MANYTHING BY Dan Raphael, reviewed by Hex'm Jai

Dan Raphael, a la Dr. Moreau or Dr. Frankenstein, has brought life to a creature of many facets (It’s Alive! ALIVE!!!!)! Through dense verse that is riddled with detail we are given wolves with a taste for quarter pounders and cashiers (A Wolf Walks into a McDonald’s), caustic visual symphonies derived from living (Living Downtown) and translucent sonic Kaiju summoned from the trans dimensional musical arts/sciences as perfected by Jimi Hendrix (If Jimi Hadn’t Died So Young).

Dan has expertly employed various poetic tools to bring this beast to life: Stream of consciousness, sensual synesthesia, prose poem – free verse hybrid forms and even fractal geometry (So Many Swift Fingers)! All of these and more culminating to create this beatific monster who certainly possesses traces of Beat and Dada DNA.  Disjointed!?!  One would think, but Dan has been artful in his fusion of elements.  It is through these techniques, slices of life, observations, critiques and musings that Manything has become an omnibus for existence.

So, now that many of us free to travel and explore, don’t go alone.  Whether you’re going pool side, park side, beach side, mountainside, East side, West side, on the road, on the bus, on the train, on a plane or just on the couch bring a friend.  Manything could be your trusty travel companion full of pocket dimensions!

Available at Amazon via Unlikely Books:

So Many Swift Fingers 

obscurity is not a virtue where alternative islands & lakes 

harness the monster curves of watershed trees, 

fudge-flake dragons sweep up the fractal hills 

curdling whey streams like the blazing sky effect of an agglutinated universe 

cuts diamonds into stars whose cloudy wake defines intermittent turbulence. 

jets flying through mammalian brain folds percolating clusters 

tame gargantuan knots while sponges & foam split snowflake halls 

into the very substance of our flesh, the lungs bronchial trees 

spread apollonian nets & osculating soap where pragmatic chance, 

from recursive to random, ferments sponge coastlines airport strips & tribology 

in brownian emotion conceives a cup on the devil’s terrace, 

a birth process of unforced clustering & cirraform fi laments in predisturbed lakes. 

the invariant translation of river’s failure to run straight, avoid polygons 

& discontinue prices as lexicographic trees take the temperature of discourse 

into a curdled effective dimension

><><><><

we go past the immeasurable to what language can barely 

de-obscure enough to distort through the door in my belly 

as i build the stamina to run my intestinal track, 

a personal best between meals without galoshes 

keeps me from sneaking up on angel-headed hipsters worshipping the visible woman, 

knowing which neurons to fondle & which to numb with cold drink. 

64 doorbells with legible names i recognize none of: my ancestors were thrown off ellis island & could only swim down, where the garbage was so dilute, the fi sh so plentiful you could read by their 

fluorescent eggs 

clouding my antigravity hair like radioactive mosquitoes too generous to die without 

fallout.

as i open the bottle a bone pops, a radius becomes a hemline 

exposing the green palouse of my multiple thighs. 

                                                                                          dinner was half an hour from here, 

we’d drained the biodiesel to make a hundred pounds of french fried curios— 

whatever we could catch, whatever wasn’t thick with feathers or excuses. 

the darkest hour is just before my pancreas’s naps, sending hundreds of photon-sized 

pigeons 

to every antenna too lazy to change frequencies. 

                                                                                         i put half a lake in this balloon 

><><><><

when i begin to taste the mass of stars, the many times more i can’t see, 

                                                            their potential solar & eco systems, 

my skin wants to separate into blazing molecules deaf to gravity, 

my bones with nothing to hold together but nowhere else to go. 

the beginnings of rivers escape from me, & the beginnings of radio stations, 

with every transmission we apart, as these cliff ’s pasts effects the echo— 

                                                                                               loudest 1st, susurrant infections. 

the holographic landscapes inside each flea from all she’s consumed & copied. 

i get an unmarked jar from the basement & eat whatever’s in it, 

sky full of woven, cloud shadows falling like sanskrit birds i’ll never see again 

folding their wings into their bellies before their thousand messengers disperse 

                                       (Many of the words and phrases in the 1st section come from Mandelbrot’s 

                                       The Fractal Geometry of Nature)

 

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, schooled at Cornell University, Bowling Green State University, and Western Washington University, Dan Raphael’s been active in the Northwest for 4 decades as poet, performer, publisher and reading host. He is the author of 20 other published poetry collections, including Everyone in This Movie Gets Paid (Last Word Press, Olympia, Washington), The State I’m In (nine muses books, Winston, Oregon), and Impulse & Warp: The Selected 20th Century Poems (Wordcraft of Oregon, La Grande, Oregon). Dan lives in Portland with his wife Melba and over 400 plant varieties. Retired after 33 years working for the Oregon DMV, he spends non-poetry time practicing electric bass and tai chi, brewing and drinking beer, and every Wednesday he writes and records a current events poem for the KBOO Evening News.

