Hello and welcome to issue #9 of Subprimal Poetry Art/Music. We’ve been a little late getting things ready this time around (lots of traveling – that’s another story), but here we are at last ready with various pieces from around the world.

As you may know, we accept and encourage translations, although in the past, they’ve been from Spanish to English. For this issue, I’m pleased to say that we have work from Farhad Showghi (Germany) translated by Harry Roddy, and from Lidia Kosk (Poland) translated by Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka. This is of course in addition to various other wonderful pieces that have arrived at out internet doorstep from the magical internet tubes that connect various countries and other arbitrary political boundaries.

One of my favorite things as editor of Subprimal is the chance it gives me to see work from around the world, to see what authors and artists from other cultures are working on. Aside from the Polish and German submissions that I already mentioned, we also received many fine submissions from Eurasia and had to make some tough choices. For future editions, it’s my wish that we’ll continue to showcase authors and artists that may be underrepresented in the western world.

Many thanks to our contributors and to everyone who sent their work our way; I appreciate your support and trust. We’ll take a short break until the next issue, but meanwhile, enjoy the edition that we’ve assembled this time around. And don’t be shy to leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Sincerely,

Victor D. Sandiego

Victor David Sandiego lives in the high desert of central México where he writes, studies, and plays drums with jazz combos and in musical / poetry collaborations. His work appears in various journals (Cerise Press, Crab Creek Review, Floating Bridge Review, Off The Coast, Generations Literary Journal, Poetry Salzburg Review, others) and has been featured on public radio. He is the founder and current editor of Subprimal Poetry Art/Music.

I see
a man in a chair,
his hands tied to the skies.

I see
a multiple-choice question
blocking my view and assumptions
of a scarred face I had never seen before.

I see
three tiny ants
climbing that invisible face
as if he were Mount Sinai demystified
and religious views were legalese decomposed.

I see
dark, ominous clouds
on the mountains and in his eyes
becoming tears, gushing down as streams,
flowing like saltwater in a fresh, cold bloodstream
in which the ants go swimming; their hands reach out to his.

I see
their practised butterfly strokes
and their masterstroke with oxygen masks;
They are swimming inside the man once again,
his hands tied to the skies; the dark clouds above
are multiple choice questions someone’s about to ask;
each answer leading to one form of castration or another.

I see
bombs, carefully timed to precision,
Falling all over the valley of the fettered man,
scarring a manhood forever; charring him too with blemishes,
and the three ant-men who survived the massacre quite by chance,
attempting to climb his face, trying to save their own darkened faces
by taking one step further each turn – one step up until they reach his hands
tied to the skies, crossing it and entering heaven without shrapnel on their skins.

Abhishek Sengupta is imaginary. Mostly, people would want to believe that he writes fiction & poetry which borders on Surrealism and Magical Realism, and is stuck inside a window in Kolkata, India, but he knows none of it is true. He doesn’t exist. Only his imaginary writing does, and have appeared or are forthcoming in Outlook Springs, Liminality, Thrice Fiction, Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal, and others. If you’re gifted, you may also imagine him in Twitter @AbhishekSWrites or in his hypothetical website.

There—there it is—in the deep, purple crescents beneath the old, remembered sparkle of now extinguished eyes. There in a devastating image from Wilbur, in a near-silent line of Thomas. In the broken forgiveness of your voice across the interminable wire, I hear it. In fifty seconds of Schubert that presses the burning coal up from its lodged space in the chest to the constrictions of the throat. Like swallowing warm shards of glass that start the swell of tears, ineffable, inexplicable—like the primal sound of first grief. Would that I could dissolve into the air—disintegrate into formlessness, indistinguishable from the dew drop that clings to your morning window.

Musical composition by Franz Schubert

Alina Gharabegian is Associate Professor and Chair of English at New Jersey City University.  Her training is in Victorian literature, and she teaches 19^th-century British literature, Modern Poetry, and writing.  More recently, her scholarly attention has been drawn to questions of the East/West divide in literature. She is at work on a manuscript provisionally called The Poetics of Mourning in the Middle East.  If she finds a spare moment, she turns to the tango.

Regarding his work, the artist says:

My work is influenced by both the Dadaist and Symbolist art movements and combines my interest with the origins of art and my journey through the suburban experience. I term my style "Suburban Primitive."

Ronald Walker's work has been shown in more than 40 solo exhibitions as well as over two hundred group shows. He holds both a MA and a MFA degree in painting from the University of Kansas. Mr. Walker is represented by the Mahlstedt Gallery of New Rochelle, New York. He lives in the Sacramento area with his wife and two children, where he teaches art and paints for a living.

