Motion

Emotion

Cover image by Petula Bloomfield

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The Northampton Arts Council invited regional poets to submit poems in response to our 2015 Biennial Theme “Motion-Emotion.” Herein contains the poems that were chosen by jury to be read at the Calvin Coolidge Room, Forbes Library on Monday October 26, 2015.

We would like to thank our 2015 Biennial Poetry Jury: Patrick Donnelly, Northampton’s Poet Laureate Susan Kan of Perugia Press Chris Gonzalez, Local Poet

Special thanks to: Forbes Library, particularly Faith Kaufman and Lisa Downing Naila Moreira, Forbes Library’s writer in residence Leigh Tanji, Arts Intern at The Northampton Arts Council Northampton Arts Council Biennial Committee

1600 The poor dined on mice in Vienna and in Paris it rained blood for a week. In Augsberg a cloth shearer’s wife delivered a babe whose head grew on its back, its legs turned inward at the knees. A noble in Rostock enraged by an impious astronomer’s ambition to plot the stars sliced off a piece of his nose: Be thankful it wasn’t your member. Tycho Brahe staunched the flow with a rag; brother Hakan held the flesh in another. The Surgeon, also Royal Barber, fixed an unguent: mud, spider webs, bird nests, applied metallic astringent, then suggested wax replacement, but warned avoid hot places. Tycho, councilor of the realm, preferred his family’s metalsmith. In Marseilles, gibbeted bodies were tossed into the Mediterranean amid a plague of dolphins. The Astronomer believed all things connected—his blasphemy. Howie Faerstein Previously published (on-line) in The Pedestal, #44 in February,  2008. 

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Alita Darcy Thinking of her now, that thirteen-year-old girl who died by smacking into a moving box truck at the bottom of Haskell Street when her bike brakes failed, I don’t think of her as much as I think of our music teacher, Mr. Dunn, and how exasperated he’d get with Alita when she came to chorus and put her feet up on the row of chairs in front of her, leaned back, heavy with attitude, crossed her arms, and fixed him with her haughty stare until he’d look away, unsure of how to bridle her, she who never did her homework, talked back and snapped her gum, said the F-word under her breath, she who I looked up to with awe, her seventh grader to my sixth seeming a world away, and I think of the other girl on the back of the bike, nameless to me now, the one who jumped off in time when Alita lost control, and how she must have felt guilty to be glad for her life, and I think of my own son, the same age now, and how he is just a boy, and so she must have been just a girl, and not the powerhouse I made her, her hard surface probably hiding hurt beneath, and maybe Mr. Dunn wasn’t the hypocrite I thought when he cried for her after she was gone, perhaps he saw her as the child she was and mourned for the way he lost their staring contests, wishing he’d had the fortitude to make her flinch when he still could, make her lower her long legs in those two-toned jeans, make her throw out her gum and behave so that she wouldn’t be the kind of girl to joyride down the steepest hill in town carrying a friend behind her on the banana seat, daring someone to call her bluff, no sense knocked into her yet, no fear. Rebecca Hart Olander Previously Published in Naugatuck River Review, in a “30 Poems in November!” anthology, and featured on the “Poetry à la Carte” radio program.

Almost Trued Pantoum At last, I have had both tires trued, tube patched, all broken spokes replaced. I can pedal abreast of you —assuming I can match your pace. Tube patched, all broken spokes replaced, my seat’s been raised, my rim’s been dished. Assuming I can match your pace we can bike as I’ve often wished. My seat’s been raised, my rim’s been dished, (lowered handlebars, tightened chain) now we’ll bike as I’ve often wished —assuming that it doesn’t rain. Over tweaked handlebars and chain we’ll share a smoothie as we ride. Assuming that it doesn’t rain we’ll start whenever you decide. We’ll share a smoothie as we ride and talk of things we think and feel. We’ll start whenever you decide —no need to reinvent the wheel. We’ll talk of things we think and feel as I pedal abreast of you. Or did they reinvent the wheel just when I’ve, at last, had both tires trued? Daniel Hayes Previously published in the journal Boneshaker and on the blog Velotry.