GAS Featured Poet: Kevin M. Hibshman

Kevin M. Hibshman has had his poetry, prose, reviews and collages published around the world, most recently in Punk Noir Magazine, Rye Whiskey Review, Piker Press, The Crossroads, Drinkers Only, 1870, Synchronized Chaos, Yellow Mama, Unlikely Stories Mark V, Literary Yard, Lothlorien Poetry Journal and Medusa's Kitchen. He has edited his own poetry journal, FEARLESS for the past thirty years. He has authored sixteen chapbooks, including Incessant Shining (2011, Alternating Current Press).He received a BA in Liberal Arts from Union University/Vermont College in 2016. A new book, Just Another Small Town Story will be available from Whiskey City Press in 2021.

trees through the fog

i feel it

a faint tremor

your calling

stirring in my heart chambers

dreamscape of rising mist

roused gently from falling

into soft sleep by a sudden stillness as

something brushes across my cheek

wind cushioning the collapse of reason

i throw open the door in mild distress

anticipation

a hint of dread

finds me running wet

through sodden leaves 

you had promised that you would find me

i cannot see any form yet when i pause

i can hear you breathe

rippling

like water

like mystery imparting a glow

to the fog between the trees

Meteor Shower

It was in the meteor shower that night.

The skies were bright with objects ablaze.

I had such wonderful dreams.

Little alien things whirling and whizzing by.

Ah, youth!

You saw it, too!

I asked you to believe.

They wanted me to.

Mirror universe.

Flexible dimensions.

One swirling, sophisticated, holographic spasm?

It was in the music.

Precise and patterned.

A signal.

A Wake-up call.

I sang it as we swept drunkenly down the halls to sleep.

It has followed me through the years.

Calls to me now:

“Love the mystery even if it turns out to be merely an illusion.”

There are no limits to the imagination.

In the realm of infinite possibilities,

There can be no finite conclusions.

The Thing That Keeps Me From You

Is it politics?

Is it preference?

Is it the pigment of our skin?

Is it science?

Is it religion?

Is it some antiquated concept of grace and sin?

Is it fact?

Is it fiction?

Is it just more inane bullshit?

Someone's uninformed opinion?

Is it language?

Is it geography?

I'd like to believe it is only conquerable distance

GAS Featured Poet: Thomas Graves

Thomas Graves was born in Hawaii and grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, attending the Dalton School. He has a Masters in English from Iowa. He adapted and wrote music for Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" for The Childrens Theater at Tufts University. He read his poems at a poetry festival in Romania in 2016. His book Ben Mazer and the New Romanticism was published in 2021. He is the editor of Blog Scarriet. 

THE FISH

As a boy I learned to accept the fishes’ death.
On fishing trips with my grandfather I silently hoped the fish
Would live.  After a long drive from the lake,

When the trunk was opened,
The pickerels would still be breathing,
Their gills quivering in the murderous air.
I sensed my grandfather’s indifference;
My sorrow brooded without sound on my lips.

The pity I felt
for the fish who solemnly lazed in streams,
Inscrutable monsters who lived in the flood!
My pity moved against me like a flood,
Weakening everything but memory,
Death disguised in dreams,
Dreams of dream lakes, peering within.

Fishing in dreams, fish
Of strange dimensions, the writhing
Of colors hidden partially by the dark.

Before I learned to fish, when sex
Was only something disguised in dreams,
I dreamed of two creatures,
One fat, one long, fighting to the death
In a wooden container of water, barely large enough to hold them.

I founded my religion in a pond.
You could see a boy hunched over on summer days
Salamanders hiding in the slime.

I feared for the safety of worms
We used for bait.  Fish devoured worms, and so I felt
Less pity for fish, and then less pity for all.

I stood frozen once, when I saw a minnow
In the mouth of a snake.