After Mandelstam

And to keep begging always in thumb-broken prayer, I a beggar and you a beggar of the soft luminescence and shadow, yes, the shadow of a pencil and the shadow of a book and how all darkness has its place in the windows of time and how I am a shadow when I move between rooms and move between grief, when there is a whisper on my tongue and a whisper on my lips, when I don’t have the words the shadow falls over me and I bow my head and how would I want so dearly for one hour, one minute, one second for all the world’s leaders to be beggars, to hold their hands together in one pleading fist for mercy, mercy, for light, for the shade of a shadow from the sun and their own wanton power, for the shadow of a missile or a bullet or the interrogation table, and how to beg mercy of a shadow, as Mandelstam wrote in a poem, how to walk in this valley of darkness and fear no evil, how to crack open this century with a sparkle of verse and love most scandalously all who persecute us, to beg mercy of a shadow, to beg mercy of a book, a poem, this scratching out of lines like a mouse nibbling on a piece of cardboard and how in such humble fervor the world is redeemed and almost saved and sanctified, how it is all coming down in the wind, I mean the titles and fame and factories, I mean the rape and violence committed upon and to this earth, how rapaciousness finally will go the way of all thunder and lightning into everlasting distance, how only poetry and brook trout will save us from ourselves, how a single candle flame says so quietly, Here is a bud of light in a sea of darkness, look over it and be faithful until the poem comes on the wings of a breeze before flying away forever, before you breathe again in the peaceful dark and whisper thank you, becoming one again with the moon and the stars and all there is, even a chair missing a leg in the corner, even a kiss on the forehead when you were a child and almost innocent and almost worthy of the first running brushstrokes of the eternal dawn.

spoke in tongues before he died
in Arkansas. Maybe the chaotic
spirit that urged him to kill
made him whole before the State
succumbed to its functioning.
Or maybe the unthinkable,
the horrifying maybe of maybe
he was not the man they thought
and not the man they killed.
So what happens? The living go
on past Little Rock to move
potatoes about their plates,
watch CNN in a bland motel,
praying and failing to refocus.
They consider questions
and white men make clichés,
each harboring Jesus as He
to right all wrongs, each confusing
beauty and truth. The burden
lies elsewhere always, the burden
of doing for the dead what we
could not do before.

Carl Boon lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at 9 Eylül University. His poems appear in dozens of magazines, most recently The Maine Review and The Hawaii Review. A 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee, Boon is currently editing a volume on the sublime in American cultural studies.

There’s a corner of my mind
where I sell apples
from a sack, the fruit of all

my endeavors, for five cents
apiece. But who has
a nickel to spare? Businessmen,

gone bankrupt, take flight
from the windows of gray sky-
scrapers, their double-breasted

seersuckers gleaming
like ospreys diving into
the lugubrious

blue. Soon the sun will follow
on its nightly trek to hell,
as I too return

to my unlit room, hell-bent
on self-destruction.
In the back of my head lies

a squatter’s camp, where cardboard
tents are home to the
homeless. They sit in the muck,

hunched over grubby
plates heavy with nothing, their
cups overflowing with less.

Matt Morris has appeared in various magazines and anthologies. He’s received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. His first book, Nearing Narcoma, won the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. Knut House Press published his latest collection, Walking in Chicago with a Suitcase in My Hand.

Ich gewöhne mich daran, hier, im Sitzen, wie jemand zu wirken, der sich anlehnt, manchmal nach vorne beugt, solang die Umgebung raumfüllend und im Ungewissen bleibt. Die Zunge kommt im Mund herum, Minuten vergehen. Ich will auf Weißes zurückgreifen können, wenn links im Fenster die Wolken ziehen. Den Kopf habe ich im Voraus gedreht, mit der Hand eine Tasse gedrückt. Bücke ich mich, sehe ich, wo vorher nichts war, die Füße. Ich müsste schon etwas gesagt und Wäsche zusammengelegt haben. Licht ist gefallen, das Gartengrundstück nachgekommen, kann mir gehören, ein Beieinander eigener Worte sein, eine Übereinkunft mit Gras und den Konturen der Büsche.

I’m getting used to appearing, here, while sitting, like someone who leans, bends forward sometimes, as long as the surroundings are space-filling and remain in the dark. My tongue travels around my mouth, minutes go by. I want to be able to reach back to something white when clouds go by in the window to the left. I’ve turned my head in anticipation, squeezed a cup with my hand. If I bend down I see, where before there was nothing, my feet. I must have already said something and folded the laundry. Light has fallen, the garden plot has followed, could belong to me, a juxtaposition of my own words, an accord between grass and the contours of the bushes.