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At the Van Gogh and Nature Exhibit the bodies of three sparrows in simple brown ink sprawl restrained and tender across paper. Feathered death lives on walls next to sowers in blue earth, concentric strokes of yellow and green wheat, boughs of cedar that break and swirl. Then, the child in you plops a sun dead center, puff clouds gooey as marshmallows, an impossibly turquoise sky. Everything pulses, vibrates, throbs except the lone reaper contained in a field, just beyond hospital walls where you wrote nature overpowers me. Like the way near the end, my mother, awed by the trees that dwarfed her, asked why are there so many and where do they come from? In your last painting two dull crows bear witness to rain as it slashes the planted field with diagonal precision, as it cuts and cuts without relief. Gail Thomas gailthomaspoet.com

Blessing for an Imminent Death Because my husband is strumming the bed rails, (this music of the almost-dead), because his heart is saxophoning a ragged jazz beat, because his wide-mouthed gasps are jagged as sex breaths, let there be dance. Because the brass urn yearns for his burned laughter, his fatless ash, mercy. Because the sickroom tilts to the cold oceanic hiss of oxygen, because his sheets are sticky wet with almost-death, because water hangs in crystal baubles from my daughter’s eyelids, sorrow. Because my husband is strumming the bed rails (this stringed requiem of the almost dead), because his feet are blue-hued fetuses in my palms, because the riffling of his lungs is soft as flamenco fans unfolding, let there be psalms. Because tufts of snow are nippling our pine trees, because his skin is giving off the scent of sugar fields being burned, because my thumbs are stroking the blunted blades of his cheekbones, let there be grace. Because candle flames are swaying in prayer like an ecstatic choir, because my husband is strumming the bed rails (this eerie symphony of the almost dead), because clouds are flying across the moon like a gathering of spirits, let there be death. Because the brass urn yearns for him with uterine ferocity, let there be life. Ellen LaFleche Previously published on the Cape Cod Outermost Poetry Prize website. Winner of the Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Prize in 2014.

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A Cold Hen Contemplates Chao Theory and Mt. Tom A real cold hen is nervous is nervous with a towel with a spool with real beads. It is mostly an extra sole nearly all that shaved, shaved with an old mountain, more than that bees more than that dinner and a bunch of likes that is to say the hearts of onions aim less. ~Gertrude Stein, From Tender Buttons The thinnest white thread caught in its spool, can’t find the beginning or even the end, the wooden spool somehow warped perhaps nervous, nervous and I look out the kitchen window at an old mountain called Tom while two bees compete to pollinate the yellow zinnias in the window box and I wonder about an extra soul in the universe. This morning Claire asked how long would it take for earth to die if the sun burnt out, and I quipped, Light years, and she said yesterday’s yogurt had been sour and I dribbled a bunch of likes thinking about chaos theory and how- like- ordered it is and how it is not the peeling off layers of an onion but instead grappling with the onion’s soul as one but many representations of the sun, as much as Claire is or the bees doing their darndest to distribute sun dust from one flower to the next while I dig at the white thread with one fingernail and wonder why I am less nervous today than yesterday about the great unraveling, why the climate change headlines didn’t catapult me into despair but rather lit a fire under me to get my affairs in order, even shedding the idea of an affair, gone with the ovaries removed last week by Dr. Jones, still a tug when I laugh or stand up too quickly, no more egg sacs for the fallopian threads to connect, two little planets removed from the chaos of the reproductive universe, it has been chaos hasn’t it in that patterned kind of way, cancer like the sun promising disarray, rays of disturbance that these two bees continue to defy, to defy despair like Tom who just sits there, sits there and changes color while the sun shifts on his shoulders Margaret Babbot Forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, 2015

Flourishing My therapist says I’m afraid of vanishing. Last week his ceiling caved in, ending our session in a shower of words and water. I’m serious. I’m always serious when I talk about therapists and cave-ins. This morning I’m serious in a train sliding past a clock-tower constructed when this city thought it was flourishing. Flourishing is a form of vanishing, a verb embedded in what comes after. Once there was a city that flourished, its spires confident and secure as my therapist’s ceiling. Once there was a train that pulled out of a once-flourishing city. One morning I was on that train, speeding between woods and river, through a village of wooden houses and plots in a cemetery, moving on, vanishing too fast to become part of local history. Vanishing was fun, like a sky skydiving. I was the sky into which I dove. I brooded above the little wooden town and postage-stamp cemetery. Time said, “Welcome to the fountain.” History said, “You’re already forgotten.” Wind-scalloped river, algae-covered pond, fronds of goldenrod, a patch of reeds and then a factory parking lot, cars and men moving slowly, lit by Sunday morning. The train slowed to a stop, waiting to claim the single track ahead. I will tell my therapist, when we meet again beneath his brand-new ceiling, “Once I was sitting on a train, stopped dead and already gone. Happy. Flourishing.’” Joy Ladin

