GAS Featured Poet: Sreeja Naskar

 

Sreeja Naskar is a young poet based in India. Her work has appeared in Poems India, Crowstep Journal, ONE ART, Ink Sweat and Tears, FRiGG, The Chakkar, and elsewhere. She believes in the quiet power of language to unearth what lingers beneath silence.

kissing with the news on mute

the apartment smells like garlic & rain.    

    we eat pasta off chipped plates  

 while gaza buries its children beneath the rubble.  

     you kiss me like there’s no ash in the air  

 and the water running through our pipes  

      didn’t skip someone else’s throat to get here.  

 

           you say: stay.   

           & i do, because the world is too loud 

 

 we turn the tv on, just for the light.  

     the anchor's mouth moves, silent.  

 i think about a girl with red barrettes,  

     found under concrete. i think about  

         the mother who washed her with bottled water.  

 i think of my own mother, folding towels  

     while the country she left burns slower  

         than the one she fled.  

 

           (sometimes survival is shame  

           that learned how to walk upright.)  

 

 my shower runs hot.  

     i cry into the tile & say, it’s cleansing.  

 i scroll past headlines, donate five dollars,  

       feel righteous, then kiss you again.  

 my body forgets how to hold grief  

     so it folds into yours.  

 

            (what language do we use  

             for pleasure that costs someone else’s breath?  

 

 outside, the rain keeps falling.  

     somewhere, a city turns off its sirens.  

 you whisper my name like a prayer  

     and i want to believe it’s enough.  

 i want to believe loving you  

     isn’t the most selfish thing i’ve done today.  

 

           (but the water runs hot  

           and the sky, for now, is whole)

 god works in immigration

denied my mother’s visa three times—  

    each refusal a prayer unanswered.  

i watch the clock punch holes in our grief,  

     stamped with expiration dates,  

the smell of waiting rooms stale as old promises.  

 

           (he never learned how to say my name.)  

 

god sits behind a desk cluttered with files,  

     his hands folding paper dreams into ash.  

my father’s papers lost somewhere between  

     midnight and the next form,  

i lost faith the day they lost his identity.  

 

           (there’s no heaven here  

           just endless lines and locked doors)  

 

i call god by the wrong name,  

     curse him in the language he forgot.  

my mother folds towels with hands trembling—  

     each crease a silent protest  

against a god who trades in red stamps, not mercy.  

 

the walls listen but do not answer.  

     outside, the city breathes without us.  

i fold my grief into a suitcase,  

     tuck my name inside like a secret,  

hoping god forgets how to open it.

 diaspora is a scam

  my aunt says it over bitter tea—  

     how they sold us dreams wrapped in passports,  

  promises folded like cheap paper planes,  

     crashing somewhere between here and nowhere.  

 

          they told us it was freedom,  

          but freedom never comes with baggage fees  

 

  i learned to speak two languages that don’t quite fit,  

     my tongue a clumsy translation of home and exile.  

  my mother’s cooking tastes like memory and loss,  

     the same dishes nobody knows how to name anymore.  

 

         (we are strangers in maps we didn’t draw)  

 

  every flight ticket is a wager on belonging,  

     but the currency is too high—  

  a lifetime of waiting rooms,  

     missed birthdays,  

     empty chairs at tables still warm with absence.  

 

          diaspora is a scam  

          sold by those who never had to leave  

 

  my father’s laugh is thinner now,  

     stretched between two countries,  

  one that forgot him,  

     the other that never fully claimed him.  

 

          and i—  

          caught in the middle—  

          wonder if home was ever real  

 

  i hold my heart like a visa application—  

     folded, stamped,  

     always pending.

Su Zi's Review of PLANT DREAMING DEEP by May Sarton

 

On reading May Sarton Plant Dreaming Deep

It might happen that to the hand comes a book: hardbound with cloth, dustjacket long gone. The tightly woven canvas of the book is green and has a texture; the book has feel. The inside cover is still tight and green and gracefully sun struck. Thumbing the text against the palm is a remembrance of high-quality paper, of books with deckled edges. Suddenly, there is also the remembrance of how one reads such books—with care for both the entity and the words within.

