Forever Will End On Thursday
Poems by Nic Sebastian
Edited by Jill Alexander Essbaum
Smashwords Edition
Cover Art: Paula Grenside
Copyright 2011 Nic Sebastian
Published by Lordly Dish Nanopress
For my boys
CONTENTS
places of happiness (Dartmoor)
what happened to cousin harriet
this is the box I leave to you
places of happiness (Candelaria)
three provinces and their king
places of happiness (Colorado)
places of happiness (Rajshahi)
The options for publishing a first book for a poet in my situation (that is, with several dozen individual poems already published by a range of reputable poetry journals) are limited. I could enter the poetry contest stakes and repeatedly submit my manuscript along with hundreds or thousands of others at $25 or so a try. I could also submit to one of the relatively few presses that still read unsolicited manuscripts free. But - the merits or demerits of either option aside - the fact is that in both cases the statistical chances of success are tiny, and continually dwindling in the face of growing demand.
A third option might be to self-publish my manuscript, but that process, while it has had success in some cases, is also broadly problematic, in that it lacks that key element of credibility a poetry press brings to a manuscript – the outside editor’s judgment and gravitas, which both affirm and help hone the poet’s vision.
Through the Lordly Dish Nanopress (a single-publication project), editor Jill Alexander Essbaum and I hope to pioneer a new poetry publishing model that brings together, on a one-time basis, an independent editor’s judgment and gravitas and a poet’s manuscript, effectively by-passing the poetry-contest gamble and the dwindling opportunities offered both by big presses and by heroic but limited-capacity no-fee/no-contest small presses.
This process has been an intensive learning experience for me on many levels and I look forward to volunteering my own editing skills and experience to a poet looking to publish a first collection under the nanopress paradigm.
There are no words to express my gratitude to Jill for so generously volunteering her time during the two years of this project, for her superlative editing skills, her sensitivity and patience, and for her belief in my work. My process notes on the tremendous experience of being competently edited are here. Warmest thanks also go to photographer Paula Grenside for giving permission to use one of her wonderful photos as cover art.
Financially - although future nanopress collaborators are obviously free to decide differently on this point – the Lordly Dish Nanopress is a no-profit enterprise. This volume is for sale directly from its print-on-demand publisher at cost-price and is also online as a free PDF download.
This is about encouraging each other to find creative and credible new ways to get the work of more dedicated poets out past existing publication bottle-necks, while still applying credible ‘quality control’ measures. I hope other poets and one-time editors will adopt the nanopress paradigm. I hope that others still will develop ever more creative publishing paradigms for the benefit of us all.
Nic Sebastian
December 2010
I answered Nic Sebastian’s call for help with editing her manuscript almost without even having to consider it. I read the request on Reb Livingston’s blog and I thought: Of course I will help her! I had just returned to the United States after living (unhappily) in Europe for a couple of years. My own poetry career (inasmuch as one can make a ‘career’ out of poetry) had sputtered and briefly stalled. I thought—quite earnestly, quite literally—that it would please The Muse should I offer my editorial eye to this woman who wanted very much to put into the world her own poems at their very best. And who doesn’t want to please The Muse? Truth be told, I’m a very good editor. I’ve always prided myself on being able to edit, suggest, guide a poet’s poems not toward my own specific bents (and they are indeed specific, my preferences and aesthetic), but rather toward the poem’s own. Being able to help a poem, in fact, become more of itself, its author. To shepherd it into its fullest self.
And so our process began. Nic sent me her manuscript, I read it twice over a few months’ time, I marked it up, I mailed it back to her. Then, over the next few months, she’d revise, adjust, reconsider, and send it finally back to me and we would repeat this process once again. We went through this cycle three full times.
Nic’s poems were fantastic to begin with. There was very little restructuring I suggested. Here I would encourage her to tease an image out; there I would scribble notes like ack! and gah! over a single word choice I found less than ideal. Sometimes she’d take the editorial suggestion; other times she would not. By no means was this a collaborative process. Nic's poems are all her own. My own role was—is—to provide the trusted feedback of another set of eyes, another pair of ears.
