Adelaide Literary Magazine No. 54, October 2022

REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE

SCARS AND SPITE
How Academic Labels Shaped My

Education

by Haile Espin

Among the various essays, poems, and works that I’ve written about
my education,

I try to assert myself as someone rational, as someone who acknowledges
her disadvantages but has grown from the pain of them. I know who
I am: low-income, first-generation, a daughter of immigrants, not
academically gifted, but academically striving. These words, in turn, say
“Look at her! Look at her strength! Look at her journey!” They almost
always become the center of my pieces as I voice my experiences on
paper. They molded my path as one rooted in difficulty and struggle; one
that left my emotional state littered with scars. “Here,” I say to teachers,
to literary magazines, to future colleges. “This here was engraved on my
soul. Do with it what you wish, because its wounds have been cured.”

The truth though, is that as much as I want to appear healed, the
ragged injuries the education system has left me with have festered; I
acknowledge them sometimes, as products of inequality and injustice,
hoping they will scab and subsequently heal. Without that hope, all I
have left is rage, animosity, and badly healed scars.

I have a scratch that covers the entirety of my index finger on my left
hand. It manifested itself in third grade when intelligence began to be
“tracked”. Those who left for their specialized classes, would come back
with fingers sticky with ice cream from scientific experiments, their thirst
for knowledge quenched by new equations and new words. They were
special; it was apparent to everyone, the words Academically Gifted

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(AG) latching onto them. At 1pm every day, the AG kids would leave
and come back. I remained.

There is a scar that is not entirely visible, centered in my inner arm.
It appeared not because of the high scores I achieved on my End-Of-
Grade exams in 5th grade, but due to the reactions of my teachers when
they found out.

I used to steal math textbooks. I knew that my classmates who had
gotten into the AG program were receiving a more detailed and expansive
education; and that I was falling behind. At home, I’d go over pages that
we hadn't covered in class and watch YouTube videos that solved the
equations at the end, determined to squeeze every bit of information
I could from it. When exam week rolled around, and my math score
came back, I received a 97th percentile. As elation coursed through
my exhausted mind, I watched as my teacher furrowed her brows. She
murmured congratulations to me, praise absent from her voice, and then
called for the next student. Her reaction was a confession on her part.
Not only did she brand me as “unintelligent,” but she also believed I
was incapable of growth and of brilliancy.

I carry a gaping, bleeding gash on my body that stretches from the top
of my left breast to the right side of my hip. When my shirt lifts a bit, my
friends always ask me about its origins. “Our middle school,” I respond.
“Our school?” Some say. “I was not aware we went to the same school.”

The middle school I attended divided its children by academic
abilities, separating itself into three groups: the VS (very strong), AG
(academically gifted), and the Performing Arts kids (the kids in neither
academic program). The VS kids received the best of everything– the
funding for field trips, the beautiful classrooms, the best teachers,
and the respect of everyone. The Performing Arts kids were subject to
classrooms that were falling apart, old textbooks, and little funding.
I was part of the AG program; a kid who, like the rest in my group,
could be capable of academic grandeur, if it weren’t for the absence of
privilege. We almost always regrouped with the Performing Arts kids,
our hardships solidifying our bond.

Often, when recounting this division, I bring up privilege. How most
of my group and the Performing Arts kids walked to school or got

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dropped off by buses, carrying dollar tree notebooks. Most of the VS
got dropped off by Tesla’s, Subaru’s, and BMW’s, arms packed with
Mead folders, and Ticonderoga pencils. How they carried lunch boxes
with carefully packed sandwiches, while most of us survived off free
cafeteria food. There was no difference in our intellectual capacities.
The VS kids simply had the resources and encouragement to nurture
their intelligence. We did not; we were first-generation, low-income,
and plagued by at-home responsibilities. In the shadows, we created
a community where we acknowledged each other’s backgrounds. We
might not have their money or their opportunities, but at least we had
each other. We alone could survive.

At the end of eighth grade, I applied to a prestigious public school
that accepted its kids through a competitive process. More so than
education, I wanted to prove that I was more than the labels placed
upon me. I wanted to make my parents proud, and I wanted to show
my classmates that we were more than what they made us out to be.
How ironic, I’d think. For an academic reject to be accepted to one of
the best schools in the state. I wanted recognition, and I wanted success.
When I received the acceptance email, I remember falling on the cement
pavement in front of my house, and the scrapes on my knees that were
created. This is what I had been working towards all my life; to prove
that I was great. That I wasn't average, or ungifted. That I was smart.
Later, I found it disheartening that 50% of those accepted to this school
were from Lincoln– but all from the VS side. I was the only one to make
it from my AG section.

When I entered, I remember looking around, anxious to find a face
that looked like mine. I had stayed up the night before, searching up
percentages. 3% of the kids at this school are Hispanic; out of 50 kids
in a grade, the number averages out to 1.5. I remember praying that it
would round up; It didn’t. In my two years at this school, I still do not
know how to express the solitude that surrounds me here. I am deprived
of the community I had felt so safe in, of the usage of my native tongue
that I had grown accustomed to sharing with at least one classmate, of
the unity in inequality my peers and I always shrouded ourselves in.
My current friends are the very same people my former classmates and
I vowed never to talk to because of their privilege; the very same people
I used to hate because of their ignorance at the division at our school.
Did you never realize how separated we were from each other? The

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inequalities in our educational experiences? I asked my current classmate
once. No, he replied. We didn't have to.

At times, my friends thank me for my insight, and how I offer them
a different view of the world. Most of the time, I do not know what to
say back. Whether I should reply with you’re welcome, or stay silent,
knowing I can’t say the same for them.

These scars aren't visible, nor are they tangible; but at night I am
restless, my limbs aching with their phantom pain as I think of the
climb, and how parts of me got left behind during the claw-up. I
think about those still trapped in it; my reckless, desperately intelligent
cousins, my previous friends who had so much to give but so little to
prove it, and my older relatives, who dropped out because their schools
made them feel like they had absolutely nothing to offer. The system
allowed and continues to allow the falling behind of students who don't
demonstrate perfection to nurture its gifted students. They perpetuate
stereotypes that not only carry on the myth that a kid who cannot pass
an AG capability test is a kid not capable, but also enforce damaging
self-beliefs onto the child itself, that they will carry with them forever. I
wish I could say I spoke from growth and understanding; but I speak out
of spite and defiance. Because instead of giving me the tools to succeed,
the educational system left me for dead, not expecting me to get back
up, fight back, and speak out.

