Edvard Munch, Night in St. Cloud, 1890
Miyoko Ito
Ganesha Baba. 1960
Oil on canvas
43” x 36”
I do not always like the people in my dreams.
Few, likeable enough, but often low, they shrink.
Snapping at each other, they go from room to room.
Like taffy, the house grows larger as they part.
Each room, a nook or stage with drapes of red
and window bays with views of other nights.
Dreams glow and deepen into plum at night.
Never known for light or space, these dreams.
Chairs and tables mesh with rugs, red,
rabbit holes in closets, stairs that shrink
from sight until the hangers part
and floor boards rise throughout each room.
I enter one compressed triangulated room.
People flail at one another through the night,
press forward to project each other’s part.
Twisted kite strings, the people in my dreams,
followed by a square, are pressed to shrink
upon a paisley rug inflamed with red.
I push away the light. The swinging bulbs of red
compound my pace with swirling circles in each room.
The circles chill my mind and shrink.
These dreams repeat themselves each night.
By 4 a.m. in bed, I feel a grayish glow of dream.
The dream as daylight severs it apart.
I push aside the curtain, shearing it apart,
start to gather shards of plum and red.
In my periodic dream,
I move around the furniture and twist the room,
assume the costume of the night:
bold steps to move beyond the threat to shrink.
The people I don’t always want to shrink.
At times, they wish that I might part.
Some enjoy the night
but I, for one, find night’s hue well beyond the red
required for a handsome room
in the time we hold a dark dream.
Plum colored night causes us to shrink
from all our dreams. In this, I part
through walls of red, and those too close within each room.
1. The Moment
A swallow swooped down
tore you from my arms.
Geese narrowed their passage in a flock so thick
the morning sky darkened as if night had arrived early.
Gulls churred.
Wings on wing,
swirl, geese.
Tangy jet fuel.
Nose on the water’s surface.
Level landing on a blue screen.
Waiting on the wing
up to their waists.
Walking on water
shivering in coats.
Five Our Fathers, Hail Marys.
2. The Edge
Do you remember, You asked me,
when I was little and a swan swiped the half eaten banana from my hand?
I screamed – frightening you and everyone around us.
Yes, I replied. It was a harrowing scene.
You were so very little, so scared;
the swan was eye to eye with you.
Swallows skimmed the rims of my eyes this time as never before.
I will not be the same any more than you were after that day by the stream.
We thought the swan benign, but selfish and desperate
to have what it wanted when it wanted it.
Yes, You told me. But I am grown now and
in spite of the sky darkening from time to time
light shows through paper thin cracks –
at times brilliant – other times just a dim, far away.
love like mad
mad like love
some people don’t like
poetry, it can all seem so very frivolous when the bodies stack
up, when the earthquake rumbles and decimates and
sighs its resignation, when chance or a hard-on has
left you with a bullet in your side, odes and sonnets just
aren’t hip let’s face it
they are the flowery enemies of the very market forces that forever seek out the hip
in dumpsters, in coffee shops, in your underpants
hip drains us all
of any kind of meaning
beyond our appeal
hip is the new currency that can elect and bankrupt
hip sells more cars than Henry Ford ever did
I am not hip and
neither are you
reading this poem has made
you less hip by 1/12 x 7 %
multiply that by √ 7 and you will have orgasms gushing out of your nose
and that is definitely not
hip, your city
would be a brilliant city if you
didn’t live there
I don’t mean that as an insult
I just mean
to say that if you could step
back and view it from the
kind of perspective one
only gets in Nebraska
in between the ears of corn you
could view your shimmering citadel,
spires gleaming beyond waste
disposal areas, your beloved skyscrapers
would glimmer all the greater from a country lawn strewn
with tires and old dolls, it may benefit you spiritually to
stare at your city on the horizon
with the smell of manure in your nostrils
inside a truck full of Mexicans telling bleary-eyed tales from the twelve hour workday
their laughter the worm
in the tequila of their pain, it may benefit you financially to
talk about the old neighborhood to a former minority resident
pushed onto some monotonous strip mall highway
while your urban friends paint frescoes all over his old walls
Gentrification, Oh Gentrification
please tell me of your splendid ramifications
are we young artists any better than Custer
when we invade and displace with every band member we can muster?