One interesting thing that happened as this process unfolded: my own aesthetic—heretofore generally formal, typically straightforward and non-elliptic, always concerned with usage and grammatical style, perhaps (dare I?) stuffy, even—changed. It opened. It widened. It evolved. This is what can happen when poets work together.
But the question is invariably raised, as perhaps it should be: what legitimizes this approach to publishing, the nanopress model as Nic has envisioned it? Does it need to be legitimized? Who says so? Who makes these rules? For—and let’s be honest—it doesn’t matter how spectacular the book, if it’s self-published it’s going to get a sneer or two. Why do we let the nay-sayers nay? Why do we care?
Let's face another few facts. It’s tricky to get a press to publish a book. There will always be more contest losers than there are winners. Even if you hook a press or win a prize, you may not have the level of control over the construction of the artifact of your book (its cover, font, size, overall design) you'd prefer to enjoy. And just because the one book gets published there is no guarantee the next one will. Why not, then, take the bull by it’s pointy, proverbial horns and make your own way, your own splash, your own place in the tight but complicated world that we as poets share? The benefits of having an outside editor are obvious. But what, I think, is less evident is what a good and solid and bold and purpose-fulfilling idea this is. An idea brimming with guts and moxie.
But: the poems. Nic Sebastian’s poems are not static. They move and they tremble. They dance and they shudder. They play both ends against the middle, and the middle is a sort of fight-back beast that no one’s ever seen, that few believe to exist. They are and are not rooted in place. While many of the poems are situated in physical locations, it is the geographies of the heart’s happiness (and, by obverse extent, its unhappiness) over which she rambles, in which she makes camp, upon which she plants a citizenry’s flag. The banner is her own. The I is lioness-strong and owns an owl’s ocular prowess. Thus, it is difficult to separate the author from these poems. How could one? Why would one? And who would want to?
Not I. Not I.
Jill Alexander Essbaum
December 2010
skin parts
under a blade
blood welling
is warm above
all things
fear nothing
not the broken-winged owl not
the black-haired child nor any kind
of moon
just say it:
forever will end
on Thursday
Sylhet
we sat high on elephants
in the Lawacherra rain forest
we watched a teak tree fall at dawn
these poems you write
what are they
you asked
we climbed hills braided
with fields of pineapple we walked
the lemon groves of Srimongol
they are some kind of trick
you said as we wandered
the tea gardens
we saw the white bleeding
of rubber trees the great tumble
of the falls at Madhabkunda
will you answer me
you asked
and when I fell asleep
on the road to Chittagong
you covered me with your jacket
and held my hand
they labor in sweating cells
in midnight under the city
they glide cowled past each other
their eyes never meet and each
hugs the stain of his own recipe
against the roiling scars of his body
there is no talk in the catacombs
just the stink and boil
of a thousand cauldrons
the glue-makers infuse
rank ingredients won
in appalling ways
for hours they stir and test
and stir again
when the fire banks itself
when the hot ferment
stills to fretful murmur
the glue-makers anoint themselves
with blazing eyes
they don borrowed smiles
and rise into daylight
to hunt with baleful purpose
the clean of limb
the sound of sleep
the laughing
we will live forever!