Haile Espin is a Mexican-American writer from NC. Her work has been published in
The Louisville Review's 2022 Spring Edition, Apricity Magazine, and Valiant Scribe
Literary Journal.

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ON THE STAIRS TO NOWHERE

by Chris Arthur

In the corridor outside my office, there’s a staircase that leads nowhere.
In fact there are two. One I think of as going up. It has ten steps before
it meets a wall. The other, which I think of as descending, has only five
steps before it too is blocked. I know that stairs go both ways. Thinking
in terms of up and down depends on the level from which you view
them. If I stood with my back pressed close against the walls that cut
them off, my up stair would lead down, my down stair up.

These blocked stairs draw my eye with compelling magnetism.
Why?
I’m loathe to credit such poor, amputated forms with the significance
given to stairs by those who write about them. John Templer (in The
Staircase: History and Theories) says that stairs have “always been used to
represent human spiritual aspirations and cosmography.” Oscar Tusquets
(in The Staircase: The Architecture of Ascent) argues that stairs are
“charged with symbolic force, representing power, hierarchy, mysticism.”
He notes that the idea of a staircase leading up to heaven or down to hell
“exists in virtually every culture.” In similar terms, Markus Hattstein (in
Stairs: Architectural Details) points to the way in which stairs possess
a range of meanings “which far exceed their practical usefulness.” In
“Stairways of the Mind,” a perceptive essay in the International Forum
of Psychoanalysis (Vol.9, 2000, 7-18), Juhani Pallasmaa summarizes the
significance stairs are granted by a range of authorities when he says they
possess “a wealth of metaphoric and symbolic connotations.”
But the stairs outside my office are no grand sets of steps such as
you’d find in a pyramid or ziggurat; they have nothing of the cathedral

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or temple about them, still less the palace. They look uninspiring,
entirely ordinary. Is it possible they carry any of Pallasmaa’s wealth of
connotation?

Despite their lowliness, they certainly have an impact on me. Perhaps
in part it’s because of their unsettling juxtaposition of what’s familiar
with what’s unexpected – being ambushed by the blank walls that fall
like portcullises across the path the stairs seem to be inviting me to
take. And in part, for all their modest stature, I think they somehow
succeed in tapping into the wider associations of stairs, and so echo with
an array of notes that have nothing to do with the utilitarian function
they once served.

§
There’s an entirely prosaic reason for these two aborted stairways.
It’s not as if they were deliberately made this way in order to convey
a message, represent some truth. They’re quotidian in character not
symbolic. My office is in one of the older parts of the university campus,
occupying a stone building that was originally a generously proportioned
townhouse. Long ago, it was some wealthy family’s home. As the
building’s purpose changed over the years, shifting from domestic to
institutional use, various structural changes were made to the interior:
corridors blocked off; new doorways opened; large rooms divided into
smaller ones; ceilings lowered; the house sectioned off to provide separate
territories for different departments. Fire doors and reception areas were
added, bathrooms and larders converted into stationery stores and
photocopying rooms. Fireplaces have been covered over and replaced
with radiators, windows double glazed, paintwork and furnishings styled
to conform to the bland functionality of teaching and administration
rather than the unpredictability of a family’s taste.
Originally, the stairs that lead nowhere were just ordinary thoroughfares
linking different levels of the house. The walls that cut them off were
built to create the division into separate units that’s now in place.
Leaving these truncated remnants where they are was clearly the easiest
and cheapest option. But from the perspective of architectural aesthetics
they’re an affront to the appearance of the place, and practical good sense
would dismiss them as unnecessary glitches in day-to-day utility, an
inefficient use of space. Despite such no doubt justified condemnations,

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I’m glad they weren’t removed. They lend the distinction of eccentricity
to the bland corridor outside my office – as if a folly or a gargoyle
had been added. I know they’re just awkward remainders that it was
less trouble to leave in situ than take out, but they have about them a
pleasing air of whim and flourish, as if someone had decided to carve
their own illicit embellishment, rich with paradox, into the prevailing
ordinariness.

Sometimes, though thankfully this is rare, these stairs that lead
to nowhere cause real confusion if visitors attempt to use them.
Occasionally you can hear laughter prompted by a first encounter. But
almost everyone who works in the building is so used to them that
they’re scarcely noticed. On the rare occasions when someone mentions
them, it’s almost always in the context of exasperated resignation at
how the university is run. Though I sympathize with a reading of these
awkward remnants that presents them as evidence of the institution’s
scrooge-like attitude to its real estate, I’ve come to see them as possessing
far more significance than that.

§
When I pause to consider them – as I often do – the blocked stairs
spark a cluster of related ideas. Advancement to a higher level thwarted,
a path leading downwards – with the promise of getting closer to the
root, the heart, the nub – abruptly stopped. Our steady step-by-step
progression peremptorily halted in its tracks. The stairs that lead to
nowhere seem tuned to the same key as our mortality; they resonate
with that unpalatable truth we all must face – the fact that at some
unknown point death’s wall will cut across our timeline and we’ll be
stopped for good.
More positively than these terminal tropes, the stairs that lead to
nowhere also make me think of a hidden realm just beyond them, the
prospect of continuance, a secret place, somewhere out of sight that
demands a different itinerary to reach. It’s off the beaten track and needs
to be approached obliquely, according to some arcane map. Entry is
granted only to those with the proper esoteric knowledge. It may be
tantalizingly close, but we can’t break through unless we follow the right
directions; access is guarded by password, code and ritual known only
to initiates.

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I like the way they nudge the mind with gentle reminders of its
mortality and pose the paradox of a route that leads nowhere while at
the same time hinting at the possibility of hidden realms beyond the
cul-de-sac of obvious cessation. But the main reason the blocked off
stairs appeal to me so much isn’t because they provide a memento mori
or hope of some beyond, but because they’re such visible touchstones
for something we repeatedly encounter. The truth is, we’re surrounded
by such stairs; they litter our experience.

When I say there are numerous blocked stairways all around me, I
don’t mean this literally of course. What I have in mind are not plain
cut-off stairs that you could reach out and touch, not actual physical
structures like the stairs outside my office that anyone could walk up
or down for a few steps before encountering a wall. I mean rather the
repeated instances of what seem like parallels – where routes are started
and then stopped; where we find our progress forward blocked; where
we’re locked into a single level although other strata beckon; where we’re
halted in our tracks and kept within the bounds of familiar confinement.
The actual stairs to nowhere outside my office have come to act like
mascots – tangible symbols – for these thematic blood brothers that
invisibly crowd our days.