The volume has a 1968 copyright, and photographs. Prior to generic pixels, means of reproduction involved plates, and this book has a number of them: of the author across from the title page, across from each of the fifteen chapters. It is a testament to the prowess of the publisher then to have been able to release such a book; and there the crest of  WWNorton.

Of course, an AI overview of the work at hand is infuriatingly superficial, but not untrue—let consideration for such broad gloss not be here. Yes, the work is a memoir of buying a house in the middle of the twentieth century—readers will gasp at the minuscule monetary amounts mentioned. Nor ought to readers, getting a glimpse of the list of previous publications, be surprised that the author, May Sarton, is readable. What becomes striking about the work becomes its nuances—as if coming across the volume itself—once a ubiquitous version of a book, now a vintage treasure—were not clue of serendipity enough.

Sarton’s reason for buying a house begins with her commitment to her ancestry: “ I enjoy beginning this chronicle with an evocation of two ancestors because in this house all the threads i hold in my hands have at last been woven together into a whole” (19), but she purchases her particular house in a remote location because of a bird

[...]under a stand of old maples, and there, a little back from the road, behind its semicircular drive, withdrawn from the village itself, stood the house. [...]The whole impression was one of grace and light within a classical form, and i was so bedazzled by this presence that for a moment i could only see, not hear. But then I heard it—an oriole, high up in one of the maples, singing his song of songs” (28)

For any bird lovers, Sarton beguiles aplenty throughout the seasons; she maintains feeders in winter “And sooner or later I must push hard to open the front door against the drifts and get myself out with seed for the bird feeders” (86), and weaves these perceptions with ones about solitude and the life of a writer.

Sarton also gardens, because she: “considers flowers a necessity, quite as necessary as food. So from spring until late October i spend the hour just after breakfast in the garden, [...]for whenever I look for the rest of the day there is always somewhere a shaft of light on flowers, and I feel them strongly as part of the whole presence of the house” (57). 

 It might seem, to those who are quintessentially transient, to be so thoroughly stay at home, and to do so in solitude. Sarton does socialize—she has guests, and becomes participatory in her community, but she also travels to teach. There might be some who consider Sarton’s determined retreat to be quaint; others might find themselves already in the solitude of which Sarton speaks. Certainly, the perceptions here are worthy for many reasons, giving Sarton’s simultaneously simplistic and complex style her worthy iconic status.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.

GAS Featured Poet: Arvilla Fee

 

Arvilla Fee lives in Dayton, Ohio, teaches English for Clark State College and is the lead poetry editor for October Hill Magazine. She has published work in over 100 journals and magazines, and her poetry books, The Human Side, This is Life, and Mosaic: A Million Little Pieces are available on Amazon. Arvilla’s life advice: never leave home without a snack (just in case of an apocalypse). Arvilla’s favorite quote: "It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” ~ Henry David Thoreau. To learn more, visit her website and check out her new poetry magazine: https://soulpoetry7.com/

How to Eat An Over-Easy Egg

in Front of Your Ex

 

carefully,

deliberately,

fork cutting

straight down the middle,

yolk pooling

like a daisy-yellow pond,

perfect for dipping

butter-covered toast;

fold the bread,

drag it along the plate

in slow, circular motions,

absorbing,

never dripping—

never leaving the table

with egg on your face

Momma Needs a Moment

 

just five minutes to close my eyes,

to allow my chest to rise and fall,

to let my mind go blank.

Put your badgering on a shelf,

tuck those questions under your arms,

and just let        me         be.

I cannot answer the rapid-fire requests

that press into the gray matter of my brain

like bullish thumbs against a tender wrist.
I cannot tell you what’s for dinner.

No, I don’t know where birds go

when they leave their nests.