we have birds
warm in our hands and rife
in the bushes they are nightingales
mere brown fistfuls
and small you think
but warm they are
warm
bird-throat pulses
against the sheet iron
of our skin bird-breast
lies soft
against the thorn
of our pointed will
bird-blood is redly
fragrant its splash
the scarlet bard of epics
we once knew but have
forgotten and bird-song
while it lasts
we price it
above rubies
vocation
he thought he was a monk wearing
brown wool wearing
silence
in sweet tenor on four
or five bronzed notes he knelt
on the polished stone
of what was not him but was
wholly him, he woke greatly
to the peal of bronzed
bells, spent his days in thrall
to an oboe
but in his dreams at midday the sun
dropped on him drenched him
in thick
butterscotch in whole blankets
of angry bees
what is it like living with your body
splayed your whole body
spread tense up to the thin wires
of your brown hair the all of you threaded
through the squirming loam
the itching seas of this
planet
a stick figure with pigtails and
squeaky voice runs back and forth
across your muscle across all your pitched
nerve calling in from Zinguinchor from
Dili blogging from Cali from
Baghdad exploding in chipmunk
outrage in small burning
agony
and you
keep the position taken swaying
like the first like the only
hammock
you ask why
I write of budding
spring and rising
sap would you rather I wrote
of razor wire and cold
scrubland
mother
the chiseled ivory of your sleeping
face your paper eyelids gliding
shut like
bricks in the wall
of your sleeping
face mother the deep miles
of night sky with no moon
the stars you gave out
so sparingly the ones that cost
so much the miles of
tundra the trudging and your pale
face turned up mother always
up to your own
moonless sky
the room bustles it throngs
with sharp heliconia in curved
orange chic with canna all
ostrich-feather pink and
fuchsia in somewhat
in between but what is the order
is there one in this humming
multitude what is this
hovering needled flitter
of metal green and crimson
that flashes here and suddenly
not there oh wait this is a dance
a careful cotillion
the birds glitter they probe
the flowers deliver
themselves like the nightingale
all soft breast against
heedless thorn
the birds drink
fleetingly but deep
hardly arrived
they are already gone
and the flowers
close on themselves drag slowly
home cradling a slight
new spark using
careful inside breath
to blow on it
would come and get us
if we didn’t go to bed
and stay there Theresa said
they float along at ground level
in white gowns with fire
between their hands
they eat dead bodies
all night
during the day they could be
anyone she said they are so good
at pretending
they could be tall Isaaka
glistening blue-black in
the vegetable garden chasing us
off carrot beds knocking down for us
the pinkest guava the ripest
mango
or hard-handed Theresa herself
smelling of wood-smoke wiping
noses on her apron telling bedtime
stories of Kintu the first
man of Nambi the first wife
they could be
our thin tired
mother tapping
her soft-boiled egg at breakfast
our square father mutely rehearsing
his jury plea for the week’s
court case
and so we went to bed and
stayed there
marveling
at their beautiful
subterfuge
all of them just waiting
for floating white night for fire
between their hands
and the rich taste
of dead bodies
she came to us in spring
from the city
grandmother said
she needed rest
she was like
a ribbon a
tree sprite like winter
mornings
she did not speak
stevie and I showed her
the horses
the cherry orchard
and the ten acre field
it spread out thick
and choppy
at our feet
a dark soil sea grandfather
had just ploughed
she pricked up
like a collie’s ear she stood
at its edge in her
thin dress and
breathed that soil
in
she looked like a hostage
selkie she looked
sick
and grieving
I told stevie we should
not leave her alone with
the ten acre
but that afternoon
he came hurtling home alone
and big-eyed
she just took off her dress and
dived in he said she dived right into
the soil
Leviticus 25:35
you are a stranger
from fire-raped country
my gaze alone is tearless
before the twist
of your scorched skin
you say I am your sister but no brother
ever clenched a sister in such arms
from such dry hot sleep
you rear awake in thirst from thick linens
turn on the wellsprings of my body and suck
as if to end all moisture
we are well my brother
for the heat of your grasp
speaks the blistered name
of my thirst
charcoal man
when charcoal man married
ice cream lady he hoped
for smoothness and
melting
she hoped for backlit clarity
and a boldly-drawn world
their early confections were
charming: chic charcoal
whorls upon thick vanilla
ice-tinted dollops
on chiseled obsidian
charcoal man introduced ice cream lady
to charcoal lore
Lascaux Roufignac
Rembrandt Degas there is
freedom you cannot draw
fine lines with charcoal
he told her in long evenings
of his lives as an artist’s medium
as an adsorber
and there is
adsorption he said for which
the use of poison gas in war
created an urgent need
but he did not tell her
of him the first pile of wood
covered with damp dirt
and set on slow fire
so it was a hot it was a searing
surprise to the iced lady
when he said
stand back!