Does anyone know what anything is just before it happens?
I remember feeling sex for the first time.
Poetry hinted at sex; sounds of words
Saying what was underlying, 

Here’s the brook, the forest, the hungry trout,
The dream of sex which is not sex,
The hungry sweetness of desire,
The sunlight, the mist, the mad-life child.

You returned from the woods with your books,
You brought your books back; poetry failed you;
Poetry in books was too full of silences.

Sex, the adolescent feeling sex,
Suddenly coming for the first time
While just lying on the bedroom floor, alone;
You live with it, marry it,
It keeps you company,
And poetry, lying before you in piled books,
Becomes your companion too.

If we could get back
To the dream of sex which is not sex,
The meadow, the arms, the face,
The whispers, the explanations, mother, father,
Brother, sister, the conquering, the sand,
The water, the coughing, the poetry;
The light just above you as you look up;
You’re a fish, swimming towards him,
The boy in the boat with his grandfather;
He is listening to his grandfather tell a joke;

You will interrupt, you will startle the line;
You will be pulled up on the boat;
You will die; you will die, slowly,
And the boy will no longer know what to think.
But the idea was to die for him.
The idea was to save his life.

LONGFELLOW PARK

That summer we were devoted to baseball
And counted dexterity highest of all things.
Under high trees we learned what we could do on our feet
With the wiffle ball---make it soar or run and with its curve
Baffle both the left handed and the right handed batter.

Our umpire was the venerable Henry Wadsworth Longfellow;
On Brattle Street in Cambridge,  Longfellow's house stands,
Between it and the Charles River, Longfellow Park;
A dozen stone steps on either side descending to the river
Frame a monument fifteen feet high, featuring the bust

Of Longfellow, with his fictions carved in low-relief
On the wall behind him; the base on which his bust sits
Is a pedestal forming a strike zone perfect in width,
The wall a fine back-stop to the field of play, formed by
A three foot stone wall enclosing the infield, lamposts

Perfect foul poles just beyond the short wall's two corners;
Three stone steps opposite the statue twenty feet away
Lead to the grass outfield and a curved path: homerun.
Two is all that's needed; one bats, one pitches.
Singles need to clear the three foot stone wall,

Doubles are any hit which hits an outfield tree on the fly,
Triples those hits which on a fly strike the distant path,
Homeruns those which clear the path, sixty feet away.
Home is the vertical area behind the batter,
Under Henry's beard.  He watched the called balls and strikes

We threw against his pedestal all summer.  My fastball
Was okay, but then I changed speeds---she'd lunge at the ball
Before its anticipated arrival; that was the change-up,
My best pitch.  She threw hard and learned a spot
Where I just couldn't hit it and threw it there all day;

She shut me out once; we'd play nine innings
And we took it seriously.  We fell in love with the game;
We hated to stop when tourists came by to peek at Henry,
Or when it rained, or grew dark, or when lovers
Were there ahead of us, sighing in our perfect field.

THE GIRL AQUARIUM by Jen Campbell, reviewed by Ren Powell

Reading this collection, I began to question the definition of surrealism. The leaping images in Jen Campbell's poems in The Girl Aquarium seem at times more playfully associative than Freudian. These poems make the wild, imaginative connections of childhood’s make-believe worlds. Though at times they allude to a darker kind of fairy tale than any I've ever read. 

Reading through once, for the individual poems, the collection compels me to read again to find all of the details of the narrative, to understand and fully embrace the brokenness and the strength of these girls with equal appreciation.

The collection includes free verse, "formal" verse like list poems and prose poems, and Campbell is a master of utilising internal rhymes and assonance when referencing fairy tales.

From The Doll Hospital: 

My mother claimed I had changeling feet
dancing in dirt water         pulling a ragged doll
through fairy rings when she summoned me home for tea.

I cup my palms. 

Little fishling.
I wonder if we should roll her hair like starfish.
Watch it flicker the colour of raspberry-plum. 

We hum, take turns.                  Pirouette
her little body so her organs align like marbled planets. 

