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FEATURED STORY FROM ISSUE FIFTEEN (STAY TUNED! THE REST OF OUR STORIES WILL BE PUBLISHED ON AUGUST 4TH!)

Featured Interview: Mark Carthew.
fafter brewing a cup of French roast
I step outside
songbirds echo from the magnolia tree
a shifting breeze moves around me
placing my laptop on the garden table
I sink into the sun soaked chair
rest my fingers on the plastic keys
waiting for that automatic moment
when a sharp pain rips through my stomach
I double over
notice my poem sitting next to me
she scoffs at my travel plans
my niceties about the garden
insists I’m lazy
writing through a facade
never close
with no apologies I massage that elusive spot
her chaos of words
as she moves closer
slams my fingers over the keys
slightly bruised I surrender to her fury
accept my fate
as the sharp pain in my stomach
slowly subsides
after brewing a cup of French roast
I step outside
songbirds echo from the magnolia tree
a shifting breeze moves around me
placing my laptop on the garden table
I sink into the sun soaked chair
rest my fingers on the plastic keys
waiting for that automatic moment
when a sharp pain rips through my stomach
I double over
notice my poem sitting next to me
she scoffs at my travel plans
my niceties about the garden
insists I’m lazy
writing through a facade
never close
with no apologies I massage that elusive spot
her chaos of words
as she moves closer
slams my fingers over the keys
slightly bruised I surrender to her fury
accept my fate
as the sharp pain in my stomach
slowly subsides
Imagine a line like a rolled petal, darker than blood, brown at the edges.
If you have an orderly mind, it might seem like a dignified end, rather
than dropping unceremoniously (but who is to say what a ceremony
can be?) from a vase. The president keeps his roses close to his chest,
their fragrance trapped in their tight structure, yet a little is released
each time he opens the tin. Is there a more delightful invention than
a clock? We pry apart and leap through the hours using its two
wiper-like hands: hands that really do feel the pressure of time.
Imagine this stanza as upside down. There is no need, then, for it to
be written upside down. Readers are ready, for what is not complete
novelty: it is only novelty within this poem and book. The heel
and snout are reversed. The root supplants the bloom. To use
a human or sunflower – rather than a pig – figure. How flexible are we?
Can we invert our days in order to find more metaphorical truffles?
Hedonists are adept at this. Tyrants have others turned upside down
for the keys to safes in their pockets. Or for a key to a room full of art.
Long lines suggest death, when piled upon each other. How deep, you
ask, can we bury them? Deep enough to find water? There is no use for
rhetorical questions underground. Stand guard on yourself, watch
a myth trickle into the next century. Yesterday I saw Death cross
the road holding a picture of the Madonna over their face. Curious.
Yet it is not death I want to conclude with, but with the unrectangular
face of Jacinda Arden, who made of terrorists nonentities. The shape
of New Zealand (or of any landmass), is an awkward one to bury.
The Girls on the Bridge – midsummer 1901
From my rotting body
flowers shall grow
and I am in them
and that is eternity.
Edvard Munch
The midnight sun is nudging the horizon.
Three young women stand together,
gazing down into the water’s
wavering reflection of that moon-like orb,
the Nordic sun, and also a dark, brooding
mass, inchoate on the farther shore.
All is still: no sound of birds,
no breeze disturb the gravitas.
The girls have paused in the hiatus
spanning disparate centuries—
the one in red flanked by her friends
or sisters, wearing white and green,
evoking vernal aureoles
of new-leafed apple trees.
Yesterday is virginal in white:
baptism and first Communion; bride.
Today is the embodiment of passionate
desire for life, arrayed in red— a poppy,
an anemone; the heart, the blood,
the troth of lovers, marriage bed,
the birthing of a child;
the crimson haemorrhage from ailing lungs—
first the mother who succumbed;
then the sister who died young,
her silent, stricken siblings at her side.
Tomorrow, yet to be inscribed,
is like midsummer’s evening skies—
celestial cerulean, forget-me-not.
All three girls upon the bridge
gaze down upon the water’s face
as if to scry what might await them
on the other side: beyond ensorcelled
summer night, this eerie twilit sky—
After the painting, “The Girls on the Bridge” (1901) – by Edvard Munch
See also other paintings of three girls on the bridge, which vary the
configuration and feature a blue dress instead of a green one.

Jena Woodhouse

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