the temperature rose
and ice cream lady stood back
but not far enough
there is a crack
in the green moor edged
with white limestone
the air it breathes
out is cool it is
earth fresh and you may
tunnel through it
in breathing darkness to deep
basin caves which are
theaters of mime in gold-brown
rock which have mounds
fantastic built drop
by limestone drop over
eons and when your thought
stands back thousands
of years you see
this roiling stone
cavescape is cover for ancient
catastrophe for gargantuan
rock-fall
the bleeding and the moan now
stilled the splinters
smoothed and high
many feet high
above your head there is another
earth-crack and the sky is blue
and on the moor a lark
is singing
Dartmoor
in June we lolled
in heather in bright gorse my head
on your chest
you read to me my cosseted
ear heard your inside
voice all the voices
of your nerves listened
to the sun heat
your bones listened to it simmer
your blood which was
my blood heard your breath
heard you drop the book
and there you were all over me
dragging open the buttons of my shirt
my shorts your burning fingers
fighting with my bootlaces
swearing hot golden curses
and I all pliant with orange eyelids
on the open moor listening
to the choir of your breathing
and the skylarks and the sweet purple heather
crushing itself against my cheek
jade lamps flare
in her eyes when she looks at him
he draws weeks of living strength from a single hour
by her side on the jungle trail
his hand warm on the black
silk of her shoulder blades
while she hunts
but he has a day job so they move
from the jungle to his semi-detached
bungalow with one bedroom and
a fireplace
she fills the rooms with
the engine of her purr and the
pouring movement of her cat
muscles she curls richly
around him
but the house is small
and one night they quarrel
a spitting green arc scorches
the sky above the house
she bursts
through the wall shedding splintered glass
and shattered brick along
the driveway leaves him hurled
and crumpled by the empty fireplace
clawed lacerations oozing deep
in his chest
while he heals she runs
the jungle trails alone
they live plaintive lives apart and watch night
after night the same thick moon
hang sluggish and too low
in the sky
until one day he sells
the bungalow and builds
a tree house with an internet connection
ninety feet above the ground
she climbs to him after the hunt and enters
the tree house at night with the jungle
breeze she pours
the black silk of herself her flaring
jade eyes through the open window
she rubs her head against the thick
scars on his chest
and they sleep long hours
on the engine of her purr
high among the trees
with the fruit bats
and the fireflies
where the hot earth was red
the juniper berries thick
in angled blue
she said they should go higher
to the white aspens to their shimmered
leaf spells but he said
wait
they became thirsty but
wait he said
she broke forth in a hot night
mad with thirst for hill
height and leaner air
a new gape carved the air
at his back and he dreamt
thickly among the junipers
of the green rustle the liquid tremor
of the aspens
oboe
you are the beauty of bound
reed or better
numen’s breath passing
through reed into African
blackwood or better
shaman’s fingers on silver
keys you are
oboe
and I the heart drawn
behind you out of body
up spiraled paths into
purple hills and
flayed alone
in chill wind
on a hilltop this is
what I do
for you
are oboe
Dougga
do you remember the Roman remains
at Dougga do you remember
the olive hills of Tunisia all
bright air and luminous
like holy water after the fonts
are emptied for Good Friday
and filled again for Sunday
do you remember
how we argued through
the olive grove and
the Baths how you folded
your arms and leaned
against the Doric column
in the Capitol and I collapsed
laughing at how little you looked
next to Jupiter and how you chased me
under the arch of Septimius Severus
all the way to the temple of Juno
and caught me there
and when all your body pushed at me
against the marble wall of that temple
all your body was somehow
crying and a sharp bitter thing just
evaporated that was what happened to us
in the hills
at Dougga
that I could rear so high and bite
your head off your shoulders like
puffed corn that I could grab
your life like some
shirt from the dryer snap
shake out your life fold it so
small drop it off so
easily at the thrift store
striding by
on my high long legs
headed
for Jupiter
we live where they come from
the brown air of our country
rattles
our mountains are gray with
sleeping our babies born
without ears
let us hang our harps
on the willow close in
among ourselves and ask
is there nowhere some slight
fallen spark we may carefully
blow upon
your dry hands push me hard
through thick layers
of swamp weed and
muskrat they assault me
with blasts of amber
and nightjar song
with the slipping wind dance
of sand dunes
your hands ply me
with cicada-thrum with aloof
Amaretto and a lonely oboe
in the hills
tell me again why you call these things
evidence
you left me where the dark twists
a small shoulder blade in one hand a set
of eyelashes in the other
they were sky-cut fresh like the silver chain
of high laughter in my pocket
and the squirming fairy bones
under my arm
in bending hoops of night
I put them down
carefully one
by one
I walk out and here I am again
putting them down carefully one
by one walking out
carefully here I am
again
she would joyfully
hack off her legs with
an axe for yours gouge out
her eyes with a fork
for yours but just now
she would like to go
mad throw herself
out of the hospital
window howl all the way
down anything
to stop all of this any
of this but because you ask
the way you asked
when you were six
she makes slow
mommy circles
on your burning boy’s
forehead with
her fingertip and sings to you
through pitched
throat through churning
knives in her chest she sings
to your cracked lips and bandaged
eyes your hard white
arms held motionless up
high she sings to the flat plain
of the sheet below
your knees
(The Albanian nun Teresa received Indian citizenship on 14 December, 1951. The official order granting citizenship stipulated simply that her name be removed from India’s List of Foreigners.)
