Adelaide Literary Magazine No. 54, October 2022

REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE

Third Eye Sagas

The specters are starting to take over my reach-in closet,
already sardined with rusting halter tops, skittish stilettos.
These revenants exhale ashes of boat orchid funeral wreaths,
unbarred eyes hemic with beachheads and canyonsides.

The tinseled revivalist enslaved in a Bordeaux robe
dripping coquille feather sleeves arises every skyblush,
supplicating in Carpathian Romani at the cashew footboard,
offering up alms and psalms to any bleeding-heart angel,
a capsized Mary Magdalene exorcizing trumped-up demons.

Her crib-noting pepper shaker grandiose daughter
acute with Skylark foo foo, asymmetrical draped hip,
nourished by chiselers, alligator jazz, and torpedo juice,
robot-bombed this Fox Fields wedding cake-contoured
Second Empire baroque with cut stone, balustrades, and
Flagstone clapboard trim, gung-ho for a Governor’s Palace
genuine fake manor on the hill, funded by her egg-beating
crab patch mother’s pennies from heaven.

I don’t have the heart to clarify hell-bent hydraulics
of astringent offspring to this forsaken lost sheep
primping dime store Art Deco hinged half hoops,
Bakelite bone, synthetic rock crystal asymmetry.
She warbles, an aweless wren, about her coterie of
polished Lucite poodles, penguins, toucans, leopards, bulls.

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Neither can I summon the mettle to unfold to her
the quick-freezing fact that her peripheral overtures
are grasped only by a lonelily woman tardy on rent,
dreaming of circling sharks and headless folklore.

She implores me to recoup the gold architecture dangles
she was set in quartz stone about being laid to rest in,
rabidly insisting that her spitting cobra sister-in-law,
a mugbug Minnie Moocher who kicked the gong around,
navigating her wolfish wares from the brother’s secretary desk
to his Louis XVI giltwood bed, hijacked the heirship earrings
before dramatizing her meteoric plunderage earned from
the groom’s quick-tempered influenza mere weeks after
bartering his thriving uptown shoes sovereignty
for a thunderstruck sum.

The untarnished widow donned Gatsby ballroom crystal drops
at the cliff-hanging wake, the dead brother’s loved ones
retreating in revulsion after paying final respects.

This roundheel sister-in-law never wanes from
the beggar banshee’s tantrums for a peerless moment,
trapping her own figmental essence in slow-burn brimstone.
Her inexistence is panoramic.

A primitive, petulant lad in muddy pantaloons
boomerangs his lemon peel baseball up and down
the bronze-baked staircase on the declining occasions
our dethawing family receives visitors (mostly clammy priests),
his decomposing giggle waxing macabre hysterics
as our ruffled callers furnish their unmilled excuses,
making pyretic escapes.

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My stepson has glimpsed this sunless kid pacing hallways,
swears to the very Lord that the insensible child’s face
has depicted a vulture, a rat snake, a gurgling skull.

The unfinished war widow in the bias-cut gown with
a slashed backline, Red Cross Coquette air step heels,
black olive hair mantled in pin-up top victory rolls,
is by far the most unsaved and unforgiving of them all.

She crouches by the floral fireplace in the Surrealist den,
toiling to warm a gossamer pair of pipe dream hands.
I’ve withstood her frenzied dogma in the freshly-fussy
Amish-toned guestroom where she was reputedly throttled
on the parquetry parlor by her big-wheel lover,
an impeachable senator’s son who never stood trial,
was wed within the year to the primrose niece
of the local Lutheran youth pastor.

The unseeing widow still huddles in vain
for her sweetie to return bearing yellow lilies,
cordial apologies, profound excuses,
the promise of poignance and children.
She doesn’t miss her first husband, then or now,
a corporal who shattered on a gaping beach.

This piteous waif carved an unflinching eye
into the built-in butler pantry door,
frantic to imprint her shadowless survival.

