Jim Doran
Rotten Fruit
Oil on canvas
Response

Linger
By Yolanda Palis
Inspiration piece

There’s the trash – old newspapers, shoeboxes,

an avocado pit, me in family pictures

at my mother’s knee. Lingering salmon smell

of expiring.  Can’t recall –

did I dream; was I gay, bi or hetero?

Pushed away by a boy, and an irritated voice

I still hear “Let me be!”  Now I recall, I chose

to die.  Now limited by coffin space, I linger

in the air, the rotting stink of forgotten berries

and bananas, disturbing like the questions

I asked.  I linger, the anger between puke

and stifled burp, not having done enough

to stop words that hit, that caused,

perhaps, my indifference to the gash

still gurgling purple blood to earth’s gut.

.

.

Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Jim Doran
The Gray Lady
Response

Revelation
By Rachel Evans
Inspiration piece

Beloved, when you come to me

You must come to me in color,

Bright in tortured contradictions,

Bearing Baals of blue ablaze with

Yellows dancing unencumbered

In rays of pious purplish light.

From your inner core let pour the

Greens and pinks, forgotten deeds that

Shed unholy hues on hands of

Crimson bound and broken for you.

For in darkness you may hide

And from lightness fall away

But, Love, be hidden not

In shades of endless moaning

Gray.

.

.

Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Tony Anthony
The Visitor
Response

The Sweet Bye-and-Bye
By Robert Haydon Jones
Inspiration piece

Several weeks ago back in early May, June was already busting out all over here in Connecticut and I was on my fourth funeral/memorial service in nine days.

First, Brian, an Irish actor, who actually drank a lot more than I did when I was out there — only he never stopped.  He was a big star – but I never saw him smile. At his memorial, the actors and the theatre and film biggies were there – and reverential townies – and the wife, a grown son and a grandchild in arms.  Everyone stood two and a half feet away from each other. The minister said Brian had the Celtic sadness: “Why be happy, when there is so much you can be sad about?”

Then I went to two wakes for older men I knew from AA. Their wakes came one day after another. At funeral parlors, crowded with Irish-American family members I didn’t know and scores of people I did know from 12-Step meetings. Both wakes ran big screen slide shows of their dead man – featuring Clean & Sober Times.

No big sadness. No tears. Gratitude was, oh so abundant. No prayers despite all of the talk in the program of spiritual awakening. No food or drink at the funeral parlors and precious little later at the homes. Speaking strictly for myself, I miss the old style Irish wakes – where you could stuff yourself with fatty forbidden food and drink until you couldn’t. Hell, I even missed the grief and praying.  As you may know, there is a lot of solace in the Sorrowful Mysteries.

The dead guys were very good guys. They were real comrades of mine.  I didn’t feel these plain vanilla wakes did them justice. These were men who usually led with a hot diggity about waking up one day at a time. Their wakes were so circumspect I felt like saying, “Why be sad, when there is so much you can be happy about?” But I didn’t say anything.  As you may have surmised, I am clean & sober for quite a few 24 hours. So I left. I just ambled out into the gloaming of the summer coming in and went on to Choir Practice.

About ten years back, I joined a church folk choir at the suggestion of my AA Sponsor, who saw it as a relatively safe way for me to learn how to socialize with human beings – now that I was not out there always drunk, and stoned with a proclivity for violence.

It had turned out well. Singing was fun. Socialization was safe. I even discovered I could flirt with sultry women now and again without consequences. When the rehearsal or service was over, everyone went straight home.

That was good. I am happily married. To my great surprise, I like being straight with my wife. I really have changed a lot. I still have eyes for sultry ladies — that part definitely hasn’t changed. So safe flirting in the choir was and is good.

Nicole Black was my favorite. She’s the SVP of HR at a top hedge fund – and happily paired off with Brad, a CPA who sings next to me in the bass section. Nicole has such a fabulous body — I wonder how anyone could possibly think of business in her presence. I love looking at her. Then one rehearsal night, she caught me ogling her and gave me a look back that said I was a dirty jerk – and from then on, all I could do was peek.  She definitely had me at a disadvantage.

So, I came straight from the dull wake to Choir Practice and happened to walk in from the parking lot with Nicole. It had just turned summer dresses time, and Nicole’s fabulous body was sheathed in a flimsy light blue number you could tear off in a second. I couldn’t help stealing little look, look, looks at her and noticed she was wearing a really fine necklace of Mexican silver and small dark blue agates.

“I love your necklace, Nicole,” I said, more to cover my peeking at her than anything. “Thanks, Jimmy”, she replied. “A beauty for a beauty”, I said off-handedly, as we entered the church.