the wanderer learns quickly
that in all places there are no lists
of those who belong, only lists
of those who don’t
members of the order
of strangers
and interlopers do not speak
when they pass each other in dim
mountain passes, on rope bridges
above the abyss
they bless each other silently
through bitter winds:
may your name be removed
from the list of foreigners
the goddess
is portly
but not made of balsa wood
last night, it rained slightly
around her
the land and his skin dry
upon him, the man approaches
with a basket of polished seed
from harvests past
he kneels and offers the basket
he inhales deeply, scenting
the breath of damp
from wood that is not balsa
she crushes the basket
with her foot
the man
retreats under thunder
to his cave and that night
twenty years of rain
fall before moonrise
the rising waters wake him
and he wades to the cave mouth
she shoots past
floating like balsa
the waters take him
and together, they flail
the child
unfolds on a sandbar
from the pulsing pile
of them, she totters
after a humming bird
what happened to cousin harriet
she pitched her tent
among the aspens
in spring
they shimmered
in hundreds
around her
she sat in their midst
as in the palm
of a many-fingered hand
all aspens are one tree
in May tall men emerged
from among the Douglas firs
and carried her away
when all was quiet again
the deer came
has a grappling hook
and a coil of rope
she wears them over her shoulder
when she goes to work
she gives us fifty kisses
anchors her grappling hook off our
bedroom window and climbs
over the sill in her big
adventure boots and her black
adventure watch with a compass and she
rappels away bouncing
and gliding down the side
of the world
we look out the window
down the rope
a lot but she always
surprises us she climbs in
at night and wakes us like a moon
on fire and daddy comes in frowning with
sticking up hair he says
it’s late and it’s
a school night but he wants
to dance around her too
the shoulder blades under your skin are like the white
thread moon in the afternoon sky over
Naivasha when the ring doves descended
on clapping wings to take seed from your hand
and you were not afraid
your upper lip is the high violin
under bridges of Prague that drew all
sadness to the top of us and pulled us after still
as if it the moon and we
some spellbound tide
how do I speak of the sweep of your eyelashes
when you sleep they are like the opal reaching
of the midday tide on the beach at Tunis
when your brother buried you in the sand and your laughter
fell popping about us like bright green
carnival beads
that you are not here
is the raw black stench
left by wildfire at Suva
and the smoke
and the dying birds
this is the box I leave to you
it is of olive wood and has you grinning
and monster-leaping on me then us
tight-wrestling on the floor your squirming
feather bones and my square
growling ones muffling
your laughter it has our best stories Ferdinand
Swimmy The Berenstein Bears and you
being a shark me being a shark
in the pool on Saturday in
the sun gnashing our teeth your
laughter falling around me like
pearls it has me rubbing the boy-silk
of your back at eight o’clock
on school nights singing Brahms’ Wiegenlied over
and over and the poem you wrote my mom
smelz like hot cookies she feels mushy I love her
these are the things in the box
I leave to you which carries all the purple
pansies of my love and my honor to you
as you were as you are now as I shall not
have known you
places of happiness
my daughter asks about Colombia
and I tell her Bogotá in autumn
is drizzle and tramlines until
the Candelaria
where the streets become
warm stone they tighten
against cars and all the high houses
have names
we are students under full moon
in October in the Candelaria I tell her
weaving edgy midnight
laughter through the Gregorian
chant of log fire
Luis Fernando’s silver eyes are from
volcano land they jump at me through cracks
in the fire in the
wine he would much like
that I should sit by him
the warm bones
of his Michelangelo hand
press into my cheek and he uses
the subjunctive
there are cumbias
we slow strut raise our arms as hippy
sexy cockerels for the music they play boleros
for pelvis languor
to pelvis flaring out of rum
and aguardiente out of musky
anise which is fire-water which is the name