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Gamine

Arsenic-blue maidenhair
hammers at the French barn door
like homicidal harbinger banshees,
or werewolves whittled from Baily’s Beads

Platinum pixies pamper the stargaze hothouse
birthing bullheaded bouquets of floss flowers,
quicksilver pomp trailing Lusty Gallant
and drunk-tank pink, the tender articulation
in a flame-of-burnt-brandy butterfly kiss

Often, I will summon scapegrace zigzag Jobyna:
unvarnished eventide of black-market milestones
ill-mannered flower moon nighthawk kiss-curls
wildcat moxie in labyrinthine lifeblood
hunting steeplechases in cerulean snowstorms

Monophonic, we watered waxen orchids
crooning gypsy jazz for understory tea fields
graphed camisado shortcuts throughout
pine-floored Greek Revival plantations
branded tin lizzie go-carts with dirt road donuts
lindy-hopped the cha-cha-cha
wielding origami legwork
cross-examined historic lavender hotels
hunting the revised ghost of Jesse James
divined japa mala jumble sales
from Americana roots-rock ash heaps

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Between these discolored heartbeats
thrashing with tobacco shiraz and inanimate elegies,
you still lie in wait, a curtained gator
transporting twigs atop its pancaked skull,
luring in catbirds patchworking platform nests
Your koi pond essence lingers
like stolen apple perfume:
an atomic tootsie outlaw
in that rumpled peplum dress,
bumbling bungee cord sneaker boots,
catapulting rotting rogue ranches
into tectonic missing lakes

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At Age Thirty-Seven

Thirty-seven years old and still no sign of
hotspot mountains. I am too repressed to pull off
leg kicks at weddings, even when my pushiest
nonbiological uncles plead. I am always stuck in
plum or periwinkle cupcake tulle, forever the
retrospect bridesmaid with the drunkest escort.

I am too obsolete to relearn high school Latin,
too dishonest to teach myself action origami.
I can no longer, in good conscience,
erode crochet underboob crop tops
scored from corporate hippie hawkers,
stockpile novelty unicorn keychains,
annex flapper dress fringe totes.

During which phase are you obliged to outlaw
your ham-fisted polychromatic braid flower,
commence donning formless soot-hued slacks and
those slashed-sleeve sheaths your aunt insists on
burdening you with at annual Christmas bashes?

I’ll hawk mermaid cat cookie jars at yard sales,
stop exploiting dollar-store warm sugar vanilla,
actually start exerting those junk mail credit cards
for Nordstrom, Coldwater Creek, J. Crew,
learn to tolerate the tang of blood oranges,
to exude poignant daisies sown for the childless.

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My age-old niece will deify these Rainbow Brite stickers,
will lionize the musty menagerie of My Little Ponies
still vamping nylon cotton candy mohawks.

The unfinished attic cages the militant board games
left unstirred by battle since that uncombed morning
you last framed the jazz apple kitchen’s swing door,
just itching to confront the refrozen snowflakes
in your ghost-white soda ankle booties.

To my transient nephew,
I will transmit this scruffy Big Wheel
I used to patrol my pastel-painted precinct.

My mother may want Dad’s iron basset hounds back,
but probably not. She’d hide them in a garage capsule
instead of flaunting them in her teal farmhouse cabinet.
Or else she would donate them to the nearest congregation,
regardless of byzantine Biblical interpretation.

Once upon an enameled time,
there was a resealable girl who preserved
a class project terrarium for five and a half years.
She flickered up and down balance beams,
wrote English papers for swanky girls in baby tees,
spritzed unsent letters in Lisa Frank keepsake boxes,
allowed her faint-hearted kid sister to monopolize
her tea rose velveteen Minnie Mouse platform bed
on vertical, vagabond autumn nights.

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That arroyo of a girl has carried that bed on her back
all her life: across undersea mountains, through
black-tailed deserts obscuring towering vertical clouds.

Megan Denese Mealor resides in Jacksonville, Florida. A two-time Pushcart Prize
nominee, her writing has been featured in literary magazines worldwide, most recently
Penumbric, Bewildering Stories, and The South Shore Review. Megan has authored
three poetry collections: "Bipolar Lexicon" (Unsolicited Press, 2018); "Blatherskite"
(Clare Songbirds, 2019); and "A Mourning Dove’s Wishbone" (in the works). Megan
is currently toying with architectural photography and volunteering for animal shelters.
She and her husband, eight-year-old son, and three mollycoddled cats occupy a cavernous
townhouse ornamented with vintage ads for Victorian inventions.

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NAKED IN DREAMS

by Michael Eaton

Parting Is Sweet Sorrow

she left
and

didn’t leave
much of herself—

a blond hair
dropped without care,
frayed golden thread
on a worn and stained carpet,

a cup of coffee,
half-filled, unstirred,
and a smell lingering
on the morning sheets
like a winter fog lying lightly
over soggy ground

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Those Hidden Places

Poetry begins when your childhood
friend plays with someone else;
when the one you love says
she only wants to be your friend.
Poems come from that secret
place where your uncle touched you
while your aunt wasn’t looking.