Well, to my great surprise, she colored. I watched the flush spread like a stain up her chest, up her neck, up her face. It was definitely a visceral event. Frankly, I was quite pleased. It turned out Nicole wasn’t airtight after all. What’s more, she knew I had watched and enjoyed every millimeter of her firing up. I was an Alpha dog again.

The next morning I drove through a cold steady rain to the funeral Mass for Luigi, the old barber, who had given haircuts to five generations of my family. It was at the ugly yellow stone church that had been my home parish growing up. I hadn’t been there since I came back from the Marines except for funerals. In fact, I had delivered the Eulogy for three family members there.

The church was jammed. Luigi had been cutting hair in the town for more than 50 years. I had to sit way to the side way up front in the second row. I didn’t even know the priest. He was banging on with the same old stuff about Luigi being in a far better place — when I looked back and saw the crowd just sitting there stolidly taking the empty words like funeral medicine. I thought, “If only we could believe what you’re saying, Father who-ever-you-are.”

I looked back out at the crowd again, just sitting there, silently listening to the same old empty words with nary a flinch. Under the indifference I knew there was a yearning. I thought, “Imagine how different our lives would be if we knew for sure there was an after-life.” I felt myself yearning for it.

It was right then that I suddenly remembered a wondrous message I had received 27 years back that somehow I had forgotten.

************************************************************************************

I loved my Dad – we all did – the three children, and my mother. He was a genuine savant, a genius, a prize-winning physicist, who spoke 21 languages (not counting dialects as he would say). He was greatly admired, very successful and utterly miserable and sad most of his life.

He drank alcoholically all his adult life. It was his medicine. His sadness was primary, chronic and chemical. He tried and tried to love each of us – and some times he succeeded. But usually he reverted to his default setting of sad distance. Naturally, all of us, the three children and his wife, thought his sadness was our fault.

I was there for him when his career just ended because of the blur of alcohol and the pervasive strain of melancholy. His marriage ended at the same time. Same reasons. My brother, George, and I worked out sort of a joint care-taking deal.

George lived in a mountain town in southern Spain – and my Dad loved Europe. (In the old days, every September he made a big to do about choosing which ship to take to Europe, the Leonardo da Vinci or The France. It all depended on the state of their wine cellars.).

My house in Connecticut was close to his old house, his old wife, and to Manhattan and his favorite old haunts. I had him from late spring to September. He tried and failed rehab twice while he was with me. It was sad to see him alone and still so sad, but, honestly, I enjoyed being able to care take and love him.

I had not had a single dream I could remember since I came back from the Marines, so I was amazed even in my sleep when I had a wild dream on a certain Christmas Eve night. I dreamt I was my Dad.

Please note, I didn’t dream, about my Dad – I dreamt I was my Dad. I was in a dazzling white place. I didn’t know where I was or what had happened. There was a blurry sort of amorphous someone there, who seemed female, (a nurse?) so I asked if I were in a hospital and the someone said, no, not exactly, but not to worry, everything would be all right. So I didn’t worry – I had a rapturous feeling of all-rightness but also a falling-dream feeling of displacement.

At that moment, I woke up and vaulted out of the bed. I was upset. I told Jane, the winsome lady who was sharing my bed, about my dream. About being my Dad. I reminded her that I had never remembered a dream since the Marines. I told her I had never had a dream where I was somebody else.

Then the phone rang. It was George from Spain telling me my Dad had died in his sleep taking a nap – at the very time I was having my dream.

The shock of grief roiled through me — yet even at that moment – I was filled with gratitude that my amazing, sad, savant of a Dad had somehow managed to gift me with a message that there really was an after-life.

“My Dad’s dead,” I said. “He died in his sleep while taking a nap at the same time I was dreaming I was him.”

“My God,” Jane said, “I’ve got goose-bumps”.

“My Dad’s dead,” I said.

“I’ve got goose-bumps all over,” she said.

************************************************************************************
So, now 27 years later, sitting there in the ugly yellow stone church at Luigi’s funeral, I remembered the message I had forgotten that my Dad had somehow gotten through to me. I remembered every detail. I had been him. I had actually been in the sweet bye and bye. And once again, my interior bloomed with rapture. It was the most wondrous love. I knew my life would never be the same. Talk about “spiritual awakening!” I thought of the Psalm: “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all of my days.”

That evening, I went to a Farewell Dinner at the Hilton for the Choral Director, who was retiring after 35 years. The chorus gathered for pre-dinner cocktails in the
penthouse suite. After a couple of hours, we lined up to fetch our coats from one of the bedrooms before we headed to the restaurant downstairs.