While five of Campbell’s poems are so rooted in the culture of Northern England they are written in dialect, they hit close to home for this reader. The freak shows and sides shows that conjure up Coney Island and the stained, canvas tents at county fairs across the American heartland. The Girl Aquarium isn’t difficult to imagine: 

At half-term the aquarium is at its busiest.
They hire street vendors to come inside and hand out beer.
Candy floss for the kids whose parents don’t care.
The corridors heave with barbecue.
Too damp to strike a match. […]

In the feeding room: girls with extra limbs.
They scuttle into corners, pretend they’re shy.
In the sunroom: girls with beetle eyes.
Iris headbands blinding
at all the mobile phones.

Hashtag girls.
Hashtag half-girls.
Hashtag nothing you’ve ever seen before in your tiny little life. 

A teenage boy bangs the window, gives them the finger.

This collection conjures up the all too familiar atmospheres of xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny… 

From What the Bearded Lady Told Me:

That between her legs is volcanic.
That men are terrified.
That she loves how terrified they are.
That she likes the sea.

And zoanthropy. Here is a world-full of woman forced into a half-creature existence. From The Woman’s Private Looking Glass: 

Take the physician’s advice. 

Forget imagination and do not look straight at the moon.
Up there devil-girls cradle silver eggs. They slide
from roller coaster innards, trickle tales
of the greats. 

Leda, Lilith, Sirin — all owl-chested women. 

 And do not peer into the sea; for there salted-tadpoles twist around your organs and turn your body into stone. 

This collection was so painful to read, so familiar and so fantastical that I sit back and wonder now how I ever negotiated—much less survived—being a girl. But there is more here. The poetry is infused with the poet’s personal experience with very real physical disabilities. This knowledge forces the reader to interrogate the poems further. The reader has to question the limitations of empathy with regard to experience, has to explore the boundaries between metaphor and metonymy—and even the literal. 

These poems left room for me to find myself within the pages. But then they also pulled me out of myself entirely, which is what great poetry does. 

Jen Campbell

JEN CAMPBELL grew up in the northeast of England, and graduated from Edinburgh University with an MA in English Literature. She is an established writer of children books and short stores, but The Girl Aquarium is her first poetry collection, published by BloodAxe books in 2019. She has a YouTube channel where she talks about (not surprisingly) fairytales and disfigurement. Her website is jen-campbell.co.uk. Her book is available through Bloodaxe and Amazon.

From The Vault: Rainer Maria Rilke, presented by Matthew Bowers

Rainer Maria Rilke 1875-1926 

"I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”  In his time Rainer Maria Rilke was considered one of the greatest German lyric poets of his day. He became famous with such works as Duineser Elegien and Die Sonette an Orpheus. They both appeared in 1923. 

He created the 'object poem' as an attempt to describe with absolute detail and clarity, physical objects. He called it the 'silence of their concentrated reality'. 

Rainer was born in Prague as the son of Josef Rilke and Sophie Entz. A particular fact that was important in the developmental years of Rilke's life was that his mother called him Sophia. She forced him to wear girl's clothes until he was five years old, allegedly compensating for the earlier loss of her previous baby daughter. Rilke's parents separated when he was nine. 

As a poet Rilke made his debut at the age of nineteen (1894), his style of writing similar to Heinrich Heine (a German poet, writer and literary critic). In Munich he met the Russian intellectual Lou Andreas-Salome, who was an older woman who deeply influenced him. She was a Russian-born psychoanalyst and a well-traveled author, narrator, and essayist. In Florence, where he spent some months in 1898, Rilke wrote: "I felt at first so confused that I could scarcely separate my impressions, and thought I was drowning in the breaking waves of some foreign splendor." 

While Rilke was with Lou Andreas-Salome and her husband, Rilke travelled through Russia in 1899. Here he visited Leo Tolstoy, among other authors. Rilke was deeply impressed by what he learned of Russian mysticism and he focused passionately on seeking truth; he found that one must go through all kinds of suffering to finally break through into Love and Light. During this period he started to write The Book of Hours: The Book of Monastic Life, which appeared in 1905. 

In Letters to a Young Poet (1929) which he wrote from 1903 to 1908, Rilke explained, that "nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether you would have to die if it denied you to write." Quite a powerful sentiment for sure. 

Rilke had married the young sculptress, Klara Westhoff in 1901. She had been one of Auguste Rodin's pupils. François Auguste René Rodin was a French sculptor generally considered the founder of modern sculpture. Rilke and Klara had a daughter, Ruth, but marriage lasted only one year. During this period Rilke composed in rhymed, metered verse, the second part of The Book of Hours. At this time he was expressing his spiritual interests and beliefs. After Rilke had separated from Klara, he settled in Paris to write a book about Rodin and to work for his secretary from 1905-06. 