Poetry comes up from the bottom
of your soul, slowly rising like
stinking fumes of sulphur, like
bloated corpses that will not stay underwater,
that must find their way to the surface.

Writing poetry is like pulling your
own teeth without anesthetics,
like chewing your leg off to
get free of the trap; hanging
yourself in the cell to cheat
the electric chair.

What we call poetry
has many seeds; some
grow into flowers and
some into weeds.

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Uncentered

I’ve always felt a bit off-kilter;
not in the same world as others.
A child trying to seesaw with himself
while the others played on swings.
Afraid to go to church because
the congregation prayed for
the final Rapture of death.
I believed that prayers came true

I always felt my nose was larger, that
I had on different colors of socks,
the right one brown and the left one blue;
as if the rear of my pants was torn,
as if my DNA came from alien worlds.
Perhaps I was a foundling
brought in from the forest,
having been raised by animals.

My thoughts stroll on different paths
than ones where others are jogging.
My hot air balloon is blown out to sea;
the rescue ship has sprung a leak.
I am locked in a space capsule when
it explodes, seeing only
blue sky, flames, and angels.

I should sneak off and hide somewhere,
before they realize there is a wolf
loose in their holy places.

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Remembrances

They only exist in the
corners of the room now,
like repossessed spider webs,
the tenants gone,
unable to make rent;
dusty strands of silk,
fading threads of memory,
offering only glimpses here
and there, sneak reviews
of life already past, or recollections
of that bare sight of thigh
above a woman’s stocking,
before she lowers her dress.

All things you do
become memories and
attach like mistletoe,
needing a host,
slowly draining you,
sprouting white berries;
lovely to kiss underneath,
but dangerous to eat.

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Or, perhaps they are like
the wispy ends of dreams
as you awaken,
not telling the whole story,
but letting you remember
just enough to keep you
from going back to sleep.

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Naked In Dreams

Poetry is just too damned embarrassingly personal;
airing your own dirty laundry in public,
or writing unpleasant truths about your friends,
praying they won’t see themselves in the poem,
hoping they will see themselves in the poem,
trusting they won’t kill the messenger.

Reading a poem aloud is like
coming out of the closet to your parents,
like standing red-faced in the bathroom
with your pants around your ankles,
like loudly breaking wind in the middle
of your onstage plie’.
Poetry doesn’t always smell like roses.

The audience stares with blank gazes,
yelling, “Take it off. Take it all off.”
looking for their money’s worth,
wanting to see the poet’s naked soul,
even when they know that souls are invisible,
even when the poet thought
he had it lit in flashing neon.

Poets will continue to be caught and embarrassed
putting their hands down unbuttoned blouses,
sneaking back in their windows late at night,
slipping the magazines under the mattresses,
trading quick kisses with other men’s wives,
walking naked in dreams while others are dressed.

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But, poets go on with their singing—
eccentrics in their own home towns—
with stains on their shirtfronts
and their flies unzipped,
wishing their voices carried better,
wishing for the silver tongues of gods,
reading poems with pebbles in their mouths.

Michael Eaton: "Growing up in Littlefield TX, rather than receiving my knowledge in
the public schools, I spent my weekly allowance on paperback books learning about the
world from writers like Steinbeck and Faulkner. I graduated from San Francisco State
University during the experimental years of the sixties while living in a commune, with
a MA in Creative Writing. I write to stay sane in an insane world. Currently living in
Austin TX helping to keep it weird. To date I have poems published in over 20 magazines."

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EMPEROR'S CONCERTO

by Richard Weaver

Emperor’s Concerto, Ocean Springs MS, 1943

My blackened windows are part of the coastal
war defense, or so I’ve been told. Even so,
this is no room for sleep. Beethoven’s violins race

through the open door of night and the piano
plays catch as catch can along the darkened shoreline.
Almost without effort, lost to a world that demands

each note in its place, each line drawn exact.
Last night, when the room danced with images,
I had only to listen and transcribe until the sun

lifted the blackout. The day-moon, caught unaware,
was hovering in the pine-tops, a bronze amulet.
After a swim in the harbor I saw a squirrel

doing battle with one of my companion cats.
Each had staked out a claim to my breakfast;
neither dares face me. I balance their fear

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against the simple fact that I am happy. Nothing less
keeps me here. The tabby’s high-toned purring, (she pretends
I saved her), a holiness I can accept. As for the squirrel,
it has scampered out of sight and hides in the persimmon.
I hear it muttering threats to the world at large. And laugh
and laugh with the many bright voices of this deaf world.