I don’t know why the store

was completely out of grapes.

Just let me have this bubble;

I’ll close my eyes and imagine,

if only for a moment

that I have all the space I need.

I’ll stretch my arms over my head,

yawn,

listen to the coo of doves,

step into the sun’s warm orb,

and measure my brief autonomy

in the beat of a hummingbird’s wings.

The Air Between Us

 

without the mixture of my molecules

and your molecules, the air is clearer,

fresher somehow, with a hint of jasmine,

pine, and tangerine—

 

without the verbal bullet holes and

the cock crowing, I can take a breath,

can spin around without hitting your ego,

fragile as it was—

 

without the rumbling of your empty

thunder, the sky has returned to me,

a prodigal piece of blessed haven,

draping me like a prayer

The Mad Librarian

 

Everyone said he was crazy,

my grandfather,

but I liked to think of him as

                  unconventional.

OK—so maybe the five hens

that slept in old milk crates

on his front porch was a little crazy.

Maybe the life-size garden statue

of Edgar Allan Poe with a raven

sitting on his head was—

well, odd at best.

But the pinnacle of his peculiarity,

according to the wholesome folks in town,

was his insatiable love of books.

Having converted his 1920-something

house into a massive library

when I was just a kid,

I found the rows and rows of bookcases

perfectly normal! Little books, big books,

books that smelled like the earth itself,

books with water marks and wax seals.

Books with red covers, brown covers,

no covers at all—tattered pages clinging

desperately to the threads that bound them.

Grandfather often sat in a winged back chair,

a book perched upon his knee, a book open

on his lap, a book held between two gnarled hands,

his gold, wire-rimmed glasses perched smartly

on the end of his thin nose.

I stepped on his glasses once, breaking both lenses,

but he kept reading with them anyway,

said it gave him a whole new perspective.

And it’s those glasses, sitting demurely on the last stack

of books he read that now waver behind the salty film

of tears in my eyes. I blink twice, put the specs on my face,

trying to see through Grandfather’s eyes.

Hazy Days

 

Clouds stretch thin

like prim Puritan lips;

the sun pouts

from behind the sultry veil,

searing the soil with her breath.

I stretch out on a lounger,

sweet tea glass to my forehead

icy condensation dripping

down flushed cheeks.

The bees fly in slow motion,

tipsy on pollen,

This is summer’s sweet spot,

the arc of time where days stretch

like melted salt-water taffy,

the radio scratches out Beatle songs,

and I forget about everything

except a raspberry sorbet

in the freezer.

straight down the middle,

yolk pooling

like a daisy-yellow pond,

ANDREW DARLINGTON's Review of ‘Down River: In Search of David Ackles' by Mark Brend

DAVID ACKLES: THE OTHER ‘RIVER MAN’

Book Review of:

‘DOWN RIVER: IN SEARCH OF DAVID ACKLES'

by Mark Brend

(2025, Jawbone Press)

http://jawbonepress.com/down-river/

ISBN 978-1-916829-22-0, Softback, 148pp+8 photo plates

To follow their hit single ‘This Wheels On Fire’, Julie Driscoll with the Brian Auger Trinity recorded a superb five-minute take on David Ackles’ ‘Road To Cairo’. It failed to chart. Later, the Hollies – with Mikael Rickfors, covered Ackles touching ‘Down River’. Spooky Tooth also recorded the same song. Born in Rock Island of ‘Rock Island Line’ fame in Illinois (20 February 1937), David Ackles was a songwriter who never wrote a hit. He released four albums, three for prestigious Elektra Records, with fan-man Bernie Taupin producing his brooding, elegant and eclectic masterpiece American Gothic (1972), after which there was a final Five & Dime LP in October 1973, for Columbia. 

