Poems and Collages Gary Cummiskey

On Sundays

My plan was to kiss the woman
at the bakery counter,
but the manager rushed forward
and whacked me on the head
with a spoon.
He recites Homer on Sundays,
though not when it’s raining,
and he takes no chances
with troublesome dreamers like me.

*Forbidden steps* Collage **by Gary Cummiskey**

At the side of the road

There were headless
mannequins lying
at the side of the road
with so many cars
moving slowly past
and not a single driver stopping
to take a closer look
or even perhaps
load them into the boot
and take them home

*Sensation desired* Collage **by Gary Cummiskey**

Door to door

She waits in front of a door
propped up in the sand
somewhere in the Kalahari
She does not see
the woman on the other side
of the door
kneeling down
and peering
through the keyhole
She sees only the man
in the green jacket
walking away in the distance
with a cat at his side

*Love&Lust* Collage **by Gary Cummiskey**

Zoo

Standing behind
the iron
bars
I peer
down
at the animals
When I look up
again
at the sun
I vomit
blood
from my nostrils
and my eyes turn
black
like their fur

*i know what i like* Collage by Gary Cummiskey

Underground currents

A thin man
with a walking
stick
and a balloon
in the
cobblestone
streets
of the war-torn
city.
She turns,
rushing
through
the underground
currents.

Gary Cummiskey is a poet and publisher living in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the founder of Dye Hard Press, which he started in 1994. He is the author of several poetry chapbooks. His selected poems, Outside the cave, was published in 2021. In 2009, with Eva Kowalska, he compiled Who was Sinclair Beiles?, a collection of writings about the South African Beat poet. An expanded edition was published in 2016. His short story collection, Off-ramp, was short-listed for the 2014 Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award. His work has been published in the UK, US, France, Denmark, Sweden, India, Egypt, and Greece

Featured Photo: Lets Hope, Collage by Gary Cummiskey

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Six Poems Uche Nduka

SHED

But the psyche.

But the anarchy.

But the abyss

turned entirely back

on itself.

But the altar. The crone.

But the panther. Testimony

from a tranced pirate.

But the music that showed up.

But the fast train.

The visitation.

But the asylum & sanctuary.

But the breakdown.

The breakthrough.

But the brown-eyed barometer.

FLASH FROM A MAZE

An overfed guitar,

tired balls.

The fag-ends

of rambles.

So what.

I write like this

to wake sleepy monks

in the wilderness

of the street.

The end of summer

will be when

memory matters.

Wanderers head home.

So much given already.

So much given.

So much to give.

Do you remember

eating pussy

at sundown?

I do.

SEEING IT CLEARLY

Stumbling in your

alphabets the lovers

went up up up

loosed upon the island

triply blessed

our arguments

& disagreements

are part of

the full picture

I was lost

irrevocably

inside your knickers

& now

you’re gone

pounding the pavement

poems stuffed

to the gills

BRAND NEW SHIELD

Losing interest

is beside the point, we

didn’t dare figure out

the prequel, a woman’s busy

hands in the rainy season

of a nation’s beginnings,

this unholy war in holy lands,

latitudes left each other a

note, sailboat of our spirit,

those heedless selfies, the

blisters of blue irises, somehow

we braved the blast of

loneliness & sang out of tune,

no resolution, no conclusion, we

hung a new star over gathering rains.

RESCALE

Three thistles.

Four inkwells.

Terracotta tracker.

Clay coil pots.

Weaver star.

Fooling with gouache.

Black line.

Osprey in water.

You’re back again

on the sunroof of

the car as it speeds

down the freeway

with the wind in your hair

or at least try to

in the public mirror

reality & words

an actuality common

to both of us

wedged between what

is said & what is.

IF THE STAMEN

The mountain

remembered us

rainbow in the attic

the riddle

is our measure

all theology begins

with lovers that leap

& curse

don’t expect me

to present a balanced picture

this poem is a ballet

without shoes

I cling to your legs

with their stores of sweetness

like the beneficent cunt

opening its wings

I reject the entreaties

of dead language

you dance the book

from right to left

the ocean is our sky

Uche Nduka was born in Nigeria to a Christian family. Raised bilingual in Igbo and English, he earned his BA from the University of Nigeria and his MFA from Long Island University, Brooklyn. He left Nigeria in 1994 and settled in Germany after winning a fellowship from the Goethe Institute. He lived in Germany and Holland for the next decade and immigrated to the United States in 2007. Nduka is the author of numerous collections of poetry and prose, including Living in Public (2018), Nine East (2013), Ijele (2012), and eel on reef (2007), all of which were published after he arrived in the United States. Earlier collections include Heart’s Field (2005); If Only the Night (2002); Chiaroscuro (1997), which won the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize; The Bremen Poems (1995); Second Act (1994); and Flower Child (1988). Belltime Letters (2000) is a collection of prose. His work has been translated into German, Finnish, Italian, Dutch, and Romanian.

Books by Uche Nduka

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Uche-Nduka-Facing-You-1662811183-1662752885387.jpg

Featured Picture: Moon in Capricorn. Oil, Collage 2022 Mitchell Pluto

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The Cornucopia Trio

The collective art making project, Cornucopia, began in 2010 when artists Rik Lina (Netherlands), Gregg Simpson (Canada) and John Welson (Wales) began mailing each other works, an invitation to the next artist to contribute to the finished piece. I have always thought of this collective as akin to a free jazz trio, which is my background as a jazz drummer and Rik and John as avid listeners for decades. I see Rik, especially with his swooping ink lines, as the saxophone, John with his rolling earthy forms as the bass and myself adding percussive color and texture. In this case writer Allan Graubard, our guest ‘vocalist’, has written text for a select group of images by Cornucopia from past years. His writing keys in to the vivid imagery, but he insists his singing is always off key! If that’s that case, let atonality reign supreme.