of our flesh its hot
crawling impulses
tomorrow
we will descend from the mountains we will go
to Villavicencio
suddenly it is dawn and Luis Fernando
turns my face kisses the oval-square of my jaw
that bone of mine
enchants him he whispers while I mourn
I do not want that I should go but the taxi takes me
from the Candelaria back to Bogotá and
this October in this New York my student daughter
is watching me
she puts down her book she kneels
by my chair in her orange jeans
her crooked smile
is moonrise in the Candelaria
three provinces and their king
the seafarers
he is our king he is
sweet he sails
among us and draws rope
as we do gives many names to the sea
as we do
then he leaves us he goes up
to the mountains (we know nothing
of the mountains)
the mountain folk
he is our king he climbs
to us in snows and the eagle
names him as he names
our babies on the tableland
then he leaves us he goes down
to the plains
which are far from us
and not known
the plainsmen
he comes to us and walks
among cattle as we walk
the yellow grass
of the plains speaks
his name as it speaks ours he is our king
but he leaves us he goes out
to the sea which is wet and
storm-ridden and is not
what we know
the king
we have no wars
we have named
the sea the mountains
and the plains
the king’s mother
woe is
this kingdom
inside the baobab
lives a dark slender girl
dressed in drifting
moon-cloth who carries
a luminous bone dagger
upon which she has carved
many names
exquisitely
at her belt a bag of duiker skin
swells with the pulsing
prayers she has stolen
and kept
singing high
she rides as she pleases
upon the great winds
and through the light
she haunts the canopy
of the baobab tree
and at night bends
over your fevered
sleep to whisper:
ausculta, fili! I am
that to which nothing
may be preferred
her eyes are dark gold
as wild bee honey
and when she moves
little blood-beads fall
in scalding rows
from her prayer bag
and settle steaming
on the path behind her
what might stop him from walking out
into the soughing heat of his
savannah what might keep him
from its burning winds its
tricks its cozy
punishment
his feet are sewn to hot
trails only by wrenching by brute
ripping in his walk might he tear
into the blood table
would he fall then free
and bloody onto cold alien
steppe
the buck is beautiful but
so am I
and he is there
for me
as are that curving moon
and all the silver grass
of the plains
in a moment he will know me
our bounding hearts and churning
blood will spread the night
out like a season and we will
contemplate his death together
in detail in
grace
and I will bring the sweetness
of his death to my cubs
and the plains will name us
as we name the plains
Colorado
the toffee-eyed young man with fringes
on his leathers who rides an itching
chestnut filly as if he were a ribbon
knotted to her saddle is a wrangler
called Chance
he holds the filly in the tight braid
of a bosal rein because she wants to throw
him she bucks and curvets she
whirls and the arches
of her nostrils are like crescent
moons flashing silver through scudding night-time
storm clouds
the open place that happens like a gift
unwrapped when the trail emerges
from the pine forest is alpine meadow
thick blue with upright flowers
with dancing rows
of bottle-brush they are lupines and
larkspur the wranglers say you may not
dismount to pick them so you reach out
to pull a handful of needles and angled blue
berries from the scratching
bushes shaped like teardrops
through which the trail meanders
their smell is like the first Christmas
you remember and their name you learn is
juniper and as you ride over the meadow your horse snatches
wisping mouthfuls of silver-blue shrub the color
of your grandmother’s eyes the day she died
and it is sagebrush and so the day goes on
and the names roll in and the high bowl
of heaven you are riding through gives itself to you
a little more
with each name and at nightfall
at campfire when Chance passes you
the steaming enigma of egg coffee
in a tin mug and you lie back to watch the pearl rise
of Colorado mountain moon you know this place
is yours
if your friend gets teased
because she has red hair
you could write a poem
about how she is like bonfires
in the evening on the sand
when you are camping
in the desert and the sand