As it turned out, Nicole Black and I were the last two to leave. I held her coat for her. As she turned her head back to slip her arm in the sleeve, I leaned forward and kissed her. She kissed me back. Then we were gobbling each other. Then I just kept leaning forward and she arched face down over the bed and I arched over and into her.

It was a primal shtup – it took 50 frenzied seconds, tops. She came and came almost immediately. “Oh, my God, she said. “Oh, God.”  When we uncoupled, there was a splatty reverberation. Like the sound you hear when you pull your foot out of a bog.

I waited while she cleaned up in the bathroom. I felt terrible. When she came out, she walked straight up to me and gave me a hug and a lingering, moist kiss. “Jimmy, that was absolutely wonderful,” she said, “ but it must never happen again.”

“I’m really sorry, Nicole” I said. “I hate what happened. I just couldn’t help it.”

“That’s okay, Jimmy,” she said. “Neither could I.”

We went on out and got into the elevator. On the way down, she looked into my eyes and smiled. “You know, Jimmy, what we did was wrong but it really was wonderful. To tell you the truth, just thinking about it gives me goose-bumps.”

.

.

Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Tony Anthony
Petunia

Petunia – Naked
By Robert Haydon Jones

A while back, I wrote a short story, “Saint Shannon’s Salute”, about what happened when the police in Greenwich, Connecticut arrested a Medal of Honor recipient, as a Peeping Tom.  A patrolman had observed him lurking in the shadows outside his PTSD therapist’s home peering through her window as she lay naked on her bed with her husband.

The story was first published on-line on SPARK 7 and then in Recovery magazine. It triggered a lot of response – e-mails, snail-mail letters, faxes, phone calls (yes, four or five heavy-breathers – a surprisingly disconcerting first for Yours Truly) – hardly any of it about my story, per se.

Almost all of the comment was about the central scene in the story: A man peeping at a naked woman as she lay on her bed with her unsuspecting husband. Nakedness seems to have been the real trigger.

Most of the responses were from women. I got scores of jpegs and photos of bare naked ladies. Sent to me by the ladies themselves or by their husbands or boy friends. Would I please take a good look – and then write a story about them? I could write anything I wanted – evidently, the concept of allowing me to  “look” at them naked and then do whatever riff I pleased was deeply thrilling.

I responded to none of this – I told the callers thanks for the comment – and I told the heavy breathers to fuck off.  I trashed the e-mails and jpegs and shredded the letters and photos. I had mixed emotions. A writer likes to provoke response – but, as noted, I wasn’t sure if it was my story that had triggered this or simply the subject of nakedness.

About three weeks or so after the magazine was published, things quieted down. But every other day, I would get an e-mail from someone going by the tag: “Petunia”. Each e-mail had the same text: “I love your story about the Medal of Honor recipient and the naked therapist. It touches my core as it has never been touched before. Please look at the attached image and please write a story about me.”

Well, the images were of a comely, naked, woman in her early 40s. I got 20 of these emails over the next six weeks. I trashed the first four attachments, but from then on, I downloaded each attachment and saved it in a folder, marked, “Petunia”. The images were progressive in nature. From restrained, “classic nude” to splayed, in-your-face, “wide open” frontal assaults.

Well, although “Petunia” was using the “please” word — I bridled at the imperative of her message and the assaultive nature of the series of images of her nude body she had sent me. There was no way I would ever write a story about her.  I was sure about that.

I had known what I was doing when I wrote “Saint Shannon’s Salute.” It is based on real world experience. I knew the linchpin of the story is the raw, relentless, power of a woman’s naked body. But the responses from Petunia and the others about being seen naked — had startled me. They got me thinking hard about nakedness, nudity, exhibitionism, voyeurism, intimacy, love, sex, distance and memory.

I sleep naked, do you?

Do you cover up after sex?

How many people have you seen nude?

Did you ever see your parents naked?

Can you remember what your first lover looked like naked?

How many people have seen you nude?

Did you ever look at someone naked without them knowing it?

Do you look at porn?

Did you ever?

Do you have a favorite memory of a sexual encounter?

Do you fantasize about having sex with someone you know?

My paternal grandfather and one of my great uncles were both working artists. I have scores of their paintings – yet only two are of nude women – both rather formal studies that appear to have been done in workshop settings. My grandfather’s six sisters were artist’s models – and each married an artist.