Farhad Showghi is a psychiatrist, poet and translator who resides in Hamburg, Germany. He is the author of the poetry collections Die große Entfernung, Ende des Stadtplans and In verbrachter Zeit. Ende des Stadtplans was published in English as End of the City Map (translated by Rosmarie Waldrop) by Burning Deck Press and was subsequently shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award for 2015.

Again it comes, like a stone
Caught in the wheel, like a fire
Leveling the valley, overturning
A life’s perceptions.
No monasteries remain,
No stacks of irreplaceable content.
The student learns he must begin
With only a few leaves left to study.
They are first pages, turning over
And over in the empty wind.

Seth Jani currently resides in Seattle, WA and is the founder of Seven CirclePress. His own work has been published widely in such places as The Chiron Review, Pretty Owl Poetry, El Portal, The Hamilton Stone Review, Hawai`i Pacific Review, VAYAVYA, Gingerbread House, Gravel and Zetetic: A Record of Unusual Inquiry. Visit him at sethjani.com.

The zucchini blocks the doorway, but we make the escape, past the dog, through the pile of vegetables too woody to chew, and into the getaway car, which is bright and zucchini green. There’s no fence. Just a sign: red letters on sepia outlining prohibitions, the boundaries of the reservoir. We dive in quickly, our arms teeming with onions, imagining the tang of tomorrow’s water in our neighbors’ mouths, and in the dog’s dish, as police lights shimmer over our submerged heads, the sound of sirens muted in breathing bubbles, little onion scalps bobbing on the scrim of water that protect us from sight. Our toes scraping the mucky bottom, we wait for silence before dog paddling to shore.

It’s the onion we take turns pushing with our noses that makes me feel better about you, and the way you shred the parking ticket, salting it to feed the birds.

Musical composition by Friends of Uranium (live)

D. Dina Friedman has received two Pushcart Prize nominations and published in many journals including Calyx, JJournal, Common Ground Review, San Pedro River Review, Bloodroot, Inkwell, Tsunami, The Sun, Anderbo, and Rhino. Dina is also the author of two young adult novels, Escaping Into the Night and Playing Dad’s Song. She has an MFA from Lesley University and teaches at the University of Massachusetts.

Regarding his work, the artist says:

I look for artistic raw material in the natural, cultural, and built environments, focusing particularly on details that suggest meaning beyond the literal, the familiar, the snapshot. Like many other visual artists, my ambition in making art is to make the invisible visible, to use the medium and its syntax to magnify and intensify perception. In the best images, I see a successful mixture of "speech" (the formal elements of craft) and "story" (the revelation of creative meaning, felt life).

Roger Leege started out as a painter, printmaker, and analog photographer and earned BA and MA degrees in Visual Arts from Goddard College. Following post-grad study in computer science, Roger became an early adopter and evangelist for digital art and artists' tools. Working mainly in montage with generous helpings of wacom paint, he draws on his past as a lawn boy, meat cutter, storyteller, trucker, EMT, embalmer’s assistant, trim carpenter, bass player, house painter, journalist, dissident, videographer, educator, computer scientist, and somewhat atypical Florida man. The literary arts strongly inform his visual art practice; his art owes as much to Pynchon, Borges, and Barthelme as it does to Arbus, Cartier-Bresson, and Uelsmann.

A man looks at his reflection and sees a bird. The bird is round and pale. It looks like the moon made of dead strawberries. The man looks away. He picks up a brush and sets it back down. It does not matter what he does with the brush. The man opens his lips and spits out a caw. His wing-blades leave nests on the floor when he shivers. He steps in the dislocated feathers and twigs. The shower turns itself on. The man tries not to blink. The bird blinks three times. He remembers his first love on the beach, swallowing each other in white sand next to bullet carcasses. He hasn’t touched a woman since, but looks at every one he sees—women in grocery stores, his next-door neighbor, the divorcé who only wears green jackets, faded movie stars with sagging breasts and stretched-out nipples, the store mannequins on Main Street. He looks at all of them and collects their gaze, plastic and singular, and stiches beaks to their hair.

Remi Recchia is an MFA candidate in Poetry at Bowling Green State University, where he serves as Assistant Poetry Editor for the Mid-American Review. He has been published in Blue River Review, Front Porch, Gravel, Glass, and Ground Fresh Thursday Press, among others.