cools all the red sun
inside it and comes with
your toes into your sleeping
bag and escapes
from the tent like a bonfire
early before your parents
wake and the morning sea
roars like bright red hair
and you could read it
to the class here is
a poem for my friend
with the red hair you could say
a poem for my friend
we have an orchard in the sun
with six hundred olive trees
and an olive mill, our trees
are centuries old
we have named our trees, we walk
frowning among them
draw our fingers across singing
ridges of ancient olive bark
our skin watches for harvest time
with the moon, we shake
the olive fruit carefully from our trees
and carry it to the granite stones
of our mill and when we have ground
our year of olives into rich paste
and spread it on the straw mats
of our press, we watch it engender
a slow green-gold with the sun inside it
the hiss of pepper, a thrumming
of butter and the taste
of tart grass and cold appled fruit
the brimstone butterfly
the brimstone butterfly
although she is solid
and brown like burnished
tamarind seed
and the brimstone butterfly
is pale lemon and
mist green with fairy veins
in its wings and a shimmer
like leaf-tremor
the sun shines
through its wings and you think they are
just leaves when you are walking by seeing
just leaves
but something stops you after
you have passed and makes you go
back and bend your face
close to see the pale yellow-green
butterfly among leaves
which is not a leaf
Sarah moves with tall boys
who have bonfire hair and blue
suits or gray eyes and butterscotch
hair she moves with them from meeting
to meeting and she is like the brimstone
butterfly among leaves people don’t see her and
don’t see her then suddenly they stop
after they have passed they come
back and bend their face close
to see the butterfly
which is not a leaf
Sarah used to kick
the furniture over being a brimstone
butterfly but now she finds it good she finds it
restful for the boys to lead
the meeting she hopes
they lead it right so she does not have to put it
right and make people stop
to look at the butterfly who is not a leaf because
sometimes now Sarah just wants
to be a leaf
Rajshahi
what
land of crawling
green of rain winding
water and ancient
tree life what
are you saying I will listen first
to the banyan for the banyan breaks
my heart growing old as it does in thick
high grace on the banks
of the Padma gripping
tight as it does the soil
of Rajshahi against the swirl the
gray-brown leak
of monsoon
flood what then
of the rice fields the luminous green song
of the rice fields and the girl
in the orange sari
working in bright single
grace a lonely
knife in all the wide green shimmer
of the Nawabganj
rice fields
and when I walk
in the jade rustle the deep
shade of the Chandipur
mango groves the swelling
of my heart is surely
audible for these trees call the names
of people I have known in voices
older than any dream
of Paradise and the scent of the fozli
mango blossom on the wind
aches like sharp questions like many
sharp questions of the kind
posed by God
so cool inside
the mango tree
soaring leaf dome
wired for jade rustle
rough bark knobs
sweet along my back
fugitive suns
burst through my eyelids
mango juice drips
off my fingers
the universe
sways with the breeze
I step into the heat
as into a dress
the sun fits me, it is
my size
and the heat is
face-shaped
I move through it
tightly, in state in
slow motion, sailing
reef-eyed, hearing breath
the color of amber the color
of prayer
how silent is the heat, how long
the voyage
I will anchor here
in all the yellow grass of the plains, here
in the thick mutter
of brown soil
twenty years she spoke
spare speech
in the desert twenty years
wearing white garments
as skin
forgetting
the liquid syllables
of home the moist onslaught
of sea wind
on naked skin
but when a place is your place
it tucks itself into you
prickingly
tattoo ink stigmata
and the ink is alive
and your tattoo sleeps it
sleeps then it
wakes
and the singing ink
reminds you
your place in red ache
is still calling
(on the sea wall again
her bare body drank
it drank and she said bless me
for I have sinned)
homecoming
I will return one day a peddler
all hung about with winking boxes
in each a sweet thing will nestle -
a fragrant salt color, a talking
blue smell
on Fourth and Main at Sarah’s