§
An example will help bring these multiple invisible stairways into
sight. Consider the view out of my office window – or, rather, the single
feature that dominates it. To describe this, I might say: “There’s a tree
outside my office window.” The seven words of this straightforward
statement offer the beginning of a description, a first building-block
in attempting to communicate the view to others, an initial step on
the stairway to understanding what I see. But clearly on its own this
statement is too general to give more than the vaguest picture. I need
to add more detail, give specifics, before anyone can start to really share
my outlook, get a sense of the particular textures it lays upon my mind.
Let’s take another step or two: “There’s a beech tree (Fagus sylvatica)
just outside my office window. It’s so close the branches almost brush
the glass. Over sixty feet high, the tree dominates a rough patch of grass
bordering a path behind the building. As well as flagging the changing
seasons with the semaphore of its foliage – greens in spring and summer,

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yellows, browns and gold in autumn, bare branches in winter – it also
provides a kind of daily weathervane. I’ve come to recognize the tunes
played out on it by wind and rain. If the window is open even a fraction,
I can tell a lot about what kind of day it is, without looking out, just by
the sounds of the tree’s natural percussion.”

Starting to flesh out “There’s a tree outside my office window” in
this way gives a sense of progression, of transferring from my mind to
readers’ minds the nature of the view that meets my eye. Adding words
is like constructing the risers and treads of a staircase, each addition
taking us incrementally further, letting us progress in our grasp of what
is there. But far stronger than any sense of progression is a feeling of
curtailment and confinement – the words seem as much like stones in
a wall that’s built across our path as component parts of a stairway that,
incrementally, increases understanding.

My frequent sense of being on stairs to nowhere is engendered by
the jarring mismatch between the actual nature of the things that we
encounter and the way we talk about them. Ordinary parlance scarcely
scratches the surface of the world. We use language to name and describe
things, but those names and descriptions hide more than they reveal.
Yes, “There’s a beech tree just outside my office window” provides a
measure of what’s there. But it gives almost no idea of the nature of
what I’m seeing. It only skims the surface, omitting so many hidden
depths it seems closer to deception than description. Just a few steps
and then a wall – behind which lies what happens in photosynthesis and
pollination, the invisible processes and structures occurring at molecular
and atomic levels, the blueprint of the tree’s form, the history of this
species’ existence, what led to this one individual tree being planted in
this particular spot outside my office.

§
Mostly, of course, I rest content with the truncated steps of everyday
discourse. Like everyone else, I rely on the portcullis power of words
more than their stair-building potential, the way they corral within
familiar names, offer a palette of customary colours that lets us draw the
simplifications we recognize, caricatures that facilitate all the commerce
of our commonsense interactions. But sometimes I prefer to take a few
steps more, remind myself of the realms just behind our word-walls.

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As with so many things that we encounter, the beech tree outside my
office window contains stairways that lead on and on, far beyond the
blocking of our routine locutions. “There’s a beech tree outside my office
window” ignores eons of history, hides the intricate insights of biology
and chemistry, operates at a level of superficiality that masks astonishing
strata of intricately balanced processes.

A few of the steps that might be taken beyond the shorthand portcullis
wall of “beech tree” can be glimpsed in Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden
Life of Trees. His book reveals some of the staircases that lie behind
our usual labels. Wohlleben reveals that beech trees can live for four or
five hundred years; that a mature beech “exhales hundreds of gallons of
water a day;” that in the course of its lifespan it may produce1.8 million
beechnuts; that the trees share resources with each other, forming a
community of cognate lifeforms which provide succour for those trees
that are struggling; that periodic “mast years” of massive fruit production
– with single trees producing 30,000 or more beechnuts – are part of a
coordinated strategy to outmanoeuvre predators. And this is just the start
of one ascent beyond the ordinary. It doesn’t touch on the role beech
trees have played in human history. One aspect of this can be gleaned
from the fact that our words for “beech” and “book” are related; they
share an etymological bloodline that points back to this smooth-barked
tree’s ancient use as a writing surface. Beech bark and beech wood tablets
used to provide the equivalent of paper. In addition, as Jonathan Drori
points out in Around the World in 80 Trees, medieval European writing
desks “were often made of beech,” and before Gutenberg “letters were
often carved from its bark for early experiments in printing.” Perhaps,
under their dusty lino covering, the stairs to nowhere in the corridor
outside my office are made of beech wood, so weaving a variation around
the themes embodied in the living tree that grows just a stone’s throw
from them. Maybe it would be symbolically appropriate to print a copy
of this essay – or inscribe it on beech bark – and leave it on them as
a votive offering; a tribute to those aspects of beech we almost never
acknowledge.

The seemingly ordinary seethes with what’s extraordinary. Every
moment feeds on the umbilical of time and space, so connecting it
to perspectives that rupture our everyday containments. Convenience
urges one way of calibrating things; the metrics of wonder suggest quite

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another. Just behind our customary word-walls there are seemingly
endless steps leading into immensities of scale and complexity the mind
has difficulty grasping. “The beech tree outside my office window” can be
dismissed in those seven words. Or it can reveal stairways leading back
in time for all the eons it has taken Fagus sylvatica to form, develop and
spread its presence across so many parts of the world. Etched into the
substance of its trunk and branches, the fabric of its foliage, the network
of its roots, the rhythms of its flowering and fruiting, there are intricacies
of form and function it would take lifetimes to unravel, chart and follow.
And this one specific beech tree that I look out at every working day
not only holds the potential to tell the story of its own intrinsic identity,
its nature and history. In its rootedness to this particular place, over
this particular span of years, it also forges a web of relationships with
what passes here, thus interlinking with numerous threads of richly
embroidered narrative that together weave the fabric of existence – the
people who walk under it, immersed in their own lifelines, the birds
that perch on its branches, the insects that land on its leaves and bask
there briefly in the sun, the patterns of shadows it casts on the ground,
the way the city’s sounds lay their invisible fingerprints upon it.

§
I could add thousands – millions – of words to my initial “there’s a tree
outside my office window,” but the thing that’s there would still elude
complete elucidation. How can we describe the wonders that are daily
before us? So much is present in so little that it can appear fantastical
when we stop to think about it, as if we’re dealing with fairy artefacts,
something charmed and magical, imbued with unsuspected powers. A
leaf unfurls, green and fresh, it grows to full size. It reaps its harvest from
the sun, it’s there in sunshine, moonlight, rain and wind. It takes on its
autumnal color, falls from the tree, is blown away, lands on a patch of
rough grass outside an office and rots back into the earth. In that single
isobar of small events, the little timeline of a single leaf, there are echoes
of such haunting resonance that they allow us to glimpse massive vistas
of time, heavy with the cargoes of meaning that they carry. Behind the
paper-thinness of every leaf stands something astounding – the raw
fact of existence sprawling its presence across the amplitude of time
and space.