He family moved to LA, but he didn’t live a Rock ‘n’ Roll life. He wasn’t cool. While other kids were out rocking around the clock he was listening to clunky old musical The Desert Song. Raised in a Presbyterian religious theatrical family he did Hollywood toddle-on parts in six Rusty movies – a kind of low-budget Rin-Tin-Tin variant billed as ‘Great Kids… A Wonder Dog!’. Out of step with teen-trends he favoured all-round variety to the Twist or the Boogaloo. If Bob Dylan referred to himself ironically as a ‘song-&-dance man’, David Ackles started out as the real thing.

Intending simply to demo his songs for other’s consideration, Ackles accidentally fell into recording his eponymous debut album (1968, EKS-74022). He’d already turned thirty and had yet to play a single solo live date. Jac Holzman’s Elektra was likely the only label with the open foresight to sign him. Producer David Anderle used session players, including former Iron Butterfly and future Rhinoceros musicians. They may simply have overdubbed Ackles existing demos without Ackles even being present, on songs such as the thumb-tripping screenplay ‘The Road To Cairo’; or the warm-voiced conversational piano-led ‘Down River’ – which he performed for a DJ John Peel Radio session. It tells the tale of a freed prisoner who returns to his hometown to find his girl has found someone else, yet he accepts the situation with sad grace. ‘Blue Ribbons’ controversially – at the time, is about a white woman pregnant by a black man. Then there’s the liturgical organ that complements the ‘arms of grace’ lyric of ‘His Name Is Andrew’ (covered by Martin Carthy on his 1971 Landfall album). 

Despite writer Mark Brend’s scrupulous research, which considers unreleased outtakes and lost songs, the session details remain uncertain. Yet Brend perceptively writes, Ackles ‘wrote as a dramatist or an author, creating songs like one-act plays or short stories,’ while under the influence of the Brecht-Weill partnership. It was difficult to place Ackles in context, he was not quite Randy Newman, neither was he a darker Harry Nilsson, he might have been chanson, Jacques Brel, or maybe even his Elektra labelmates Tom Rush or Tim Buckley? To journalist John Bauldie Ackles’ songs are ‘often dark vignettes of the sorrows and inevitable seriousness of experience, poetic sketches of not-so-beautiful losers and unlucky lovers, hopeless vagabonds and embittered misfits, set to tapestries of tune. It’s grown-up stuff’ (‘Q’, February 1994).

After failed sessions with Al Kooper and Don Ellis, the eight tracks that make up Subway To The Country (1969, EKS-74060) use lush widescreen Fred Myrow settings – an arranger who’d worked with Jim Morrison and would score Charlton Heston’s Soylent Green (1973). The title-song has a ‘got to get back to the land’ father-to-son brightness, other tracks such as ‘Mainline Saloon’ – with its dubbed-on ambient lowlife Bar sounds, and ‘Inmates Of The Institution’ with its chilling atmosphere of community derangement, in particular are disquieting and deeply unsettling. While the macabre character-sketch ‘Candy Man’ about maimed war-veteran Oscar, jailed for unapologetic peado offences, is possibly his bravest song, in that it adds psychological depth to a disreputable individual. But where Jim Morrison or Lou Reed were writing from their own life-milieu, good church-going David Ackles appears to be assembling his cast in the way that a playwright creates characters. His songs are story-songs.

He was still playing shoes-optional Folk-dens supporting Tom Rush or Joni Mitchell… such as the ‘Bitter End’ on NY Bleecker Street, until he played a support slot at the ‘Troubadour’ on Santa Monica Boulevard to an audience of the counter-culture glitterati there to witness rising star Elton John. It was 25 August 1970, and although Ackles performance was overshadowed by Elton John’s career left-off, there was rapport between the artists that led to Ackles crossing the Atlantic to live at ‘Farthings’ in Wargrave on the Thames at Berkshire, from where he could commute, scoring his own arrangement charts, to record at the IBC studio at Portland Place with Bernie Taupin producing. 

