This issue of RKzJ focuses on scars. Scars are an endless source of life metaphor – both for the life we clearly witness surfacing each day and the life we put away, some intentionally hidden or conveniently lost, temporarily misplaced, mislabeled, accidentally tossed in the fire, or hugged warm like the secret blanket we retain from our fleating youth. Some scars heal and are forgotten, others scar from within and are too painful to even name. We scar our spinning minds and the earth we spin upon. There is evidence of the impact of things against other things all around us – and they are gorgeous. But we must search them out to befriend them and understand their story, or at least be open to the idea of letting them find us.
The scars theme was physically appropriate for me recently when, in my enthusiasum and haste for racing spring’s true calendar arrival, I bled in my garden upon the occasion of my first obligatory injury of the awakening season: a nice harp saw cut along the first knuckle of my left thumb. As if subconsciously collecting these reminders, this one nicely matches the two along the length of its neighboring finger from a few years back, those applied within five minutes of each other as I hacked a chunk, not only out of my finger, but from a piece of sassafras I was working into a primative tomahawk. The squarish stone of that primative tool still bares the dark red splashes of my DNA. I made sure of that. It’s my favorite of many fashioned since. If you bleed for something, if you get scarred for something, even if that thing causes you pain, you remain connected to it in some involuntary way.
On the topic of scars rendered upon our mutual planet, I offer up to readers the following poem which attempts (perhaps in vain) to give voice to the tree. Not any tree, but the angry, wandering ghost of a tree with something to say.
Ire of Screaming Tree / Myth of Walkingroot
Chop and grind and burn me down,
misguided by your invasive David and
Goliath malady, throwing yourself against
my family of immovable giants with your
tiny things, you wetched metal mongers,
sap thirsty sawdust barons. Alas, the
hovering wind still weeps over our
fading shadows.
What you cannot hear, or choose to forget,
are the sounds I sent out before you were born,
and before your fathers, sounds from this
destructive moment, this senseless blinding pain
from deep in my roots, screaming up through my
limbs and bark and veins, written and set upon the
wind through the countless messages of leaves.
Unplugged from the earth, breathing only
through my skin, damp with fog, caked with the
earth I bore away from my resting place you disturbed
with your machines of teeth and fumes, I will crawl
to where you were born and find the memory of
your parents first meeting under my father’s shade.
And when you furl your aged brow trying desperately
to remember details of your youth, remember this oath:
That I will return to where you left your roots
and hug them slowly to death. And when we are both
too long dead for our offspring to know us, I will again
remind you of your removal of me from your world
and my removal of your memory from yours.
I don’t rightly know if it was the journal topic of scars, just people yawning their way out of winter in good timing, or if RKz’s message is reaching an audience (or a mix of it all), but there was a wheelbarrow full of submissions this go around, many of which fit the direction of this issue. Along with Lee Evans and Larry Blazek, who are returning from earlier issues, we offer eight new author’s to RKz. Whether attending “A Wake for the Dead of Winter” with Howard Good, standing by with Karl Miller as ”exhaust from passing cars casts incense over the dead”, or positioning time perfectly as Jhon Baker reminds us, “If I were a gold fish I would have been writing this for my whole life”, we travel this issue upon the unique perspectives of our authors’ many world views. LTCT
Contentz of RKzJ 2.04 “Scars”
Howard Good – A Wake for the Dead of Winter // The New Grammar
Larry Blazek – The Psychedelic Messiah
Lee Evans – Tracey’s Creek
Gary Lehmann – Double Entry Bookkeeping // The Warmer Side of Calder
Karl Miller – One Last Insult // Paranoid
Pamela Young – Bukowski
Jhon Z Baker - Margins // Untitled (Spring Frost)
Eric Kingsbury – Alleys // The Place of Sacrifice – Petra, Jordan
Emily Kraus – Scars of Self Sabotage
Steve Ausherman – Bite Wound
Howard Good
A Wake for the Dead of Winter
Birdsong alarm
don’t cry
I can feel broken idols
change trains
upturned hands
forfeit fire
uncle decay still trying
shhh tree
sleep
The New Grammar
I bomb the house,
and by morning,
the corpses of black ants
scar the floor
like a dozen misplaced commas
in the breathless
run-on sentence of spring.