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How can we convey how astonishing are the things we daily encounter?
Though I’d be pleased to find a vocabulary that could pick the lock of
the mundane, loosen the blindfold of routine so that we could give a
fuller sense of the scale and nature of what lies behind our conventional
labels, it’s hard to envisage what sort of vocabulary this would be. It’s easy
enough to reach for a handful of terms that promise to break through any
stair-blocking confinement – “infinite,” “eternal,” “ultimate,” “timeless,”
“unbounded,” “incredible,” “extraordinary,” “miraculous.” But although
they promise to take us into more expansive territories, such terms
can bestow a kind of vacuous mystical or metaphysical tone whose
bland generality undersells the fact that the world – as Louis Macneice
puts it – is “incorrigibly plural.” How can we effectively celebrate what
Macneice, in the same poem (“Snow”) calls “the drunkenness of things
being various”? Rather than resting content with the limited range of
convention’s blocked off stairs, or reaching too soon for an overblown
vocabulary, I prefer to concentrate my efforts on making sure that I
remember the presence of stairs to nowhere (or to very limited vantage
points) all around us. They’re there in the way we talk about trees, or
birds, or each other, or virtually anything.

Sometimes it feels as if the stairs to nowhere that litter the mundane
are not so much blocked as designed to be like Penrose stairs – those
impossible staircases created by mathematician Roger Penrose and his
father. Their work influenced the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher,
whose famous lithograph “Ascending and Descending” offers a pictorial
depiction of the Penroses’ paradox. It shows a staircase at the top of
a building. On it are 26 figures all clad in the same, monk-like garb.
Half seem headed up, half are headed down – but no matter which way
they’re facing the figures make no progress – the stairs in this brilliantly
crafted optical illusion are continuous, never-ending. The figures get
nowhere. I particularly like the fact that Escher chose to have 26 of
these monk-like figures caught in the treadmill of their endless loop. To
me that symbolizes the way in which we so often use the letters of the
alphabet to craft words that keep us trapped within the orbit of routine
simplifications. Caught in the confinement of the conventional, we skirt
or ignore the wonders that surround us. Trying to use words differently,
making the walls they build transparent, constructing a few more stairs
so that we can step up and see things from different perspectives, is
surely one of the enticements of essay writing.

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Chris Arthur is an Irish writer currently based in Scotland. He’s author of several essay
collections, most recently Hummingbirds Between the Pages (2018), and has published
in a range of journals. Further information about his writing can be found here: www.
chrisarthur.org.

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MEMOIRS

by Drew Soliz

Stress accumulates the more I get annoyed. The more I get annoyed
the easier and more I get irritated. Next thing I know I find myself in
sickness – a sickness that could’ve been avoided all along had I kept
my composure, and not let an external circumstance define or shape
me but rather see it as a happening, not as who I am. What happens
happens but the view and interpretation belongs to man alone. Man’s
view can’t change what happened but the aftermath could be molded;
thus, modified to fit the interpretation of the viewer into an optimistic
outcome rather than a predicament.

I experience more of what I accept and less of what I neglect. I must
credit Aldous Huxley for stating and I quote, “Facts don’t cease to exist
simply because we ignore them.” Another man once said, “You could
ignore reality but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring
reality.” Some things are subjective, others are objective. I could form
my own opinion about the subjective but must align my thinking with
the objective lest I suffer from cognitive dissonance and get left behind
living in an illusion perpetuated through radical liberalism.

A lot of things I see aren’t what I see but what I perceive. I get lost in
those perceptions I interpret to be organic when a lot of the times they’re
a disguise to tamper with my emotions to make me more susceptible
to an agenda orchestrated through its disguise intended to give off a
perception or false identity, a cover, if you will. Sometimes defeat lies
within the confines of perception and not reality. I’m beaten by my
perception before I even get a chance to face reality. Thus the saying,
“The battle is won or lost in the mind.”

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I’m wondering what to do as if what I do defines my identity and
substantiates my value.

What is is not because it is it’s because conscious or unconsciously I
chose it to be. I must decisively choose my life.

Mindfully, what I take seriously maximizes, what I laugh at minimizes.
The size of my problems are often determined by how seriously I take
them.

True contentment encapsulates and resembles luxury.
Fearlessness gives me leverage but arrogance sets me up at a disadvantage.
Rational thinking is attempted expertise on the macroscopic world
but it takes discernment to analyze the microscopic world which is
the foundation of the macroscopic world. Sometimes rational thinking
doesn’t always get the job done.
What, who serves me? Look at life from this point of view – in all of
my approachings and doings. Nervousness, shyness and the alike stem
from uncertainty; certainty accustoms when I approach with putting
myself first. Never play another’s game. In all of my doings ask who or
what benefits me.
People’s mentality changes with society. The social state determines
people’s outlook on life. Social media overtook the world and so people
need to adapt to the frequencies and changes brought upon the world
from and through social media. If social media is a filter for authenticity
then maybe that’s the direct link with people wearing filters and not
being their authentic selves.
Dangerous is he not concerned with society’s expectations nor the
social ramifications of not following the trends.
There is a possibility that how I think and what I think is programming.
Have I ever considered the possibility that my thoughts are not my own?
Where do I get my thoughts… these thinking patterns? I ask where I
came from but I never ask where my thoughts came from or if they’re of
my own. I’m not my thoughts – they’re simply vehicles I could choose
to ride or not.

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There are consequences for not acting like myself, for I reap what I
don’t want; I live in the alternatives… in the sides.

It’s in my fighting that I see the quarrel in my life. When I accept reality
the fighting ceases and all I see is the possibility for growth.

Facing myself is one of the hardest things I’ve done because in the midst
of facing what I am I’ve had to swallow my pride and come to terms
with myself. I learned that I was never this idealized version of myself
that I thought I was. Who I am doesn’t exist and cannot be momentarily
defined because my identity is ultimately forged throughout my lifetime.
I could change what I am but that change only births from primarily
confronting what I am.

When I live without regard for the measures of society I truly live; it’s a
heartfelt energy from my core that resonates do deeply almost everybody
feels it on a quantum level – including the magnetic fields of the earth.
Heart energy emits the strongest and furthest and it only forms through
authenticity; that is, being honest to the core with thyself.

Free myself from others’ opinions and expectations but not from my
responsibilities and obligations.

It’s much better to be authentically insecure and owning up to it than
being superficially secure – for nothing can manifest.