-Gregg Simpson, 2022

***Holy Smoke***
**Rik Lina, Gregg Simpson and John Welson**

That night, when a large red praying mantis landed on her bedroom window with a soft thud, the window before the desk where she was writing, she lifted her head up and smiled. Nothing could be so vulgar, she thought, than this creature who, because of its cunning, mastery of camouflage, and sharp powerful tearing spines claimed the world it inhabited. For her, of course, vulgarity was a prize. The more vulgar a creature was to her – human, animal, fish, bird or insect – the greater its power.

She used the term as well from its root: tawdry, flamboyant, garish, brash, loutish, crude, brassy, rude and as common as possible. A perfect amalgam to paste together her curious tales into a medium that the cheapest lowlife enjoyed. So they did, and the prizes and checks and film offers came, one after another, two at a time, until she didn’t give a damn who made them or how well or how poorly they did for a public she evaded, preferring her solitude above all else in this make believe vicious whirlwind she conducted as if her life depended on it – which, no “as ifs” needed, it did.

***The Table Is Set***
**Rik Lina, Gregg Simpson and John Welson**

Field agent’s B16 report, initially filed per directive at his local office, quickly found its way to the national director. He read it, wrote up the affidavit for a search warrant and sent it on to a judge. After due process, the judge approved it. The director ordered the special squad to suit up and get to it.

At stake was nothing less than the ability to breathe, bite, breaststroke, battle and belittle. That the latter had less to do with the former than a frog does with a bottle of milk had nothing to do with it. Since the evening of the 12th when laughter replaced cognition and water balloons exploded on the street, moonglow dousing us all, everything was in flux. This included every prevarication sewn into a leafy flower, each busted safety valve worth saving, two or three aural visions and walking upside down. Enumerative, exhausting, eruptive? Quite.

They’d done whatever they wanted to, those bipedal harems, living in red brick row houses stained with coal smoke. Ah, that coal smoke …

Thereafter the lexicon unraveled, uproarious, horizontal, striking its own match to the torch that seared a name across the case: Agamemnon.

So that was it.

Murder, murder and judgement.

Neither the national director nor any of his assistants testified. They didn’t have to. The lawyers argued over the instrument but blood tells all. Even deer licking a twilight barbecue cued up, hooves hot to applaud.

And when it came down, the heavens parted and great sassafras babies with thick chocolate lashes stirred the witchy soup that feeds us …

see more on Cornucopia

Rik Lina

The Inner Landscape | Riklina Visual Artist | Buarcos

(The Netherlands 1942) lived and worked on different continents, preferably in wild nature, as a way of life using Odilon Redon’s advise: “Immerse yourself into nature!”. For this he dedicated life and art to study the deserts, the mountains, tropical rainforest- and coral reef jungles. In 1975, the emigration to the Caribbean island of Bonaire became an essential experience for his work with more than a thousand hours of scuba-diving. A major part of his drawing, painting and graphic work represents poetry and life of the pelagic realms, next to his explorations of the jungles of cloud forests and inner space.

Gregg Simpson

The Art of Gregg Simpson

A prolific and critically recognized artist and musician, has exhibited his paintings, drawings, and works on paper throughout Canada, the US, Europe, South America and Asia. His work is included in several academic studies, art history books and journals published in Canada, Europe, and Australia and has been exhibited in several historical surveys on surrealism and abstraction.

John Welson

https://www.johnwelson.com

began painting at the age of 12. He received a thorough education in painting, drawing, graphics, ceramics and attended two colleges of art. He has participated in over 300 exhibitions in both private and public galleries around the world since the early 1970’s. From the late 1960’s to the early 1990’s he painted Figurative Surrealist Paintings, exhibiting with artists as diverse as Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Rene Magritte, Max Ernst, Lucian Freud and Damian Hirst. Since the mid 1990’s he has produced Lyrical Abstracted Paintings inspired by the landscape of his native Wales.

Allan Graubard

is a poet, writer, and playwright with works translated in numerous languages. His plays have premiered in the U.S. and EU. He is the editor of and contributing author to Into the Mylar Chamber: Ira Cohen (Fulgur, UK, 2019), American liaison for and contributing author to the International Encyclopedia of Surrealism (Bloomsbury, UK, 2019), and editorial advisor for and contributing author to A Phala: Revisita do Movimento Surrealista (Sao Paolo, Brazil, 2015). Forthcoming in 2020 is a new book of poems and tales, Western Terrace (Exstasis Editions, Victoria, BC) while 2019 saw Language of Birds, a collaboration with artist Rik Lina (Anon Editions, NY/Flagstaff). In 2017, A Crescent by Any Other Name, selected tales, published (Anon Editions, NY/LA). That same year he was co-editor of and contributing author to The Art of Conduction: A Conduction Workbook by the renowned conductor-composer Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris (Karma Books, NY), with whom he was a principal collaborator for over three decades. Other titles of fiction and poetry are: Sirenes (Phasm Press, NY), Targets (Anon Editions, NY/LA), And tell tulip the summer (Quattro Books, Toronto), and Roma Amor, with photographs by Ira Cohen (Spuyten Duyvil Press, NY). He was co-editor of the expansive, two-volume: Invisible Heads: Surrealists in North America – An Untold Story (Anon Editions, NY/LA) and guest editor of and contributing author to a centennial celebration of poet Gherasim Luca (Hyperion, Contra Mundum Press, NY).

https://fulgur.co.uk/artists-and-writers/allan-graubard/