‘It seems like you get a sharper perspective on your own country when you’re away from it’ Ackles explains on the sleeve-notes of American Gothic (USA Elektra EKS75032). This time there were eleven tracks with a full 43-minute playing time including the 10:05-minute ‘Montana Song’ which is a search for rural ancestry roots taking him to a ‘long abandoned farm,’ all interpreted through diary entries. But there was still what Brend calls not ‘enough of the familiar’ to hit mainstream preconceptions. No chorus. More string quartet, piccolo and cello than Rock guitar. Even Brend concedes that ‘it is also the most inaccessible of his records’ which requires repeated plays and close attention to yield its rewards, ‘it’s not a record for the streaming age.’ For Ackles himself, he’s quoted as saying ‘I like parables, little morality plays.’ 

Critically the album was well-received, from Stephen Holden in Rolling Stone to Derek Jewell in the Sunday Times, drawing comparisons as diverse as Aaron Copland and George Gershwin. Chris Van Ness, writing in the Los Angeles Free Press, announced it as ‘the Sgt Pepper of Folk’. But as Brent admits ‘critical acclaim doesn’t always sell records.’ After it peaked at no.167 on the Billboard album chart, Ackles amicably parted company with Elektra. Only to be picked up by Clive Davis of Columbia, for a more modest low-budget album project.

The newly married Ackles produced Five & Dime (1973, USA Columbia KC32466) on a four-track TEAC machine in his Pacific Palisades home, inviting guest musicians – including Dean Torrence of Jan & Dean (on ‘Surf’s Down’) to visit in various combinations, before the tapes were mixed and mastered. Inevitably, the resulting album got lost within label and management politics. It was what Mark Brend calls ‘a more personal, intimate record – a step back from the big statement of American Gothic.’ Twelve tracks this time, including the black horror of ‘Aberfan’, which records the events of 21 October 1966 when a small Welsh village was engulfed in a landslip of saturated slag with a tragic loss of life. Ackles succeeds in riding a precarious edge between being maudlin or exploitational.

By now, ‘the fissure between talent and sales that was a feature of Ackles’s recording career from the start became a chasm.’ There were no more albums. But he wasn’t in it for stardom. He was in it for music. With the advent of CD there was a mild ripple of approving reappraisal with the reissue of his Elektra albums. A 2CD compilation There Is A River (2007, Rhino 8122-74884-2) included all three Elektra LPs plus ‘unreleased songs & rarities’ with Bernie Taupin and Elvis Costello liner-notes, although the edition was subsequently withdrawn due to legal conflicts with Ackles’ estate. And there were nay-sayers. Some reviewers considered that after such doses of intricate prettification it was necessary to syringe the ears with the Ramones or Motorhead!

A tall dark-haired affable man, David Ackles didn’t die a Rock ‘n’ Roll death. After retiring from Pop he wrote TV scripts, enjoyed a long academic career while writing and producing low-key musicals and ballet scores. His ambitious musical projects ‘Allendor/ Prince Jack’ and ‘Sister Aimee’ remain unstaged, while his collaboratively scripted Word Of Honour was filmed as a TV movie starring Karl Malden and a young John Malkovich. David Ackles survived having part of his cancerous left lung removed, but died of a relapse 2 March 1999 in Tujanga, California, aged sixty-two. Yet his reputation persists. Elton John and Elvis Costello sing his praises. Mark Brent’s book is a personal quest to discover the truth about the man he got to speak to once, on a single phone call.

 Ensorcelled by the September 1955 mystical vinyl codex ‘a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom’ at age eight, Andrew Darlington embarked on a lifetime quest to decipher the magical incantation’s profundity, traipsing in not entirely straight lines of zigzag wandering across decades of enchantment, yet is still no closer to the true enlightenment revelation must bring. 

As of now, the seeking continues across a proliferation of platforms, including EIGHT MILES HIGHER .

44 Spa Croft Road, Ossett, 

West Yorkshire WF5 0HE

ENGLAND (Tel: 01924 275814

Email: andydarlington@talktalk.net

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