Tensions block the way. Ease paves the way.
Empathy comes from understanding. To be understanding I have to
be open-minded. To be open-minded I need to set aside the ego.
Detach from the outcome. Only then will you be free. Though your
bones may be broken refuse to break another’s for only then you’ll have
peace and maybe just maybe a speedy recovery, for healing must come
from the quantum level in order for it to be projected onto the physical
level.
Where were the bold? Where were the courageous? Dispositions that
lack nobility end up becoming society’s favorite.
Relationships that have gone south when they meant to go north
sometimes never knew their worth when times went worse.

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Find the silver lining from the silver bullet.
Authenticity is not encouraged. Individualism is dead. You must follow
the trends to be liked… to fit in.
In every horror movie dealing with the paranormal the main characters
almost always faces the inevitable repercussions that beget them when
they lift the veil from the normal to the paranormal.
A lot of our confusion of self – identity come from wanting to fit in
and adhere to the trends and the status quo. We’re listening to what
others are telling us to be… to what we should be.
Your best ally is your mind. If you learn how to control your mind
you can control not the world but your world.
All we are is chasing a feeling.
Never conform yourself to another’s perceptions or expectations. The
right people and things will fit into your mold.
Don’t write advice based on comfort. Write advice based on growth.
Those that don’t fit into your mold don’t fit in for a reason - don’t waste
your time lingering over it.
We all want to be accepted but never settle for being accepted at your
own individual expense – intend to be ace[ted for who you are – yet, not
solely for who you are but rather an improved version of yourself – for
those who do the work are worthy of the rewards.
You had no knowledge of it, then you became aware of it, then you
were curious about it, you then tried it and you liked it… fell in love
with it… abused it, and all the while you knew you were using what
was destroying you but you kept using it anyways not for the taste but
because you were addicted… knowing that eventually it would lead
to your death. What you once thought would help you in your time
of loneliness and pain actually took your life away – including the
possibility to feel love and joy.
Some people live life one – sided. They listen to and pay attention to
the things that they want to hear out of their convenience and comfort

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but neglect the things that they don’t want to hear – sometimes its those
things that they don’t want to hear that are what’s best for them so they
never really live up to their full potential because they don’t embrace
every side.

If you don’t face your demons they will eventually eat you alive.
Never starve yourself of certain leisure in attempt to ensure disciplinary
use over that leisure. What will happen is that once you’ve starved
yourself enough and finally give yourself a taste of that leisure you will
indulge in that leisure which defeats the purpose you had in mind which
was to starve yourself of that leisure to have more self – control. Instead
you ought to balance yourself.
Why do we feel the need to burden others? Is it because we’re hurt?
So in a way of deflecting the blame on us (which is easy to understand
because no one likes feeling blamed or ashamed or we all have trouble
taking accountability) so we latch the blame onto others so that we
feel justified for our actions because we can’t cope with the fact that
what we did was wrong. To take accountability is not shameful – it’s
responsible. What’s shameful is not that we mess up. What’s shameful
is that we don’t improve. To feel pain or make mistakes is what makes
us human but to not own up to them and bounce back makes us lesser
than being human… for humans evolve and not dissolve. Life is always
going forward never backward.

Drew Soliz has been writing since he was in middle school in 3rd grade. As he says,
"writing is a vehicle I could use for my imaginative mind so I could process my thoughts
more clearly and find steady ground where they could hopefully and eventually take root."
This is his first submission to a literary magazine.

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POETRY
POESIA



REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE

ELEANOR'S POEMS

by Nardine Sanderson

Poem one: (Decorum)
How bitter sweet is sleep, The pillage of the end, where death evades the
breath of life, and silence is a friend, for what becomes of us and love,
does it last eternity and seek freedoms
Like a dove.

Poem two: (values)
I cannot place my value on a single string that love would play, for I am
mortified that death might take away, all that I had valued in a single
note of bliss, and once it comes , the blue unpleasant, might linger
longer
than a kiss.

Poem three: (forgiveness)
Must I ask forgiveness, from the dark void that steals the light, love
would armour any hand, but willingness to fight, for love it lives in
shallow ground, the water takes it toll, and there is would justify that
ache within
my soul.

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Poem four: ( starlight)

This the night so bitterly divided and starlight makes an interesting
scene, but not before we are subsided for all the love that lays between,
how does one then reach the heaven’s , whilst the clouds all rage with
rain, and that lonesome wind it calls, unto my

heart again.

Poem five: ( live in him)
Will the tapestry weave his soul into webs of my sleeping limbs, for I
have suffered long and hard but waiting, for the hymns, a song might
play against the waves and morrow bring the dawn, but I have many
times before felt as if forlorn, oh sorrows plague me in the heart, where
he alive can only dwell , and tender I may live in him a holy light as well.

Poem six: (clovers in the rain )

When the light shines on the clover and rain persists to fall, luck might
grant him pardon and not hurt at all, for what of his heart when faith
insists he be as brave, only to find his gentle love falls

upon a grave.

Poem seven: ( judgement )
Might judgement call this dusty place A lifeless home, and deaths
disgrace, for withered like an evening rose, the ocean greets beside, and
throws, back and forth the moon of night, only to greet the lending
light , which shadow on my pale face, and all those angels lead with
grace, to a paradise unknown, when seeds of love are set aside, because
that love
had slowly died.

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Poem eight: ( alleviate my pain)

If the harrowing wind shall brace these arms, like they have never loved
before, and heavens grounds shall reap thus soul, in high tides evermore,
should you find the cold limbs of an enchanted tree, turning barren,
no fruits, held down by the seasonal rupture of a seaside , down with
roots, buried in a tomb misplaced, when grace has left the light, behind,
alleviate my pain my darling for love I say

I’ve lost my mind.

Poem nine: (surrender not to death)
Surrender not to death my darling, for long might angels sing, what
i cant nor dare to say as an offering surrendered hearts they plead for
light, and mine well due might glow, but only as a star might wonder,
towards the night and so , deep breaths would have been hard below
the tiding sea, and as you know, I loved the so
More than life in me.

Poem ten: ( reconcile )

Can you begin to reconcile the love within your heart my dear, for all is
dark without a flame, and I fear the end is near, how does one tell the
heart to stop, it loves forever just the same, and nothing can relieve that
ember of my aching pain, for I am lost amongst the dark , my darling
, awaiting the coming light, and so I say , it soon is day

But leave thee in the night.

