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HERMAN MELVILLE DECIDES ON THE COLOR OF HIS WHALE
Herman Melville dangled his legs over the end of the pier. His boots nearly reached the rolling waves beneath him. He felt elated. His big book was almost done. He’d sent his sailors out to sea and killed them all except one. He liked the final touch, his so-called narrator saved by the savage’s coffin. Coincidence? Yes, but why wouldn’t the box float to the surface, whether near the drowning man or not? Only one other question harassed Herman, brought down his mood: the leviathan’s color. The entire novel—everything—depended on that decision, that vision. He’d scrolled through the rainbow spectrum tens, hundreds of times. Red for the American native. Orange for fire. Yellow for sunlight. Green for seaweed. Blue for sky and ocean. Indigo and violet (close enough) for veins and arteries. They all had potential, each had its own merits but highlight one and diminish the rest. Moby Dick consummated every potential, the peg-leg captain trafficking life, death, and every mollusk and cormorant in between. Then there, floating toward him, a dead fish, borne aloft by its very immobility, its dearth of struggle, as if to stop resisting raised it up, allowed it to lounge. Did it hold the Answer, this Atlantic cod sweeping toward him, its dorsal fin invisible? In death, its body had turned, its underbelly baring every wondrous, inexplicable, invisible color. Herman leaned out, plucked it out of its sea’s casket, and kissed the slimy, smooth skin reeking worse than cadaverous gutter rats on a rainy day, then slipped it back into its grave, the novel finished, the whale white. (Richard Holinger’s books forthcoming this fall include Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences, a collection of his newspaper columns, and North of Crivitz, a first book of poetry focusing on the North Woods and Upper Midwest. His work has received three Pushcart Prize nominations, and his Thread essay received a “Notable” mention in Best American Essays 2018. Not Everybody’s Nice won the 2012 Split Oak Flash Prose Chapbook contest, and a chapbook of innovative fiction was published by Kattywompus Press. Among other journals, his fiction has appeared in Witness, The Iowa Review; creative nonfiction and book reviews in The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Northwest Review; poetry in Boulevard, Chelsea. He lives in the Fox River Valley west of Chicago. Degrees include a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Please go to https://www.richardholinger.net/ for more on the author and for ordering books.)
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my bell jar
I'll give you a nice bell me inside I didn't place the glass around I more humanely would have used a porous element so I still politely breathe beyond the fifty years I choke at now vacuum- packed and freeze-dried I didn't mind the womb it was opaque and I was obsessively guarded by the only one who ever loved me but this glass cruel everyone sees me mourn trip tremble bang they point hear nothing I'm endlessly vocalizing I thought it was crooning but no a life death mating scream the worst of glass is seeing prettier people exhale twirl laugh beside lovers touching tossing unshattered children in the autumn evening air beneath strings of lights orange purple I remain guilty chaste confused gray within this grave I believe the rip gape twist of god will be done soon o believe what an empty verb I'm a damp pouch with a soul that traveled nowhere we are tearing contraptions wanting to be more than chemical thank you last O2 molecule thank you last ray thank you all (Marc Darnell is a custodian and online tutor in Omaha, Nebraska, and received his MFA from the University of Iowa. He has published poems in The Lyric, Blue Unicorn, Shot Glass Journal, The HyperTexts, Ragazine, The Literary Nest, Runcible Spoon, and elsewhere.) Second Round of Chemo
My brother wants to remember our life—the marshmallows we roasted on a stick, browning them, their soft, sweet taste in our mouth, the coals beneath, soft and warm. He wants to hold onto Yesterday as I want to hold onto him, but I’m not with him. I’m twelve hundred miles away where, after the call, at dawn I go out to pick the blueberries, some pale green, some plush blue that fall from clusters into my hand, each with a round mouth puckered at the end. I go stem by stem, the weight of berries bend the branch. I lighten the load. It’s the least I can do. Then to the raspberries, I stick my hand deep into the thorny stems, red juice of them staining my fingertips, whole fistfuls giving themselves up, fall in the bowl, like Eve with those apples, the smell of them, wanting them all in her hand, the ripeness, the sweetness, this the third week in July when the cancer came back, not good, the insistent cells proliferate as those of the fruit in my hand. Tomorrow, I will pour them over my granola, the blue red staining the whiteness of milk the bittersweet taste of fruit as my brother, back in a sterile ward, has the metallic aftertaste in his mouth, his skin desiccated like those marshmallows that flamed, too hot, melted, ashes to fire. (Bruce Spang, former Poet Laureate of Portland, is the author of two novels, The Deception of the Thrush and Those Close Beside Me. His most recent collection of poems, All You’ll Derive: A Caregiver’s Journey, was just published. He’s also published four other books of poems, including To the Promised Land Grocery and Boy at the Screen Door (Moon Pie Press) along with several anthologies and several chapbooks. He is the poetry and fiction editor of the Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine. His poems have been published in Connecticut River Review, Red Rover Magazine, Great Smokies Review, Kalopsia Literary Journal and other journals across the United States. He teaches courses in fiction and poetry at Ollie at University of North Carolina in Asheville and lives in Candler, NC with his husband Myles Rightmire and their five dogs, five fish, and thirty birds.) Sonnet for the Long Married #3
There ain’t no cure for love, sings Cohen on the playlist. Both dogs barking: hate the music? want a treat? You crank the sound and drink your meds, these cool strong beers. Linguine bubbling, damp dishtowel your epaulet: Commander of the Kitchen Sink. The rain, the time tick-ticking down, hung leashes drip, unfinished dissertation shelved, and Hamlet essays still to grade. Your wife still at the stylist’s: takes him eons. Darkened windows glint like sequined mirrors. All these years refracted and redacted, water droplets, life support. You wipe your hands and glasses: why so warm and wet? Love’s IV on slow drip. Midlife (V) Chorizo, couscous, thin-sliced gala apples in a bowl: a bachelor’s hash a husband married many years can love, with spiky jazz (that’s Braxton morphing Monk), cold beer in front of you. Your wife has turned in (headache), so it’s you and Trey, adopted greyhound black as dreamless sleep. Linked memories, your private myths—first Ali-Frazier fight (on German radio), a gradeschool English teacher and the story of his scar, Andromeda’s bare bottom in a painting by Burne-Jones—rise glistening as boulders in a river. Have you journeyed well enough to know the boulders, be the river? (Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits The Big Windows Review https://thebigwindowsreview.com/ at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. Poems of his have appeared recently in Ephemeral Elegies, Grand Little Things, and Trestle Ties. Tom's website: https://thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com/ ) |
The Beautiful Space-
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