It is possible
to walk side by side
separately and together
like trees in a forest
that grow up
separately
and together
are the forest

Splendid is the forest
when we walk alongside
and separately
hear the silence

Można iść obok
razem i osobno
jak drzewa w lesie
co dążą w górę
osobno
i razem
są lasem

Piękny jest ten las
obok gdy się idzie
i gdy osobno
słyszy się ciszę

Lidia Kosk, a poet, storyteller, educator, photographer. She is the author of eleven books of poetry and short stories, and two anthologies. Her collaboration with the poet and translator, Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka, resulted in two bilingual volumes: Niedosyt/Reshapings and Słodka woda, słona woda/Sweet Water, Salt Water. The Japanese edition of the second book appeared in 2016. Lidia collaborated with her husband, Henryk P. Kosk, on the two-volume Poland’s Generals: A Popular Biographical Lexicon. Her 90th birthday is celebrated with a publication of Szklana góra/Glass Mountain, a rendition of her poem in twenty-two languages. Her poems, translated into choral compositions, as the "Polish Triptych," have been performed in several countries. A lawyer, humanitarian, and world traveler, Lidia resides in Warsaw, Poland, where she leads literary workshops and a Poets’ Theater (ATP).

Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka is the author of Oblige the Light, winner of the fifth Clarinda Harriss Poetry Prize (CityLit Press, 2015), and Face Half-Illuminated, a book of poems, translations, and prose (Apprentice House, 2014). A biochemist, poet, poetry translator, and co-editor of Loch Raven Review, she is also a photographer whose work has been exhibited in shows and used for book covers. She grew up in Poland and now lives in Maryland.

Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka

When I’m born, I hunger cry
for a nipple. I receive

the rubber glove with the pin
hole. After I sleep, I want

a breast. I suck the corners
of this deflated pillow.

A mustached lady coos me
to her cracked hamster bottle

with powdered milk. Even breath
is pumped in. I inhabit

postnatal anxieties
and life in mortal famine,

while mom’s yesterday heartbeat
starves my sunken ear today.

Tom Holmes is the founding editor of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics, and author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently The Cave, which won The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award for 2013, as well as four chapbooks. His writings about wine, poetry book reviews, and poetry can be found at his blog, The Line Break. Follow him on Twitter: @TheLineBreak

Ah, the repetition of the sorrows as if the old prayers had fallen from the beads and rolled under the bed, their quavery voices telling the angels to pay attention, please, for innocence is a brief lie and the many compartments of thought will hold steady their walls, adding and subtracting as the years grow fleshy. What do you say to the mother of a dead child, or a father? It’s only the town boys now, smoking on the back porch in the dimming with the nervous moths. As an elderly lady lumps along in her uncomfortable shoes for appearance sake, little squares of white gum in her purse for favors or habit. It’s how she would be your grandma who you’d loved beyond every sweet summer, and all the candy she fed you and your brothers out of her good grace and taste for sugar. Where does it come from, the ruin and the holes in everything that cannot be filled or ignored? Who does the breaking, this sort and that until you’re only at the window with nothing but the gray and the blank trees, not even a river to soothe?

Mercedes Lawry has published poetry in such journals as Poetry, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, and Harpur Palate.  Thrice-nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she’s published two chapbooks. Her manuscript was a finalist for the 2017 Airlie Press Prize and the 2017 Wheelbarrow Press Book Prize. She’s also published short fiction, essays as well as stories and poems for children. She lives in Seattle.

A cop out of his cruiser tapped the window
with a clacking of something metal on glass.
Pressed against one another in the front seat
of the `76 Le Sabre we woke confused, as if
we'd known things bright and sure before
but had been drained of all of it during our
illicit rest. Nineteen years old, parked in each
others arms at the end of another ping pong
night of booze and half wit gatherings,
empty conversations. The pre-dawn light
was as much of a surprise as the badge,
the gun, the inquiry into our state of being.
The law didn't care about much other than
whether we were victims in blood of some
late night crime. Dumb as any other kid
on the edge of growing up I felt like a man
when he adjusted his sidearm and said he
guessed I'd want to get the lady home before
her people grew too worried. What I wanted
was to share nights and days, bills and children
with this girl. It was love and it was every-
thing, as it always manages to be when you
know nothing about it. This hard headed girl,
volatile, possessed of cruel humor, sulking
when anything didn't go her way, I would
have married her any day of the week, spent
Sunday's at the bar watching the game, Friday's
after work drinking with the guys. Three kids
eventually. Meals once a week at grandma's.
One trip to Disneyland before the children
weren't young anymore. Mortgage, lawn care,
car payments. I'd have joined the Elks Club
or the Knights of Columbus. Easter egg hunts.
Church Sunday morning. We'd have celebrated
the Fourth of July, said we loved one another
and almost believed it, a random first love
stretched thirty years. Neighbors helping install
the above ground pool. One vacation in Europe
that never happens. A lake house somewhere
you started wishing you could afford. Young
in our parents way, old like them. Death almost
a blessing when it finally grows near, trying
to congratulate ourselves on just getting through.