Richard Weaver hopes to return as the writer-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub where
has written 485 prose poems since 2016 and freely admits he was one of the founders
of the Black Warrior Review, and its Poetry Editor for a time. His pubs: Dead Mule,
Birmingham ArtsJ, Steel ToeR, SouthernQ, XavierR, Pembroke, & New OrleansR.
He’s the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992), and provided the libretto
for a symphony, Of Sea and Stars (2005), performed 4 times to date. Recently, his 170th
prose poem was published.

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WHAT IT CAME TO

by Peter Cashorali

What It Came To

I never thought it would come to this
When I drove across town to get more cocaine
Or watched the bulldozer fill in the grave
Or played in the waves with my bucket and pail
Or was eaten in gym class by bullies each day
Or showed my mother my work in three books
Or walked down the hall to meet my first client
Or saw with a shock that my hair had grown thin
Or left him alone with his suicide plan
Or learned to tell different psychotic disorders
Or had such a terrible time at the prom
Or pored over alchemy trying to cure AIDS
Or got my nerve up to give her a call
Or realized yes that I loved him again
Or worked in a panic to balance the budget
Or cleaned her apartment out after she died
Or couldn’t go out with that zit on my nose
Or drove to Death Valley before dawn on Christmas
Or spat in the hole that old friend left behind
Or never got into bed with a woman
Or understood life was now over and finished

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Or took off my shirt in front of the mirror
Or lay on the couch in the empty apartment
Or learned orange crayon was how you made skin
Or was an old man feeding cats in the dark
But it came to this anyway, to my surprise,
It all came to this. This is where it began.

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Empty Room

If the plants arriving from themselves.
If where pictures are rising up from nothing.
If a river singing strongly through the desert.
If the crowded room but the empty ceiling.
If silence slipping between the sounds.
If the enemy’s face opening and a baby.
If housing in a grain of salt.
If stars filling the day sky.
If a stranger in the driver’s license.
If nobody’s fingerprints.
If empty shoes.
Then squares of sunlight on the wall.
Then a chair keeping itself company.
Then a breeze all through the house,
The hedge all afternoon,
A door out of the burning building
In spite of the advantages.
A going out.

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True Love

Two people don’t hear the same poem.
I’m one of a pair and I’m always alone.
We were like two drinks of water in the same glass.
Simply to live with him I had to learn
How to live without anyone.
Our living room took place out in the desert at night,
Where there were all those stars but no roads,
Where if I learned to survive or not was my problem.
I put my eye to a dry crack in the wall.
I could see a country where the weather was just beautiful,
And to my further surprise he was there.
After he died he knew where to find me.
Some mornings we sit together on the couch
And talk about how we said goodbye for good.
The first time I laid eyes on him I knew
I had never seen him before.
He had no brothers or sisters or parents,
Just those hints you sometimes find in poems and novels.
He was something about me, wasn’t he?
When he said he could no longer live with me
I thought he meant he was leaving.
I looked into his eyes never seeing him again.

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Andy

So there you were
In the boat of the sun
Gliding the smooth river under the world,
Alone as usual, not expecting
Much as your mother
In early life (as you said
Those many times)
Had erased your taste with ketchup
But with a mild appreciation
For the solitude and quiet
Which anyway was not disturbed
By anybody’s barking dog
Or developers who bought up
All of the old neighborhood
To the door of the apartment
You’d lived in forty-seven years
Whose threshold you refused to cross
Though your old and friendly books
Made their own ways to the dumpster.
Meanwhile you enjoyed the still
And quiet of your oarless glide
For as long as such rides last,
In no hurry to arrive.

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Wedding Vow

The most sought after
And the hardest to remember.
Everywhere you look
And hidden in its own shadow.
The promise kept at the end of every fairy tale
And an old yellow bruise.
A rose that sings forever.
A journey through thorns that never ends.
Remember,
When the time comes
The answer is yes.
The answer is “I do.”