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THE ONLY LETTER I COULD NOT
SEND

By Nardine Sanderson

Dearest beloved,
Do not weep for I am sleeping and paradise it holds the light, a frail

moon, would lay with doom and all the star’s would fright. But you
my darling Edgar, might not understand me now, long ago we were so
young and strong enough some how, my very weakness proceeds me, to
the cliff face and the tide, a place of rest for ghosts they haunt, I kept it
all inside, I shall lay with sorrow at the rushing of the stormy sea, and
there make heavens angels come, and waves would cover me, and love
would neither part the way, it lives eternal like our vow, you may hold
my heart against the pressing chamber now, so leave not the window
open, and place more rose to pasture there, for I was loved so tenderly,
but in my depths despair, forever seems to promise something, I know
you'll love and never leave, but ghost or darkness, I had nothing but
my lungs to breathe, in my shallow water the rocks make better use of
me, and so my tears lay hollow, too
Into the deepest sea, where loves sweet accordance won't crave me in
the wretched end
For you my sweet darling, were my one and only friend. Love me
in the seasons when the amber takes to heavens sky, and leave me not
without a rose
beneath the tide, for I .
Eleanor.

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As so loved for many years, my Eleanor of light, and as the haunting so
begun, it was my only right. Needless to say I loved her hard, embrace
she was by deaths great tide and I was broken beyond measure for my
darling bride.
There lays a tomb of troubled souls, whom could not bare the other
leave, and so one died, the other cried, and haunted I believe.
Two ghosts may travel the waves, of love into the ocean deep, love
forever haunts, the halls in shadows that they keep.

Nardine Sanderson is an Australian author poetess whose love of word's stretch across the
sea to immortalize the loves in her life.

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RAM

by Debendra Lal,
Translated from the Odia by Pitambar Naik

Whether or not Ram was there
I don’t know. Whether or not
Ram would come one day,
that also I don't know. But then,
the only thing I know is that
there’s one Ram Lal
there’s one Ram Prasad
there’s one Ram Kumar
and there’s one
Ram Narayan Ghasi.

The one who’s a servant
at someone’s house
the one who’s pulling a rickshaw
from daybreak to the sundown
the one who’s
begging from door to door
and the one who’s head-carrying
human excreta daily
from the Notified Area Council.

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I’m saying the truth, whether
or not Ram was, I don’t know.

Ram is considered to be one of the 33 crore gods of Hinduism. People of Hinduism believe
that Ram was a great king and he’d come again to rule. In this poem, the poet rules out
the existence of Ram and depicts the most inhuman practice—casteism of Hinduism that
is prevalent in India for around 3500 years. The poem portrays its blood-chilling and
despicable impact on Dalits, Adivasis and Other Backward Castes which has become a
doom for them.

HUNGER

Right behind the godown
there’s Manjula’s shanty
and the godown is full of rice.

Rats are living on it
soil is living on it
rice, rice, rice
scattered everywhere
unevenly in the entire godown.

Manjula’s husband has
gone out to work
he’s not yet back, it’s
already 4 in the evening.

Munni, the little baby
says crying, I am hungry,
get me food, get me food.

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Yet, poor Manjula
can’t light her hearth to cook.

REVOLT

I slashed the tongue
the two eyes started revolting.

I scooped the two eyes out
the two hands started revolting.

I cut off the two hands
the two legs started revolting.

Then I disfigured the two legs
the head with no eyes
and tongue started revolting.

At last, chopping up the
head and body to fragments
I buried them under a deep pit.

Then I saw after a few days
from the pit there thronged
thousands and thousands
of insects and they started
revolting with great ruckus.

I got it and spoke to myself
who can stop someone
who wants to revolt?

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THE WILD

The wild will no longer be wild
but had they been wild forever,
it’d have been good. The wild will
gradually understand the difference
between the vowel and the consonant
they’ll also learn
how to sum up the arithmetic
they’ll study modern literature
science, geography and will understand
where the profit and loss is
along with the reason
why the sun rises and goes down.
the wild will no longer be wild----painful,
that’s my sorrow-----
like someone’s skeletal body
an empty stomach and
a tear that doesn’t ooze
and the unexploded whoop of the heart.

Coming out of the jungle, the wild
will understand the civility
and as time goes by, in a few decades
they’ll be civilised and
regret for their nakedness
they’ll be dressed in urban attire-----
jeans, blazer, suit, pants, bras and panties
they’ll tune to the latest cosmetics
instead of clay and turmeric
doing away with kendu-leaves bidi,

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they’ll switch over to smack and heroin.
And eventually, the wild will be civilised
leaving the deserted jungle they’ll fly
by the Boeing jet faster than the sound
facing towards the sky, they’ll go in search
of a new planet like the earth to recycle
another jungle to be wild at any cost.

SCENE

Yesterday again
someone was laying dead.

Truth was speechless
lie was smiling
religion was godless
violence was absconding
and fear had engulfed.

Kindness was dribbling
here and there
and God was absent!

Time was ticking clearly
and the police officer
was interrogating the crowd

tell me the truth
if anyone witnessed anything.

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Debendra Lal is a lawyer by profession. He writes poetry in Odia. His work appears
in numerous Odia journals and in Indian Literature, the journal of Kendra Sahitya
Akademi, New Delhi. He’s two books of poetry, Andhakshara and Birodhavasa. He grew
up in Odisha, India.
Pitambar Naik is an advertising professional. He reads for Mud Season Review. His
work appears or is forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, The Other Side of Hope,
Packingtown Review, Ghost City Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Rigorous,
New Contrast, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Outlook, The Indian Quarterly and The
World That Belongs To Us HarperCollins India and elsewhere. He’s a book of poetry, The
Anatomy of Solitude (Hawakal). He grew up in Odisha and lives in Hyderabad, India.

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WHERE ARE YOU GOING

by Dennis Williams

Where are you going?

Where are you going?
So late at night
It’s way past bedtime
It’s long past midnight

Are you running from some turmoil?
Did you see a terrible fight?
What causes you to be out?
Or to take this dangerous flight

Did you hear someone calling?
In voice unknown
Or are you chasing the wind
That has just been blown
To a destination
Over the yonder unknown.

There must be an explanation
For this futile act
Exploring down this scary lane
Liable to attack.

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Croaking at my window.

Croaking toad at my window
Annoying me at least
Do you bring me a message?
Before I go off to sleep

Croaking at my window
You annoy me at the best
Loudest at the moment
I want to doze off to rest

I’ll search the edges
Tomorrow
When the sun is out bright
And give you some of the bothers
You dole out last night.

I’ll trim the edges
Exposing the stage from which you act
Then summoned all my foe
That prowl in broad daylight
Hoping you’ll leave me a night
Where I can rest in peace. End.