In the Spring of 1906, an overworked Rilke left Rodin and revised his work Das Buch der Bilder, publishing it in an enlarged edition. He also wrote The Tale of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke. The poem recounts the adventures of Christopher Rilke, who traveled with a company of soldiers and then, after a night in a castle with a lover, fought and died in a war in Turkey and is mourned by an old woman. This release became a very popular success. While in Paris during this time, Rilke developed a new style of lyrical poetry. After Neue Gedichte: New Poems (1907-08, )came a notebook named Die Aufzechnungen des Malte Laurdis Brigge (1910), his most important prose work to that point. It took the form of a series of semi autobiographical spiritual confessions but written by a Danish migrant in Paris. 

Rilke took a hiatus as a poet for twelve years before writing Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, which are concerned with "the identity of terror and bliss" and "the oneness of life and death". Duino Elegies was developed in two bursts of inspiration which was separated by ten years off. According to a story, Rilke heard in the wind the first lines of his elegies when he was walking on the rocks above the sea - "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?" 

Rilke visited his friend Princess Marie von Thurnun Taxis in 1910 at Duino, her remote castle on the coast of the Adriatic, and returned again next year. There he started to compose the poems, and the work proceeded easily. Then after serving in the army, Rilke was afraid that he would never be able to finish the writings, but finally in 1922 he completed Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies) in a chateau in Muzot, Switzerland.  

In the philosophical poems Rilke meditated on time and eternity, life and death, art versus the ordinary. His tone conveyed melancholy. Rilke believed in the coexistence of the material and spiritual realms, but "human beings were for him only spectators of life, grasping its beauties momentarily only to lose them again. And with the power of creativity an artist can try to build a bridge between two worlds, although the task is almost too great for a man." The work deeply influenced such poets as Sidney Keyes, Stephen Spender, Robert Bly, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, and W.H. Auden, who had Rilkean angels appear in the collection In Times of War (1939). 

In 1913 Rilke returned to Paris, but he was forced to return to Germany due to the coming of the First World War as part of the Austrian army. Duino Castle was bombed to ruins and Rilke's personal property was confiscated in France. After 1919 he lived in Switzerland, writing and gardening. From time to time he went to Paris or Italy for a few months. Rilke's companion during his last years was the artist Baladine (Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro), whose son, Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski), had also become an artist. Rilke wrote a foreword to a book illustrated by Balthus's drawings of cats. 

Shortly before his death, Rilke had an illness that was diagnosed as leukemia. He had been suffering ulcerous sores in his mouth, while pain troubled his stomach and intestines, as a result he struggled with increasingly low spirits. Open-eyed, he died in the arms of his doctor on December 29, 1926, in the Valmont Sanatorium in Switzerland. 

Here are a couple of selected works by Rainer Maria Rilke: 

Torso of an Archaic Apollo 

We cannot know his legendary head

with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso

is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise

the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could

a smile run through the placid hips and thighs

to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced

beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders

and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,

burst like a star: for here there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.

Death

Come thou, thou last one, whom I recognize, 

unbearable pain throughout this body's fabric: 

as I in my spirit burned, see, I now burn in thee: 

the wood that long resisted the advancing flames 

which thou kept flaring, I now am nourishinig 

and burn in thee. 

My gentle and mild being through thy ruthless fury 

has turned into a raging hell that is not from here. 

Quite pure, quite free of future planning, I mounted

the tangled funeral pyre built for my suffering, 

so sure of nothing more to buy for future needs, 

while in my heart the stored reserves kept silent. 

Is it still I, who there past all recognition burn? 

Memories I do not seize and bring inside. 

O life! O living! O to be outside! 

And I in flames. And no one here who knows me.

[Written in December 1926, this poem was the last
entry in Rilke's notebook, less than two weeks before his death at age 51.]