Michael Flanagan was born in the Bronx. N.Y. and raised in the New York Metropolitan area. His work has appeared in many small press periodicals across the country, most recently, Nerve Cowboy, Paterson Literary Review, Trajectory and New York Quarterly. His chapbook, A Million Years Gone is available from Nerve Cowboy’s Liquid Paper Press.

I love whiskey, adore
everything about it. The ritual,
my favorite dense tumbler, the taste
that brings me back to nineteen. All the bad
decisions rolled
up neat as tombstones. I’m here
for the scent of tar still clinging dumb
to vinyl stools. For the dim
and the din only the last bar
in town without a television
can muster. I love it enough to be whole
with one, some nights need it
to fill me all the way up. When the tour guide
in Lynchburg told us,
with the strong stuff,
you hug the amber in your mouth

along your tongue
for six seconds,

it all made sense. My apex
can tame that wandering,
my body the wild
my parents birthed into me, the root
of all my best failures. It asks less
than a winning bull ride,
this feral purring down my throat.

Jessica (Tyner) Mehta is a Cherokee poet and novelist. She’s the author of four collections of poetry including Secret-Telling Bones, Orygun, What Makes an Always, and The Last Exotic Petting Zoo as well as the novel The Wrong Kind of Indian. She’s been awarded the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Prize in Poetry, and numerous poet-in-residencies posts, including positions at Hosking Houses Trust and Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-Upon-Avon, England, Paris Lit Up in France, and the Acequia Madre House in Santa Fe, NM. Jessica is the owner of a multi-award winning writing services business, MehtaFor, and is the founder of the Get it Ohm! karma yoga movement.

One-hundred thirty-five… the thinking part of me
dissolves and I am there, in Veracruz,
with Mel and Mont smoking cigars
and flirting with the bella selling flavored cones
made from shredded ice …one-hundred thirty-five
in a mass grave, pieces of skulls
and spines and belts and shoes…
I troll past the photos, grimy workmen,
rakes and shovels, mouths and noses
masked against the smell. A face, a gesture,
like that of fat Armando dipping crabs in boiling water,
laughing as he boasts of wrestling crocodiles
“Threw the beast a hundred meters
back to the lagoon..!” Thatched roof bar,
cascades of flowers, laughter, everywhere the people
laughing, rainbow colors swirling …the sky
a gluey gray above the women digging,
putting bits of bone in plastic bags… I turn away
from the computer, hear a voice
from the cantina whisper love words
in my ear. Veracruz …one-hundred thirty-five…
No arrests, no convictions, just small pieces
of what once were people flirting, dancing.
I close my eyes, the laughter, singing
fades away, becomes the moans of those who died
and those who piece together their remains.

Robert Joe Stout’s most recent books are Monkey Screams and Where Gringos Don’t Belong. Other books include A Perfect Throw (Aldrich Press), Hidden Dangers (Sunbury Press) and Running Out the Hurt (Kindle). He is a freelance journalist who has written for a variety of magazines, including New Politics. Born in Nebraska, he now lives in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Regarding her work, the artist says:

While exploring the world around me juxtapositions unveil in the mundane. I took this photograph while walking through the beautiful streets of Montevideo, Uruguay. I was struck by Santa's glare and the dogs stare, as the surf stickers and rack showed burned up memories. The dog didn't bark, but murmured wanting a way to the beach.

Kimberly A Robison, also known as KAR~, is a multidiscipline artist and poet. She has painted murals in five countries, had solo art shows in NYC, group shows in NYC, international shows featuring her sketches, paintings, murals, and millinery wearable art. She is a restoration gardener and permaculture farmer who paints with plants. She spent the last 9 years in New York City.

KAR~

pronounced: Carline

definition: Free Man

standing for: Kultural Awakening Rite

the line: connects generations and cultures

the ~ : transcends gender, nationality, religion and ability

initials for: Kimberly Ann Robison