Peter Cashorali is a psychotherapist, previously working in community mental health and
HIV/AIDS, now in private practice in Portland and Los Angeles. He is the author of two
books, Gay Fairy Tales (HarperSanFranciso 1995) and Gay Folk and Fairy Tales (Faber
and Faber, 1997). He has dealt with addiction, multiple bereavement and the transitions
from youth to midlife and midlife to old age and thinks you can too.

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AMICUS CURIAE IN IGNE

by William Pruitt

Amicus Curiae in Igne

Amicus curiae: an individual or organization who is not a party to a legal case, but who
is permitted to assist a court by offering information, expertise, or insight that has a
bearing on the issues in the case.


First Candle
None of the news sources looked too closely.
Did he use fire starter? What was he wearing?
How did he wear it? There was a photo of him
sitting with his head on fire. Did he make sounds?
Several feeds said there was no letter or manifesto,
Some linked it to a story of a shooter of random
pedestrians across town who then killed himself,
calling it “a day of chaos across the city,”
the hotline number at end of story
“if you or someone you know is in crisis...”

(How about
All of us?)

There will be a follow up piece
on the man & his life’s particulars,
what made him different, but it will not be

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on what made him like the rest of us,
how the world he lived in happens to be ours.
A few witnesses will be interviewed
some may admit to shielding their eyes
as we do when a pattern we
don’t want to look at takes form
not necessarily from brightness
but also from the dark where shapes
begin to achieve definition

The someday that Sununu said meant we don’t know,

single-handedly crushing consensus in Reagan’s America

now gives way to the Delphic soon.

Wynn Bruce combusted into metaphor.

Second Candle

If war is metaphor where someone actually has to die
what Wynn Bruce did was the ultimate act of war
The emphatic No that Melville imagined for Bartleby

No to who we are, (an aggregate of selves

blind to our ensemble)

No to what we praise (ignorance) & enshrine (fear)
till the Lie passes as a truly suicidal means to an end

No to a life which allows this monstrousness

No to every man for himself

No to man No to self

that self finally saying the final No

“I would prefer not to.”

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Third Candle
Three of you,

sweet young thing,
drop-dread gorgeous mother,
old gypsy crone,

your roots together go down into Earth
Whose mycelial neurons let trees interconnect
Who saw the stars form, who sees
geese cross the Great Lakes every spring & fall,
hears them honk as they land with a splash
Triple Goddess, you saw Wynn Bruce die,
in the ocean of your existence felt one tear fall

It’s hard to imagine,
Hard to conceive of the size of compassion
Hard to think this act would come from such passion

Fourth Candle
Praise for Wynn Bruce!
Who chanted his searing song
on Earth Day in front of the Court
that would say Earth has no defense
against the men who would choke her to death
as if the Court said to Derek Chauvin
You don’t have to lift your knee
by a six to three majority.

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Fifth Candle
Our disease is who and what we think we are,
It’s been this way since time began. Yesterday
Our fathers came home exhausted from war
We grew up thinking we were living in peace
Except for the massacre at Wounded Knee
we may or may not have learned of in school
and the massacre at Bud Dajo
we certainly did not learn of in school
and Little Rock, where we tried to stop
some of our own children from coming to school
and Selma, where we tried to keep some
of our own people from voting out fools
And My Lai where we couldn’t shield our eyes
And the glacier and the coral reef
we thought were unconnected to us
dead we thought, but the dead was in our thought
And the frogs and songbirds deemed expendable,
we call it Nature, kill so self can live to kill again,
the same self Wynn Bruce showed could be torched

Responsible individuals told the true picture
but the message didn’t come through all the way
the news didn’t quite get delivered
the ink that linked the dots didn’t stay

But we finally got it! We never were at peace
the shooting just stopped for a breath
the Fascist repaired to his den
you think the monster’s dead
but look he lifts his head again

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the zombie’s in the back seat
the killer’s in the house

Sixth Candle
An under-reported act that was
as far from random as can be. Was it suicide?

Is it suicide to write a poem? Auden said poetry
makes nothing happen but is that what it’s supposed to do?
Isn’t to make an impression to take something away?
Displace the reader’s sense of time with the poem’s own?