the neighbors will mutter
we knew she would come to no good
but my father will hire a brass band
here is my daughter he will announce
in his purple bay leaf voice
reasons
because your eyes feel furrowed
and green-brown
like farmland in spring because your voice trails
the scent of cedar trees in June
because your fingers whispering on my skin
taste like mulled wine before Christmas
and my tongue feathering yours
hears an Easter oboe
because you smell of old gold
and orange and Friday afternoon because I listen
for the red fragrance of palm blood and weep
its warm splash
april
I woke from my nap and heard the goldfish whistling
I got up and pressed my face to the glass
goldfish I said please stop
it unpuckered its tiny orange lips but didn’t stop whistling
I went outside and a warm
blanket of bees fell upon me
that’s it I said
but the thrumming crept
into my ears like dormice
and you threw a bucket of sun over me
and I became so bright
I closed my eyes
I will have a party and invite
Thursday for Thursday has glossy
black hair and a ticket
to Istanbul
I will invite the road to
Nizwa which is snaking and wears
skirts of orange silk embroidered
with humming birds I will invite
your birthday which is a green perfume
opening with bright citrus its notes are
bergamot its notes are moss it dances
bolero and the guests
of honor at my party will be
your years to come they will offer me
bowing deeply
cinnamon twigs and fire
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the journals in which these poems first appeared, sometimes in earlier versions:
charcoal man, Mannequin Envy
first grade activist, Mannequin Envy
homecoming, River Walk Journal
the mango tree, Blue Fifth Review
the olive farmer, Valparaiso Poetry Review
the party, Anti-
homesteader, Dead Mule of Southern Literature
mother wolf, Autumn Sky Poetry
our mother, Salt River Review
baobab girl, Salt River Review
the glue-makers’ guild, Shit Creek Review
april, Shit Creek Review
we were ten, Eclectica
what happened to cousin harriet, Eclectica
what is broken, qarrtsiluni
underlie, Avatar Review
vocation, The Adroitly Placed Word
you never thought, The Adroitly Placed Word
the night dancers, The Adroitly Placed Word
places of happiness (Dougga), Lily
poem for mother’s day, The Dirty Napkin
proper to darkness, Soundzine
song for my son, Soundzine
reasons, Loch Raven Review
places of happiness (Sylhet), Hobble Creek Review
places of happiness (Candelaria), Dark Sky Magazine
savannah man, Tongues of the Ocean
three provinces and their king, Tongues of the Ocean
oboe, Tongues of the Ocean
she came home suddenly, Tongues of the Ocean
the jungle and the bungalow, Poetry Friends
the soil maiden, Poetry Friends
family portrait, Words Myth
places of happiness (Dartmoor), Words Myth
we have no need of prophets, Words on the Web
thirst and decay, Escape Into Life
cocktail reception, Escape Into Life
they met among the junipers, Escape Into Life
the wanderers' blessing, Escape Into Life
Nic Sebastian hails from Arlington, Virginia and travels widely. Her work has appeared in numerous online poetry journals. She blogs at Very Like A Whale and is the founding editor and voice of the audio poetry journal and audio chapbook publisher Whale Sound. She is also the founder of its companion website, Voice Alpha, which discusses anything related to the art of reading poetry aloud for an audience.
The editor
Jill Alexander Essbaum is the author of three full length collections of poetry: Heaven (winner of the 1999 Bakeless Prize), Harlot (2007, No Tell Books), and Necropolis (2008, NeoNuma Arts). Her most recent publication is a single poem chapbook, The Devastation (2009, Cooper Dillon Books). A former NEA literature fellow, Jill’s poems have appeared in many journals. Her poem “Apologia” was chosen for the 2010 edition of The Best American Poetry. Currently she is at work on a novel and a fourth collection of poetry. Jill lives in Austin, Texas, and teaches in the UCR Palm Desert Low Residency MFA program.
The photographer
The cover photograph, entitled Life, is by Paula Grenside. Paula is a poet and a digital artist. Both in poetry and art she loves exploring what lies beyond reality and this often results in a surreal vision. More of her work can be found here.