Bio: Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of eight poetry chapbooks, including Tomorrowland (2008) from Achilles Chapbooks and Love Is a UFO (2009) from Pudding House. He has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize and twice for the Best of the Net anthology.
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Larry Blazek
The Psychedelic Messiah
You drive into town in an old truck. There is a church that is disproportionably large for the size of the tiny town; it is the only church in town. There is no one on the streets yet you have difficulty finding a parking place so many cars are parked all over town. You finally find a place up the hill on the edge of town. There are stores but none of them are open. The tall thin man who has been riding with you beckons for you to enter the church. You hesitate because you feel that you are not dressed for church. The church is packed and several people in black and white robes are conducting some kind of ritual around the altar. You follow the tall thin man into another room .There are several women in the black and white robes either meditating or in some kind of trance. If they notice you or the tall thin man, they show no signs. The tall thin man goes through another door. It exits into a cobbled alley. You exit the church and try to orient yourself so you can recall where you parked. You walk by a building that at first seems to be a Laundromat but then seems to be an artists’ studio. This is the first place in town that you like. You look through the windows and see several washing machines with psychedelic paint jobs. You leave the alley and turn left into a side street. You see an old panel truck painted with a similar motif. The tall thin man suddenly stops and turns. He tries to embrace you but you push him away.
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Lee Evans
Tracey’s Creek
We gave the kids a push across the ice
On castoff kitchen chairs, and let them go.
Easy to do, with children not our own.
We felt we had been cheated by the sun,
But when a bank of clouds concealed his face,
A cold chill shuddered through the cheerless air,
Reminding us how piercing were the rays
Diffused throughout our bodies’ mortal frames—
Though one kind word could melt away the snow.
One melancholy skater traced alone
His cursive on the shining frozen stream.
Sometimes the gleeful children followed him,
Sometimes a pale young woman, who seemed lost
In her own mind, apart from all things else—
And yet, compared with him, quite free from care.
Between the man and woman, down the creek,
An unseen crack was moving silently;
It split the ice, and then the earth and sky;
And then the houses and the businesses;
The churches, schools; it split each person’s mind,
And deeper still, it reached down in our hearts.
As we passed there, you pointed out to me
The skid marks from an otter’s underside,
Where he had slid across the untouched ice
That froze into a graceful curving track
Toward the rushes and the tangled woods.
The frozen waste rang with the children’s mirth.
The only thing that I could think to say
Was not too reassuring. “Watch your step.
The ice out here is thinner than it seems.”
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Gary Lehmann
The Warmer Side of Calder
The mischievous sculptor, Alexander Calder, was also a jeweler
who made massive and energetic bracelets and necklaces
which were often so large that they trapped the wearer
unwittingly into a kind of gaudy performance art.
One piece entitled The Jealous Husband, c. 1940
is made of slinky brass wires that simulate and flirt with
the breasts of the wearer while clutching the shoulders
in a spontaneous display of outrageous public affection.
Art critic Hilton Cramer said the necklace contained
the humor of mock aggression and shameless self-assertion.
The witty Calder smiled and toasted the socialites of New York.
All the wearer needed was humor equal to his own.
Double Entry Bookkeeping
Please
take Jane off my account.
She dumped me several months ago.
I’m with Myra now.
She’s very nice,
but
I’ll be waiting a while longer
before putting her on my account.