Seventh Candle
Los was the poet and smith of William Blake’s epic,
the divine aspect of the imagination, the one
who labors to bring the sacred into every day.
Los did not so much write as forge, carve into rock,
engrave with burning stylus. His work was to make
creation prevail over his brothers’ impulse to destroy.
Los used abrasives & polishers, gouges, chisels,& gravers,
sharp-tipped pens to make what he saw come alive

Eighth Candle
The Peacemaker climbed the roof
of the cannibal’s house and
with perfect timing, looked
down through the smoke hole
so that when the monster looked into the pot
to see if dinner was ready, he thought
he saw his own face reflected & said
“I did not know I was that kind of man”

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& lost his taste for human flesh.
This is not my story, but one
the Haudenosaunee tell,
May it become our story.
Not all who listen will under


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Cataract

Who put the cataract over my spiritual eye?
Was it God, transfixed by miter and chalice,
Was it the Council at Nicaea who gamed
the system, drained the blood, made sure
the effigy would not smell?
Was it Christ himself who wanted a golden nimbus?
So that today the story glows
like a receding supernova,
no longer blotting out this world,
which has its own story
which has its own glow.

I see Galileo, grinding and polishing his new lens,
persuading the Venetian Senate his work
has military advantage. He stands in sun,
he stands in shadow. He is shackled by the church
before you can say heliocentric.
He dies in his chains, but after the Enlightenment,
they roll away the rock and find him gone.

He descends from the mount carrying tablets with updates
New platform, old scrivener.

That rattle in the brain you can still hear in the Big Bang’s
hum remains, even if Jehovah’s sticky notes have fallen off.

this brain that thinks
pulse is a measure,

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time an accumulation,
human personality
an algorithm,
this brain that discounts the moment
for praise of a period,
I speak for the people who are not fooled.
We love color and sound,
the smell of our own sweat, the taste
of our lovers' come, the gift of each blessed
livelong measureless day.



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Pay Now or Pay Later

1492-2020

Pay now or pay later God said when we plundered the land
and we said

—Already paid
our pioneers were butchered,
our gravid women scalped,
babies ripped from womb,
nailed to fence like the devil’s greeting
worse than animals those cunning savages
who pretend to be human

God wasn’t fooled. We were cunning, our religions
had taught us there was a heaven and it was tomorrow.
Today the best we could do for ourselves and our families
in this fallen wound of a world was to be on top
so we learned in our cradles how to say later

§

At night on the middle passage: moaning cargo
keening through the deck reached the captain’s ears

—Some of them will get through he said
and God said pay now or pay later
Captain said —They’re not like us.

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They were already slaves when we found them.
They’ll be better off here among Christians..

Yet as the call for bids went out
on the sunlit auction block

We knew in our smudged moral accounting
a cost not entered in the books
We trimmed the loose ends of our hearts & said
—later.

§

People came here to be free,

so even the Free Staters had to agree

there’s got to be cotton for planting

so it can be sold to the north who can then produce guns

to build a safe place when people flee homelands.

And if we look for a silver lining we’ll find one

as long we’re warm and well fed when we look

— a slave is a slave we said,

we’ll pay later

and you could say

war & amendments took

that fatal plant away



except lawmakers did not know

the law they changed was alive, had roots

§

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We fought wars against those
the exiles were fleeing
but people kept bolting the tyrant’s grasp

Till we threw up our hands and started shooting at them
pretending it was always the tyrants our friends
and God said...

§

Now we have dropped all but the last pretense
We say we use critical thinking
we’re being selective with science

But the haves who back murder forgot
in their drowse they no longer believe
in that tomorrow they’ve been telling
everybody and their aunt to wait until

—Why our payoff should we delay,
why not have it now they say

How long before we stop pretending
that anyone is listening but our own hearts,
where God lives, who has sensitive ears, can’t hear
over the noise, the whale-piercing roar of these frenzied days
How long before God says, I can’t hear you. Did you say now?

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REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE
William Pruitt is a poet, fiction writer, storyteller, Assistant Editor with Narrative
Magazine. He had work published in such places as The Adelaide Literary Journal, Kestrel,
Ploughshares, and Blueline, and in six books, most recently The Binding Dance and The
Teacher Who Told Stories from Cyberwit and Hands No Hands from FootHills. His
work can be seen at wpruitt.com

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ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE

TRANSCONTINENTAL

by Guiseppe Getto

Transcontinental

How do you take it? She says.
Clouds have rolled in, drawn thin
end to end like cotton panties
on high tension wire. Below the sea
of non-native grasses is Lincoln,
then below alkali flats,
the lost golden tablets of Joseph Smith.
The continent is a diagram, creation
a myth sewn every year.