DennisWilliams is an urban poet with a rural mind. He reads poems for fun and writes
them for a living. His pen is his weapon and the paper is his tool. He appreciates poets and
never misses the opportunity to read their work. He never stops writing poetry, because he
believes that persistence will win in the end.

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NO BONES ABOUT IT

by Ken Holland

NO BONES ABOUT IT

Someone told me that my story
was a story that would be told.
But I can’t remember who it was
that spoke when he spoke so.
Or who he said the teller would be.
Or if I would be the teller
of my own story. A story that bumps
and grinds within my mind,
and throws its arms up against
my skull. Which is, after all,
the bone of all I’ll ever know.
 

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SHELF LIFE

I’m reading a book I bought secondhand
which was already secondhand before I bought the book
being a book that had once belonged to a library
so who knows how many hands the book had passed through,
though emblazoned on the spine in black block letters
was the word DISCARD, so it’s likely
the hands it had passed through were few,
as the uncreased pages would attest to, though I find
the poems within worthy of having been well kept,
and well worthy of keeping, and worth adding to my will
a codicil instructing my daughter that when the day comes
for discarding all else, please allow the once discarded
to lie peacefully on the shelf.

 

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ENTOMOLOGY

He passed away peacefully.
Peacefully he passed.
Across the room his wife
is watching a wasp
at the window. She is quietly
amused, unsure which side
of the glass the wasp is clinging to.

 

COVID GUIDELINES

When they buried her, they buried her
Six feet deep.
Keeping her proper distance.
The distance we properly keep.

 

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HOW PERFECT THE IMPERFECTION

All glass is broken.
Whatever its shape,
Or perfection.
The Earth is glass, and perfectly so.
From which we cut perfect forms—
False faceted diamonds, and globes
With their wet confetti of snow.
All of it cut from the Earth.
All of it perfectly broken.

Ken Holland, an award-winning poet, has been nominated three times for the Pushcart
Prize, and has had work widely published in such journals as Rattle, Tulane Review,
Southwest Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and Tar River with poetry forthcoming
in a half dozen others. He’s won/placed in various contests and has had work included in
several anthologies. He spent his rent-earning years working for various NYC publishers,
and currently lives and breathes in the mid-Hudson Valley of New York. You can visit his
recently launched his website at: www.kenhollandpoet.com

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SOFT, DEAD LEAF

by Winslow MacDonald

I. Soft, Dead Leaf

The night that you killed yourself
I walked down to the clearing where

As boys
We had built a settlement,
As pioneers we cleared the trees,
And when the land gasped out
We leaned logs against boulders
And fell asleep beneath the lean tos.

Then one night, when the fire whispered last
We were awakened by the human shrieks of a dying animal
And the next morning we found the still-steaming carcass

Of a dead deer lying on purple moss
With an eye resting gently on a soft, dead leaf

And we left it there

So the night that you called me
To tell me that you killed yourself
I walked down through the forest to the clearing

And found two boys,

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Asleep under lean tos
With a fire breathing gently
Against the seething earth.

 

I. The Castrato on the Corner

The Castrato on the corner sings in the city of dominoes
sings of the concrete blankets

the birds that croak all night and into the day.

Sixteen, sixteen, the Castrato sings and his voice is unwavering.
Sixteen people, the mornings teem of men:

their small dogs and the men’s stuttering strides
their ballpoint heads, an insignificant triangle.

The Castrato sits on his corner,
on his black plastic, throne

subaltern, he watches these sorry men
counts them and their sorry, stuttering strides

but chooses not to sing of them.

The Castrato is the singer of a court
and each court has its King.

Each night, when the people are far apart,
their camps, their reeking mass, like globs of spit on the streets and

manbarren avenues,
the Castrato serenades his bearded Majesty,
who reigns prostrate on the unporous ground.

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The King hears this voice and maps in his cluttered mind
the extant corners of his realm.

The King touches his urban estates, their towering cliffs.
He floats to the peopled cells

and smiles to the suffocated ground, in awe of his noble subjects.

The song trembles only far enough to reach the King
and his most cherished.

It does not reach the city’s steeples,
its silent and seething innards.

The Castrato looks to the near-deaf and gently-battered moon,
cursing the nocturne,

The cold that belongs to them both.

 

II. Linear Express

The sign on the train station’s door turned a year old this weekend
Temporarily closed.

The Railroad Girl sits above the cut her legs swinging
and all about the quiet concrete.

The Railroad takes you down the coast
of heavy peninsulas sinking in their overgrown
each building stepping closer to their farther continents

The Railroad takes you and it carries her.

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In the Watched City the people walk on strings
and await their sorry reinforcements.

The old man lets a rat climb over his bed
and on the islands those called unrepentant bury wooden caskets.

From the Rattling miles away, the Watched City is innocent.
A pigeon flies from its open wounds,
The city’s blood blameless,

repulsed by the unnamed infection, unsmelled,
a pigeon flies from a gash in the punctured ceiling and crawls across

the unmapped sky.

The Railroad Girl forgets her hands and her thumbs and how they
bend.

In the mansodden car we wait and wish for white speckled or piebald
breasts,

for little crown beaks
with which we might rip at the porthole somewhere in the City’s

abdomen
our bejeweled and ravenous new mouths tear open a clean circle
let vent the choleric shroud, let bleed the mealy human current

Before time, or indeed the bloated earth,
could wretch the Railroad Girl from her ironspiked spine,
she did so herself and clutched the last unfloating particle

before the Watched City ate the train in secret.
And she wondered if she was just a girl now,

naked of the iron and the electric,
the steel-shrouded burglar,
the artifactual woman,

the Third, a man, barren and questioning.  

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III This is New York

It’s evening, outside it’s New York, and the subway rattles swiftly
through the darkness.

His steady pilgrimage to your side of the railway car is slow, a crawl,
and

you lean backwards into your seat
because he leans eighteen inches too far in your direction when the

train lurches,
And when he nears you close your eyes,

because the glance looks in you.
For a moment, there is an impulse inside that envisions the dollar

bills in your pocket
crumpled in the grime of his hands, handed in for a glass bottle that

stands upright
on the street of the lost souls.

There are men that don’t feel the grease of subways and rarely
circumvent the sleeping bodies on the church steps,

knowing their children will only confront certain realities.
And though we together make one sum,

there is more than one New York we do not share.
When I walk past shimmering skyscrapers,

I wonder if from their Cathedral of Aspiration these men look down
on the vascular system
of the city below
and see us.
 