Bio: Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Gary Lehmann’s essays, poetry and short stories are widely published. Books include The Span I will Cross [Process Press, 2004] and Public Lives and Private Secrets [Foothills Publishing, 2005]. His most recent book is American Sponsored Torture [FootHills Publishing, 2007]. Visit his website at www.garylehmann.blogspot.com
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Karl Miller
Paranoid
She imagines patterns in the sound:
an abbellimenti
played presto and light;
a dark counterpoint in bass.
(Or does she just listen more closely?)
One last insult
Cheap stones,
spotty grass,
water-stained walls:
here weeds, not flowers,
mark memories,
and exhaust
from passing cars
casts incense
over the dead.
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Pamela Young
Bukowski
I don’t get Charles Bukowski
I mean, put it in a paragraph, for christ’s sake,
Does his mind really work that way? Did he carry a notebook with him, out to the playground, down to breakfast in the morning, into a lover’s bed? Did he handicap himself in bar brawls, swinging southpaw, the other hand desperately scrawling the hurled epithets onto the leg of his blue jeans?
I wish I had
I mean, I could write a small touching vignette,
A portrait, a sketch with oddball details,
It might be a good way to reconstruct that diary I never kept
The sequence of events is gone-what’s left is the
Hand feeding me strawberries in the car, as I lay looking up
At the tiny dots in the headliner, the stubble under his jaw
(My feet out the window, toenails polished perfect pink,
Legs shaven sleek in the hours before his arrival,
Prepared for him like a sacred offering)
I am remembering that I was remembering
The peaches in the park of the week before
Kissing the juice from his lips
While the ducks squabbled
Feeling like a movie of lovers in love, embracing
the cliché
But Bukowski this isn’t
I can’t very well say, “He had beautiful hands,
I loved his hands, and his wrists and the hair
On his forearms, and one day we went
Strawberry picking, which sounds romantic, but was
Rather a hot gritty affair at a pick-your-own place,
Sweat-stung eyes, weird bugs to avoid, and
The strawberries at first were a marvel,
You would part the dirt-encrusted upper leaves
To find a gleaming swelling red treasure
A glowing ruby symmetrically seeded, and then
Another, each one lumping up bigger than
The one before, until they became creepy
And unnatural, products of modern fertilizer, fattened like pigs for slaughter
And sometimes you would reach
Into the shaded green for one and it would squelch overripe
To stain your fingers like a bleeding heart,
Red blood
And blue mold.”
And you see how quickly I’ve fallen back into myself
But no, Bukowski would say: and then
He said to me, “Hold on, there’s a bug on your sleeve,” and I froze waiting for him to
knock it off, but he took his damn time about it, looking with his photographer’s eyes and
his inner light meter
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Jhon Z Baker
Spring Frost was not kind to
my annual tulips – already
blossoming with shortened life.
If I were a gold fish I would have been
writing this for my whole life.
I mean to say that I would perceive that
I had always been watching my tulips surrender.
If I were a gold fish my life would seem
more fresh and less dry.
Margins
I find poems in the
margins of books I’ve read
or tried reading
only to find them
poking out and asking
to be recognized.
and I may.
such as…
I run to catch up to you
tho my hair is mussed
and I’ve forgotten my glasses.
well,
I’m left now to wonder
if I caught my presumed lover.
I don’t know.
should it be recognized that it
may have been
someone else?
Bio: “I’ve been writing for quite some time but only started taking seriously after a series of accidents and one in particular that left me crippled and mildly bitter with a tint of humor to get through a day when there is little other reason…I love to write poems and short stories and long to write a novel when someone decides to pay me about 50 grand to do it. Naturally I don’t think I’ll be writing a novel.”
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Eric Kingsbury
Alleys
After rain, the city shines a dull grey
and I stand at a bridge overlooking
a neighborhood familiar and yet strange,
like a vision or a dream, dissolving
in the quick moment of recognition.
Down slick sidewalks, I enter it again,
that old haunting of images, of sun
playing tricks and of shadows weaving in
and out of brick alleys lined with ashes,
stained as if by tears or waters more foul
than the embarrassment of control’s loss
by men otherwise strong, of hearty soul,
and I know, having once so fallen down,
how the alleys swallow men in this town.