give me your mullets, your Budweiser, your slack-jawed meth-heads
your fundamentalists speaking in tongues performing exorcisms on chickens
your trailer park messiahs beaten down with nothing left but football to believe in
your teenage prostitutes looking to score drugs in the parking lots of fast food chains
your customer service sweethearts slingin’ fries and losing too many Friday nights they will never get back
I see the poetry in
you, the contemplative gasps in
dangerous places, the depths of
feeling on impoverished faces
I loathe the sterility of the hip
urban non-smoking Zen gardens of
the urbane, white-walled and white-populated
houses of the insane
all you forsaken children of the country
and spurned lovers of the ‘burbs
who now find yourselves held dearly in metropolitan hands;
your sheets are steamy like sewer grates at a one a.m. stop light
above which you make love in positions that rival architectural visions
staring into eyes as blue as cop’s uniforms and the frozen lips of the homeless they march out of town
arms and legs crossed like exit ramps as the traffic rushes, speeds, and honks through your heart,
you must love this city
do not treat her like a fling
for all those doomed to tread forever upon aisle three of the Wal-Mart
on some journey for towels that just never ended
passing the bullies and scoundrels, progenitors of their dysfunction
in that long row of bathroom accessories under torturous fluorescent lights
can you feel their gaze behind you
in the halls of the museum?
can you smell their unwashed feet
in the restaurant owned by the world famous chef?
can you hear them burping and laughing
by the watercooler of your office?
can you see them drinking six-packs
watching the joggers run by in the park?
so many dream of entering the vagina of a city
that sparkling womb where we all dance in amniotic fluid
in the hottest club where we all sweat beats
and you laying with such a rapturous beauty
releasing poetry between the steel girders of her loins
are you really too hip for enjoyment,
too hip for the carnal, too hip for the divine?
Norbert Schwontkowski
Song. 2010
oil on canvas
50 x 40 cm
Love Doves by Moscow based artist Yulia Brodskaya - made with layers of paper strips, carefully colored and positioned.
She stormed into the dimly-lit study in her sleep shorts and baggy grey sweatshirt drenched in sweat, brandishing the intricately woven web of string, feather, and beads. She shook it violently above her head as if it had a neck that could be strangled. “You said this would work, Jay!” A single feather fell from the ornate piece as she glared at her husband’s tired face, careless of what she may have interrupted in the delicate thoughts of the under-paid scholar. There was nothing beyond the horrifying images that constantly streamed through her head, like a filmstrip she could not stop running. She did not notice his equally tired eyes and the worried look that was beginning to permanently crease the space between his eyebrows.
“Annie…Sweetheart, you have to believe in it for it to work for you. The man in the store said that if you do not trust the dream-catcher, it won’t be able to help. You have to force them away; visualize the release of those thoughts and let it carry that burden for you.”
Her arm fell. She was so incredibly exhausted. Her downcast eyes brimmed with tears and she slumped to the floor in a delirious sob of defeat. “I can’t do it. I cannot imagine him away. It’s like trying to force these scars to jump off my skin and sear into someone else’s! It’s been a month and they still hurt me! All I think about when I try to fall asleep is his face staring at me from each bead—twenty of his faces—all waiting to come alive and tear me apart. I’ll just sit there, counting each bead and wondering when they will attack me.”
Annie sat, whimpering like child whose parents had forgotten her at an amusement park and drove twenty miles away, clutching her head with both hands as if doing so was the only way of keeping sanity inside. She rocked back and forth, shaking.
“Honey…Dammit.” Getting up from his seat, Jay knocked over the mug of lukewarm black coffee that had been standing post next to his keyboard all through the night. The noise of shattering ceramic caused Annie to jump. Eyes red, she looked over at the source of the noise. Wiping off his desk and floor with the paper towel he had used to clean his monitor earlier, Jay rose back up with as many shards as he could grab at once and walked over to the wastepaper basket near a window behind his wife. It was a small study, with more scattered papers than books. The dark green wallpaper was torn in many places from age and a lack of funds to replace them.