References:
*Nyu.edu, Poetryfoundation.com, Allpoetry.com, Wikipedia, Images-Tumbler and Wikipedia* 

GAS Featured Musician: Kate Bush, presented by Kevin M. Hibshman

Copyright: Noble and Bright

The Weird and Wonderful World Of Kate Bush

Kate Bush began writing songs as a child and was nineteen years old when she first topped the charts in her native UK with the whimsical “Wuthering Heights.” Dave Gilmour (Pink Floyd) assisted her in procuring a recording contract. Her first album, The Kick Inside was released in 1978. It was piano-based , off-kilter pop that belied a precocious intelligence and a quite active imagination. Each subsequent release showed a marked progression in her musical abilities and her further exploration of often literary or cinematic themes focusing on the human condition. She became an instant pop star in the UK while maintaining a loyal cult following in the U.S. and many other countries.

  

        Bush would swiftly move to producing her own material and 1980's Never Forever saw her branching out in that capacity for the first time. Always theatrical and lyrically unbridled, this album was her first number one in the UK and spawned the hits “Babooshka,” “Army Dreamers” and “Breathing,” The follow-up album, The Dreaming was released in 1982 and was her most experimental

and non-commercial album yet. Critics weren't sure what to make of the album upon its release but it has gone on to become a favorite with fans and has been influential to many other musicians including Icelandic avant-pop artist Bjork. Bush has always included exotic instruments in her music and made use of uilleann pipes and a didgeridoo on this album. The Dreaming also features extensive use of the Fairlight CMI digital sampling synthesizer, a tool she would use to create her masterpiece, 1985's The Hounds Of Love.

        During the Summer of 1983, Kate built her own recording studio in a barn on her parent's property. Over the course of a year, she would create what would be her most commercially and critically successful album, Hounds Of Love. The album features the hit “Running Up That Hill,” which peaked at number 3 in the UK and at number 30 in the U.S. The accompanying video displayed her skills as a dancer. The album was split into two suites: Hounds of Love and The Ninth Wave. Critics have labeled the album “post-progressive” as it is a rare foray into the progressive rock genre from a strictly female viewpoint. She followed up this daring effort with 1989's The Sensual World which features one of the most haunting movie theme songs ever recorded: “This Woman's Work,” from the film She's Having a Baby. The album was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album in 1991. 

       Bush has, to date released three other original albums: The Red Shoes,1993 which included guest appearances from Prince, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, the double album, Aerial, 2005, and 50 Words for Snow, 2011. These albums reflect a calmer, quieter Bush but still retain the mysticism and visionary quality she is known for. Kate Bush is a true artist who transports the willing listener to worlds only she holds the keys to, so abandon your previous perceptions and allow her to unlock the gate to a universe of infinite experience.

GAS Featured Poet: Henry Stanton

 Henry Stanton is a painter and a writer of poetry and fiction living in Old Ellicott City Maryland, though he is really only a conduit for the many remarkable and beautiful revelations offered to him by his loved ones, by strangers, by the sentient and otherwise.    His paintings, poems and fiction have appeared widely in print and online journals internationally – most recently in Gnashing Teeth, High Shelf Press, Paper and Ink Zine, and Rust Belt Review.  He has two books of poetry published by Holy & Intoxicated Press, The Man Who Turned Stuff Off (2019) and Pain Rubble (2020).  His third book of poems, Moonbird, was also published in 2020 by Cathexis Northwest Press.  His poetry was selected as winner of the A3 Review Poetry Prize  and was shortlisted for the Eyewear 9th Fortnight Prize for Poetry.  His fiction received an Honorable Mention for the Salt & Syntax Fiction Contest and was selected as a finalist for the Pen 2 Paper Annual Writing Contest.  Henry Stanton is a regular illustrator for Black Petal Press and Yellow Mama Press.  He is also a regular reviewer for GAS: Poetry, Art and Music and publisher/editor for UnCollected Press/The Raw Art Review.  A selection of paintings, poetry and fiction can be found at  www.brightportfal.com. 

Irises

Looking into the speckled blue throat of this iris

could a mind do this

can a thought finely turned

open like this

for two glorious weeks

and be shimmering blue beauty hanging in memory

this beautiful throat has opened 

and says nothing so quietly it can be heard

it is a bottomless throat

i have heard it called an artichoke

an onion

i have called it other things myself

and now the iris is singing

and i am as silent as it sings 

and can hear petals shiver the air

Names

I want to hear your heart 

so I push my head up under your shirt and listen

the other night after heaving and sobbing

you said

my heart hurts again

I gather up all the innocents in my arms at these times

and now you laugh with your brother over the phone

it washes away all the upset I feel

I am both joy and sorrow wearing your robe

outside the wind cries

the names

carrying them away.

(For Jennifer)