There’s always a part on the wing
that says No Step. Who would?
The jaw ligaments contract like pistons.
High example murmurs past engine noise
the color of distant thunder,
gets annexed by defeat,
and time zones connect each possible future
with a banker, a deposit, due credit,
and a microbrewed startup beer.
Just now something floods backward
toward the windpipe.
Layover. Subsonic. Here.

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REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE

Grendel’s Mother

Where were you
when the Geats first took
to their ships,

icy and keen to sail,
when they burnt their
first king,

or offered their first
bride as a stitch
in the tribal

fabric? Did you squat
in the meres just outside
of each town

as it assembled, a bare
homunculus, waiting for
the fractional

drift of syntax from mead
hall to manuscript? Or
did you haunt

the reaches of what is
knowable simply because
your only relation

lived there, too?

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ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE

Invalidation

The sun likes its gray
trek. A boat wake
frets the lakefront where
it wrenches against
slush but no sign of
the thing itself. Must be
upriver now. Then silence.
Not wanted here.
You can hear a heartbeat
skip like a record track
at the first sound of
a human voice. Something
about not being able to feel.
The impossibility of
connecting. Trappist
lodgepoles sweat
the last dregs of snow.
Spring so sharp every
breath is disbelief.
Swallow shadows arc
across the black hollow
of foothills to the east,
blending where the white
sweep bends down. Forgetting.
Remembering.

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REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE
Guiseppe Getto is a Zen Buddhist, a poet, and an Associate Professor of Technical
Communication at Mercer University. His first chapbook is Familiar History with
Finishing Line Press. His individual poems can be found in journals such as Sugarhouse
Review, Reed, Eclectica, and Harpur Palate, among many others. Visit him online at:
http://guiseppegetto.com/poetry.

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ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE

THE RUNNER

by Alessio Zanelli

The Runner

On feet of dreams the runner’s headed to land’s end.
She knows the horizon keeps receding while she’s running,
but she runs as though it didn’t.
A finish line is not her aim.
Along the pathway time’s not measured in seconds but in paces,
in fact a runner’s time and space commingle.
The run will come to a stop where dreams dissolve,
and dreams don’t hinge on time or space
but on the run itself.
Land’s end is but a moving sight, the pathway a circle.

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REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE

Fugitive

The third round of the air raid sirens
didn’t give you the time
to collect your thoughts or anything.
A few nonessential personal belongings,
a pair of books and an old diary
remained on the table.
A black and white picture
neatly framed in silvered wood, too.
It shows a frightened child
looking into the camera askance,
a rag doll clutched to her chest,
hand in hand with mom,
who stares into the distance blankly,
as if the lensman weren’t in front of them.
Noway, you shouldn’t have fled a second time,
bringing with you all you could put on and a bag,
the fear and wrinkles of today
alongside the horror and scars of the past.
And you shouldn’t have left the picture behind.
It must still be there,
in the dark and silence of deserted places,
on the table crying out for vengeance.
Waiting for someone to return
and throw open the windows again.

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ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE

The Kite

The kite was flown
when you still had not arrived,
far with mind and body
from that unguarded edge
whereon you'd count the seconds.
It soared so plumb
that for you it was no signal
to go back on your steps,
but one final warning
not to turn around.
Then sun was enlarging
above the horizon you'd been denied.
Before it got dark,
legs and arms ready for takeoff,
eyes nailed to the floor,
you launched time into space
and rose higher than upmost dreams,
beyond the first star
shyly peeping at the zenith.
No one saw you but briefly the kite.

284

REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE

Story Of A Loser

The crumpled trench coat was hanging on the clothes tree;
the rain-streaked panes were letting in some light, no view.
It had been a frantic day, now he was staring at the embers,
sunk in the armchair, trying to make his bad blood cool off.
Miry lug sole footprints smudged the terracotta pavement,
marked a track from the threshold straight to the fireside.
There was nothing he wanted to think about or wished,
nothing but crackle counterpointing the chilly silence,
among which the patter on the glass barely emerged.
Like with the exhausted legs, weighed down and sore,
he’d abandoned all ambitions, dropped the will to fight.
All he’d been or he’d done was scattered behind by then,
today on top of tomorrow, strewn with snips of yesterday.
All pell-mell, without the slightest intention of tidying it up,
except for the lived-in slicker precipitously hung out to dry.
Despite the proximity of the hearth, his hands were numb;
only sere, darkened images were popping into his head.
He couldn’t possibly imagine he would soon go blind,
blind because of too much exposure to the afterglow,
nor the longest journey he'd ever go on had just begun.
I can recall each detail, yet I find it hard to utter his name.