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IV Virginia State Penitentiary

The grass gets yellower in the early knight
all the grass on the three knobbed hills.
They rise from the fleshy ground like women's breasts,

that from the young boy
who forgets his owning nursing,

resents his weaned lips,
and has not been with a woman to know her breasts.

The three hills rise, two of them beside one another.
The young boy and his family are camped on one of the hills.

On the third, far away, sits a castle
that springs from the grass.

The grass springs from the trees.
In the castle are prisoners.

Are the Virginia State Penitentiary.

The boy with his mother looks at the far hill with the prison
and cannot make the prison into a finger or a mangled wrist,

into anything but a castle,
the castle and the hills that look like three breasts.

They boy and his family all think about the men in the castle,
the uniformed men. White & Black.
Stripe the jaundiced ground,
the yellow lights
the yellow sky
the virginia earth.

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In the ground the boy digs
in his eye.

He digs with his fingers
and tunnels,

but he cannot find the concrete of the castle.

Night.
The lights still yellow and the young boy

in his little tent
Cannot sleep against the hard unbreathing ground.

He stomps
The ground trapped beneath the youthtired palms of his feet

pink but not to the night.

He leaves the tent
smells the dark the open dark

no creatures but him then.
The land sits like an anchor on black speckled porcelain

The young boy looks at the third hill
with the castle sitting on it like a hat.

The third hill nods its light into the abject silence.

The men inside, sleeping in their concrete shackles.

 
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V A Certain Sorrow

The first drops of sunlight do not yet remind me of the cursed blood
and in those moments I do not yet want to dissect my own knotted

head,
as the ax did hers,
and find that engram in which those shards of skull
gray hair matted, unfolded bones,

are stored.

the ax hemorrhaged in midair,
until the earth,

drank its blood in anticipation.
Am I troubled or am I dead?
I am awake now
and I remember.

I wanted only to prove to the world my triumph
to report to them what I could do and what they could not.

that one could look at me
and not read, as it were, a certain sorrow (1)

but rather see the transformation
from dust to mountain, the course held only by those

who know that nature, corrected and guided, (2)
is theirs, the victim of their aspirations
and those of all men.

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so when the trembling light shined on the blood
which the ground would not surrender
I saw the futility of my ignoble sacrifice.

(1) Crime and Punishment, 16.
(2) Crime and Punishment, 65.
Winslow MacDonald recently graduated from Columbia University in New York City.
Originally from Maine, Winslow has published his historical and political research and
hopes to produce more fiction as he encounters his youth in the city.

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THIRD EYE SAGAS

by Megan Denese Mealor

Painting Party at an Indian Buffet

I am scumbling a cataract waterfall with underhanded oils,
ad-libbing the lilac current and dysmorphic October Glory maple trees.
Feeling prolific and pioneering, I fashion a festooned mermaid
headlining shamrock curls, gaudy beneath the lioness sun
atop an out-of-tune libertine boulder garden.

The pedestrian instructor clears her throat stormily,
downturned eyes resentful as solar streetlamps
behind her rimless blonde tortoise frames
as she earmarks my mutinous aesthetic.

My syndicated mother towed me to this loitering class
within a strip mall Indian dive, the peppercorn air pulsating
with bouquets of cardamom, mutton, unleavened flatbread.
The curry buffet winking with fairy lights is distended
with acerbic cuisine that begets my broken heart
to broil like a battery acid drip.

My mother’s painting is, of course, timidly idealistic,
her sentimental waterfall poignant with larkish layers

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of pewter, aqua, salmon, smoke, isabelline, silver bullet, bone.
Her tailored flapper bob is a last-word showstopper,
Cupid’s bow lips nuanced as a silent starlet’s enigma.

Her latest bank’s silver manager extended the skittish invite
to what he broadcast as a “Paint and Sip Party with kebabs”
after Mom dropped by in a maroon leather pencil skirt
to dramatically deposit her fourth bona fide paycheck.
She keeps insisting (with no actual probing from me),
there is nothing amorous, schmaltzy, awkwardly sanguine,
or starry-eyed about his incidental entreaty.

Yet she took three-and-a-half hours to get dolled up,
discarding four-fifths of her smug diplomatic wardrobe
before culling the evergreen cable-knit sweater
Dad ponied up two Christmas Eves ago,
the most claustrophobic jeans in her swarming closet,
ultrasuede peep toe pumps and liquid eyeshadow,
counteracted by an Ethiopian emerald lavalier
vignetted against her unearthed collarbone,
Ferrari lips contradicting peaches-and-cream.

She must have pocketed a sunup manicure
because her embittered fingernails have been forged
into temporary silk periwinkle talons which clash
with her liberal yellow platinum coiffure.

I diagnose the sidekick savor of Chasing the Dragon Hypnotic,
sardined beside Mom at a reclusive folding crafts table
within the banquet room of two-month-old Curry Kingdom.
Diamond-studded notes of pink pepper and fir balsam mist her marrow.
She must have wielded that crystal flagon wholeheartedly,

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REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE

perhaps petrified of the sensual amber aura deserting her
along with her second, fifth, and eighth cherry pie cachets.

The rest of my slapdash classmates are barely propelling
their neophyte paintbrushes, far more stimulated by the
skyscraping stoneware plates stockpiled with butter chicken,
lamb vindaloo, banana fritters, samosas in mint sauce.

None of these crackerjack women are wearing
high heels or passionate perfume or carnal lipstick.
They gossip grouchily, mouths full of chickpea batter,
wiping devil-may-care hands upon whisker washed jeans.

The bank manager in a stock-tie brooch has been governing
the reverse end of the gossamer collapsible table all afternoon,
garishly coquetting a chirping twenty-year-old curvy Latina
clad in ripped overalls and a Candy Cane Tulip arm sleeve.

My mother’s animated indigo eyes never brush their way,
immersed in her invigorating canvas and bottomless blushes,
now commanding a flawless symmetry of violet and celeste
for vivifying an Indian summer evening sky ballet.

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ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE

Incoherence

It was how you overhung the spirit quartz rain
above Old Woman's Creek
that glibly thawed the syndromes
of my flickering convertible skin,
your fire-dancing into the furrows
of a heart gone breezeless.

Your upturned topaz scrutiny
detonated overdrawn overestimation,
the very counterfeit breath
when snow pellets dramatize ice crystals,
vampiric diamond dust needles
gnawing Sandusky supermoons.

With all the wiles of a Banded Tulip
spitting on tabbed sweethearts,
I candidly dog-eared the angular temper
of your truant longboard,
the impolite symmetry of mute swans
pluming such well-tailored contour.

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