The Place of Sacrifice
Petra, Jordan
I have come to this pass,
in silence, to ask:
Are you not afraid?
The celestial clock
in the dark night
unwinds its sacred numbers,
and with candlelight
and mystic purpose,
I sit at the edge
of a vast precipice,
in silence, to ask:
Will you accept this body?
I offer it to you,
in the thick night,
brown and scarred
though it is—
I would hurl it into darkness
for this union.
If you are not afraid,
will you accept this body?
Bio: “I was educated in creative writing at Illinois State University. I am a dabbler in music, archaeology and poetry. I will always be a wanderer of the off-the-beaten track places in the world.”
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Emily Kraus
Scars of Self Sabotage
Idleness is evil; spurring in me daily disasters.
Keep moving, keep busy or I will get to me.
Scars left in the trash don’t compare to scars left in my mind.
Building upon one another for over a decade
Scars feed off the freshness of recent wounds.
No mercy. No second thoughts.
Sabotage. Pounding in my chest.
Addiction is the scar that never heals.
Try to run away but the scar runs with me.
Can’t stay in one place too long.
Can’t stay with one person too long.
Hiding who I am so others will like me.
Hiding who I am so I will like me.
A self-inflicted wound leaves the deepest mark.
The repetitious assault stifles the potential growth underneath.
Extinguishing the fire inside that wants to spread love.
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Steve Ausherman
Bite Wound
The worst part was the human bite wounds.
Open and filled with bacteria. A quick ticket
To the hospital and a date with a tetanus shot.
You’d spend a free moment looking through
the kid’s chart later praying he wasn’t a junkie
and had Hepatitis, HIV, or something worse.
You’d get bit during the restraints tackling a kid
Holding him down. Usually controlling his arms
During a 5 point restraint you wouldn’t realize
That your arm was too close to his head till you
Had a 185 pound psychotic chomping down with
Is incisors into your pink skin like a bass on a plug.
Like fire if you really want to know how it felt.
Like fire through your skin and down into your
Muscle and you couldn’t punch him because that
Wouldn’t be “therapeutic” and besides it’s be against
The law and I’d lose my $6.85/hr job and I’d
Really be in trouble then. I was up against the wall.
So he’d bite you and you’d jam your forearm deeper
Into his mouth. Him or her. 7 years old or fifty. It
Didn’t matter. And you’d shove it deeper so the skin
Of your arm fills his mouth and plugs up the entire
Space so there’s no room for him to take air in
Around the edges of your arm because your salty skin
Is filling every inch and…
You pinch his nose shut (or her) and now with no air
Going into his nose and your reddened big fat forearm
Shoved deep in his mouth like a country ham he
Can’t get any air and you wait and his body still bucks
Against the restraints and the five adults holding him
And he twists his head to make space between his lips
And your arm but you adjust and there’s no room.
And he can’t breathe so he finally lets go.
You pull you arm out “blessed freedom!” and it throbs
And burns in reaction to the trauma it’s experienced. But,
The rest of the straps go on and the workers
Can finally leave the room and exhausted regroup
And begin the fifteen minute checks through the
Small Plexiglas window in the door of the rubber room.
But, for you it is off to the nearest hospital to get the
Wound flushed and a few precautionary shots for
This bite wound that won’t end up healing for weeks.
Bio: Steve Ausherman is a poet, painter, fly fisherman, photographer, wanderer and high school fine arts instructor who lives in New Mexico. His poetry is forthcoming in The Aurorean and The Mountain Gazette. As well, his work has recently appeared in Decanto, Avocet, Variations Zine, Main Channel Voices, Bear Creek Haiku, and others. Free time finds him wandering the back roads, mesas, mountains, and arroyos of the American West with his wife Denise.
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