be you the stray who returns into the mist of our bodies.
Ignition
I wonder if you’re touching the sky now as I extend my sight to these mountains what part of space will be created with your presence? What ocean will I cross to incinerate you slowly?
Prophecy
Your body dissolves things to announce a moan or remote end of the night that no longer hides anything not even a new way of shivering
Estrangement
You look at me as if I were your fetish you touch me when we’re alone I am nothing of that nor the shadow of our own steps.
Secrets
The mirror projects two lovers at the edge of the night the itinerary of its own history is broken They don’t sleep because they know how to distinguish whispers that fly by and saturate the air of people looking through the keyhole and are suddenly reflected in a pool It is not true to say that these bodies look at each other it would be better to sketch the moment when they intersect with the dark but aligned as they were they knew how to possess themselves and stood out against the background of shadows of a white that was dreamed at night and he did not even stop to contemplate the stars but if he looked at himself naked except when she unbuttoned her dress.
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 art photo Sun Set Women Oil, collage by Mitchell Pluto 2022
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.
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
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…
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
THIS WRITING IS AN AUTHORIZED DUPLICATION WITH PERMISSION AND EXPRESSED CONSENT
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.
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 Collageby 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 Collageby 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 Collageby 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
THIS WRITING IS AN AUTHORIZED DUPLICATION WITH PERMISSION AND EXPRESSED CONSENT
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.
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 …
Featured Photo False Prophet Rik Lina, Gregg Simpson and John Welson
(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.
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.
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).
Mitchell Pluto 