As he neared the window, he saw his own reflection against the black night. His pale face and dark baggy circles made him look skeletal. He felt the pain that had been growing in his chest over the past few weeks; a piercing discomfort he had yet to see a doctor for. There was something he did not want to face when questions were asked about where the tension could be coming from. He turned and kneeled next to his sobbing wife.
“This man, he won’t ever be able to hurt you again. They have him locked away and he will never see you or anyone else outside those bars again.”
He paused, and taking one hand away from her head, held it in his own. He wondered if it was his imagination or if it actually felt like holding his grandmother’s hand when he was a child—frail, and colder than was comfortable. He looked at the hand for a moment and a different look began to shadow the creases between his eyebrows. The tiniest muscle movement changed the worry lines to anger.
“Even if he could walk free, he would die before he even looked in your direction. I would kill him.”
He looked back into her swollen eyes and felt the pain in his chest intensify. Her eyes had not changed and no comfort had been drawn from his words. He knew the thought before she had even opened her mouth. It was that tension he did not want to face, that he had buried deep within his own guilty heart and tried to imagine away as he busied himself in his work.
“But Jay, you were here when he came. You didn’t even know it was happening.”
All he could do was hold her, trembling on the floor. He knew he did not need to go to a doctor to find out that guilt was the greatest cause of the searing in his chest. Her inability to be touched anymore, the scars all over her stomach and thighs would haunt their marriage forever because he could have stopped it and was oblivious. He cradled his sobbing, petrified wife and all he could see now was the beads of the dream catcher, scowling at him from the floor.
I hate and I love. Maybe you need to know why?
I don’t know, but it happens. I feel it, ripping me apart.
- Gaius Valerius Catullus (ca. 84 BC – ca. 54 BC) - trans. by James Esch
Marcel Proust’s bedroom at 44 rue Hamelin with pages and drafts of A la recherche du temps perdu covering the walls.
I think of you and tendrils of despair
entwine my heart. It chokes and gasps for breath
and yet I know your cold chair remains bare –
will stay that way. How personal is death?
It never knew you like I did and yet
it came. Attacked. Left stone that aged and cracked
and weeds that sprout, transcend, can’t pay the debt
to bring you back and so they grown and smack
your grave. Ensnare my heart. Wind fiercely blows
as in a winter storm. Summer has fled
and buds no longer tinge, ceasing to grow.
I have to face the fact that you are dead.
Occasionally, chirping birds bring hope
and gnarled branches reach down toward your grave.
leaves limply curl like hands in death
donut glazed with frosty tips
sleet patters tiny pin drops
forcing limbs to kiss the ground
white crushed lungs
from avalanches never threshed
like amphibians our bloodstreams slow
bitter winds cover our entwined
tracks with snow
unmarked graves
surrender glints from glassy eyes
I work as a secretary at a university, and one of my faculty members came into the office to get his mail. We have the typical office mail slots with each professor’s name on the front in alphabetical order. I explained to him that we were getting new mailboxes. He protested because he is over 6’5” and his mailbox is at the bottom; the slots should not be done alphabetically, but by height.
I pointed out that students and other faculty who stop by do not know how tall each professor is. They should stay the way they are.
He protested again, “I should be on top because I am a man and men should always be on top!”
I told him to consider me his Lilith.
Caravaggio, St. Jerome Writing, c. 1607-08
Many Christmas traditions have to do with food.
For instance, how about the day that someone was eating popcorn and decided, “Gee, let me get out my needle and thread and put this on a string instead of eating it; hence, I can stick it on the tree in my living room so the white of the popcorn really brings out the green needles on the tree.”
What about those gingerbread men? Why are they in need of a house? Especially since they can’t get inside it because the door does not open and the house is gutted. You don’t see humans making houses out of other humans.
Ponder this: why would you want to put candy in a sock/stocking? I’ve heard of finger food, but the only thing I can think of having to do with feet is fungus, which is not appetizing at all.
My all time favorite has to be the Christmas pickle. It’s not even edible. Did some parent give their child a pickle with their dinner and the child didn’t want it so they stuck it in the tree because they didn’t have a dog to pass it under the table to, and ever since then this occurrence has been replicated using a fake pickle just like the commercials where the latest headline has been captured, and for a limited time, placed on a coin for only $19.95?
I would like to know what inspired the person/persons who initiated these rituals.