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ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE

Affront To Deities

Primitive and impulsive, the urge to yield to something inborn,
which came naturally to him—like back when merciless Anteros
led the dance, or so it seemed—eventually took him by storm.
Free from constraints, restraints, dictates and others’ desiderata.
Did he notice how beautiful the sky was—either clear and blue
or bleak and gray—beautiful for the mere fact that it was there,
since ever and forever, immovable though eternally changing—
whether somebody observes it in awe or nobody cares at all.
In the back of his mind, he fancied the same goes for the spirit—
however peaceful or restless—beautiful anywise, more sublime
than any other impermanent flash of consciousness, thorough,
in its inaccessible quintessence, in the purity of its transience.
He then went looking for a footpath—a legacy of days gone by—
in the early-summer heat, through what remained of the wood
along the river, once a beaten track, well-kept, now only used
by few romantic anglers, nearly erased by shrubs and oblivion.
Deep in the trees, each thought dissolved for a good half hour,
his cognition itself disappeared among the leaves, just instinct,
breathing and the automatism of footsteps survived the walk.
Come the end of it, of a sudden, in front of the dropping sun,
he emerged onto a wide shore such as he didn’t expect to find—
reshaped by the years, or by the fallacy of his memories—alone,
to gaze impassively at the slow flow of the water—a sad trickle
he could barely call a river, as adrift amidst the vast sandbanks.

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REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE

Not tired, not even a little, brisk and sensitive as never before,
absolutely sure of having done what absolutely had to be done,
one with the odd surroundings, regretless, fulfilled and happy.
Sure—happy to the core for having satisfied his primal desire,
for not having repressed it again, intimate with the true beauty,
the unadorned trueness of here and now, as if time had stopped
to hand him everything he had always been longing for, at last.
Complete—in spite of Aphrodite, Artemis, Ares and all of them.

Alessio Zanelli is an Italian poet who writes in English. His work has appeared in some
200 literary journals from 17 countries. His fifth collection, "The Secret Of Archery",
was published in 2019 by Greenwich Exchange (London). For more information please
visit www.alessiozanelli.it.

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ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE

FOREVER

by Adelaide B. Shaw

A Lover’s Song

come to me
for comfort and for warmth
come to me for love
for friendship and for trust
for understanding and for care
come to me for love
for sunlit days and star filled nights
for laughter and for tears
come to me and speak your heart
and I shall then speak mine

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REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE

Forever

death of grandparents
when I was a child
was just a fact
they were there; they were gone
I didn’t ask why

they had a soul
which survives forever
the priest said
I didn’t understand
but nodded yes and moved on

the death of parents
gave rise to questions
not why–they were old–
but the place where they go
I still didn’t understand

in my late years
no more clear facts, but hope,
a wispy faith
slipping through the mist
into my reaching hand
 

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ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE

Beginnings

the earth is dying
in a whirlwind of fire
sweeping nations;
where are the beliefs once held,
the love for our brothers?

a new day awaits
with each dawn a chance to change
to make amends;
what was done carelessly
needs all hands to undo

softly, slowly
were I to reach out to you
would we meet half-way
one to the other onward
if we believe and try?

can we bury the lies,
the conceits and greed,
the suspicions?
when fires die out there is growth
of long dormant seeds to sprout

290

REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE
Adelaide B. Shaw lives in Somers, NY. She has been creating Japanese poetic forms–haiku,
haibun, tanka, tanka prose and photo haiga–for over 50 years and has been published
widely. Her book of haiku, An Unknown Road, which won third place in the Haiku
Society of America’s Merit Book Award in 2009, is available on Amazon. Her other
books, The Distance I’ve Come, and Travel Souvenirs, are available on Cyberwit and
Amazon. Adelaide also writes fiction and non-fiction and has been published in several
journals. Some of her published Japanese short form poetry are posted on her blog: www.
adelaide-whitepetals.blogspot.com

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A BLESSING

by Dayna Lellis

My Phone Died

This silence makes me confront
the thoughts I’ve tried to repress
with an assembly line of
voices and videos.

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