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Rowing from Monhegan to Manana I leaned into the dinghy’s oars, pulling through the brightness, Indian summer brightness, mute and clear as if earlier, the portable radio in the lobster shack had not buzzed with bad news and the lobsterman in his Red Sox cap and faded t shirt, painting his buoys as he did every September, had not beckoned me inside. Something terrible has happened, he said. I moved closer to the words until we were complicit in the salt pocked windows, the torn green shade, the swag of shocking pink buoys, the radio repeating itself as island-light spilled through the narrow door, in the silence we kept until he returned to his work and I walked down the path to the beach where rowboats shouldered each other, trash smoldered in metal drums and gulls feasted on corn cobs and lobster shells. Between Herring Gut and Smutty Nose rocks cinched the harbor --the ferry blasted its horn nearing Pemaquid Point. I needed somewhere to settle the fear that rose with each stretch of oars threading me like light through strands of water. But when I climbed the wooden steps to everything abandoned: signal house, keeper’s dwelling, boathouse and bell, gone too was the sense that anything can keep us. There was nothing to hold so I crouched low. Under my palms lichen’s rust clung to stone. Michelle Gillett Previously published in The Beloit Poetry Journal, 64 (Fall 2013), 29, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Sequela The ode to a cloud is first written in the form of a eulogy. The eulogy is there to remind us: in, out, through. Through the thicket, through the pasture, beautiful and full of ticks. The thing about beauty is its wavering. Unreliable as a torn map, hard to read like the EKG stained by the technician’s spilled coffee. You can stake your claim at low tide but what will you do when the tide comes rushing in. And, style aside, will you ever wear the cap you bought off the head of the guy selling live bait on the sidewalk. Walk on, we used to say to our horses, walk on. One foot shod or not, in front of the other. Your brother taught you how to climb a tree and smoke. Your mother made a big fuss when she found out. Tree house fallen into disrepair, then outright gone. To right a wrong you must first be willing to stand alone and howl. To wait however long for the pack to answer back before you head out, before you find yourself again at a brink. Last night the stars. This morning the sky, trying to say something equal to what the birds were up to at 4 a.m. Something striped and pink, running unbroken from east to west. To sing ecstatic it helps to know a thing or two about the tragic. The reasons for, the consequences of. First the snake bite, then the antidote. Maya Jansen

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Sledding with the Dead Launched by the two girls the color blending but stark against the snow of the hill. The sled, a round shield banks hard along the stone wall between patches of earth exposed like early wounds but already scab-like. Into the open space the smallest boy head back, mitten’d thumbs struggling to find the ends of glasses so thick you could see the stars. From the sky the dead stones feel like braille dots spelling one long word. Michael Foran

Turnaround Lightning lit a cigarette launched a rickety handrail that frazzled and frayed and swung in the air like a broken trapeze She tossed the match scattering potluck buckshot crack shots posting search and rescue the sky a billboard of near-misses We were sulking in the car a spat nicking scars scoring heavy on the metal a black keys only choreography I was sitting nightshift Shiva no more chitchat no more happy horse shit a lightening rod testing loss with a tuned fork her fine fur standing rattling Thunder not to be undone he ironcast a cartoon frying pan in the face and well didn’t we deserve it a wakeup call to our lucky stars all tipsyturvy in their spunglass constellation hanging by guard rails wires loose ready to let go when Lightning stubbed her cigarette staggered off to bed she said she’d had enough and now well Hell hadn’t we all Candace Curran

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What Moves What moves might eat you or save you. Might be what you were looking for all along or what was looking for you the whole day. What moves. The leaves on the trees. The dog across the field, then rolling in something dead. To keep it. Mark it. Let anyone coming along behind him know it was his. Then later finding a skull and chewing on it. The dog as grave-digger. As place-keeper. Sound asleep when the coyotes put up their yell from that crack in the earth coyotes call from. What moves will be something alive. Is alive. Is the water tumbling through the trees and you need the water. Your own mother diving into it wherever she could find it. You learned to drink. You drank from her though she sat quite still while you did it. What moves is what you need. The sky spackled at the top of the hill. The wind that came blowing down. The sky. That wind poking at the house. What moves might eat you or save you. The water you dove into to grab your mother who had dived into something much too shallow to be diving into. The water your mother’s mother dove into to pull the child from the water though it was too late. How still that child was in your grandmother’s arms. How still your mother was when she was watching it. Your grandmother laying the child down in the sand. How the water kept on moving like nothing had happened. How the sky kept on moving. How the breath moved in and out of all the people’s lungs come to see the child lying still on the sand. How still your mother was when she left you. When she pulled that last breath out of the room. How what moves might save you or eat you. How quiet. How like the sea would be if it stopped. How stopped How quiet. What saves us. What eats us. Carol Potter Forthcoming in the Green Mountains Review

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