I talked recently to two artists about nakedness. I asked a famous artist who is in his mid-70’s if he worked with nude models.  He told me that after his wife died about 20 years back, he only drew nudes in the company of other artists. “I don’t trust myself to be alone with a naked woman.”

His comment kicked in Andrew Wyeth and the Helga Pictures for me. Wyeth did 245 paintings and drawings of a neighbor’s housekeeper, Prussian-born, Helga Testorf, over a 14-year span.  It was a secret liaison. When Wyeth’s wife was  asked to comment on what she thought the Helga Pictures were about, she said, “Love.” Although she never did elaborate, and the Wyeths did not part – it was common knowledge that their relationship was sundered.

The nudes of Helga radiate sexuality…but I think that is because Helga naked is very, very, alluring in her rough-hewn way. She has the natural radiance of a Paleolithic Venus figurine.

All of the Helga Pictures pulse with another kind of naked power: Human intimacy. That’s what Wyeth’s wife saw. Helga outdoors leaning on a snowy tree in her Loden coat is just as wide open and available to Wyeth as she is kneeling naked on the bed aiming her upturned breasts straight at him like the double barrels of a shotgun.

By the way, I think the most sexual painting Andrew Wyeth ever did is of a man. He is in his mid-twenties and he is as nude as a dude can be. He has made eye contact with us and appears to be expecting us to be just as seriously impressed with his phallus as he is.

Just yesterday I talked with another successful artist about Wyeth and Helga and about doing nudes. Matthew is in his late forties. His soft impressionistic landscapes are wildly popular. He has suddenly become immensely rich. Matthew and his third wife have just purchased a home near me for about ten million dollars. Matthew has informed me that Wyeth did Helga like a landscape. I have kept silent but I do not think that Matthew has really looked all that carefully at the Helga Pictures. Wyeth is the one who has been done. By Helga and the bare-ass young man. Each in their own quite discrete way.

Matthew also told me that he still enjoys going to workshop with other artists. So, he often draws nudes from life.  But he stops his drawings at the waist. He says, “I am afraid that the lust thing will overwhelm me.”

Overwhelm is a serious word about a serious consequence. “Down goes Frazier!”

PTSD is about a serious consequence. And sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. In your Loden coat or in your altogether.

Petunia, I have decided on a compromise. I won’t write a story about you naked  – but I will give you this piece I did at Cary Tennis’s writer’s workshop at the Marconi Center about six months back.

We had 10 minutes to write. Every three minutes, we were given a prompt:
The window opened
The door closed
The bowl is not empty

Petunia, here for your consideration and pleasure is what I wrote:

The window opened. Charlie and I jumped back – it was mischief night on Halloween and we had hit the house next door hard with eggs – at 13, we were getting too old to be safe from the police.

We worked our way around so we stayed covered in shadow. We looked in the window and saw a beautiful lady starting to take her clothes off.

I told Charlie, let’s get out of here – but he held me back. Look, he said, look. She was about 35 – red hair – she was taking her shirt off and bra and then her skirt and then her panties – it was beyond thrilling — it was like an electric shock. She stepped into the shower and the door closed.

My life had changed forever. I loved her. I loved her then and I will love her always. (It amazes me women rarely know how beautiful they are!) But I stayed away from her window. I stayed away from her window. I stayed away.

A year later, on the kid Halloween, I went back to her house with my little brother. He grabbed his candy but I stayed back. She stepped to the door and looked at me. “Come on”, she said. “The bowl isn’t empty. Help yourself.”

.

.

Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Michelle Wallace
Home Sweet Home
Response

All the Way Home
By Catie Jarvis
Inspiration piece

On the day Hugh returns home from the war, his mother looks so young. She stands in the doorway, dark brown hair gathered up on top of her head, house dress floating loosely around her – airy in the breeze. Hugh feels as though so much time has passed while he was away that he half expected to return home to find her an old woman. But instead she stands before him looking younger then the day he left. She’s tan and lively, hands covered in flour, nails caked with dough. She stares, speechless, as if he were an apparition she were savoring. As if any word or motion, even the blink of an eye, might make him disappear.

From Vietnam, Hugh was flown into DC like all the soldiers. They clean him up and give him a stiff new uniform. What he wouldn’t do for a T-shirt, a loose baggy cotton shirt that says “Free at Last!” They offer him a hair cut, but he doesn’t take it. He’s growing his hair out. He pets the short strands on his head encouragingly. They offer him a steak dinner, and he laughs: “Man, I don’t want steak, I just want to go home.” But the steak dinner isn’t like the haircut, and he can’t opt out of it. Hugh enters the mess hall with the other guys like him, fresh into the country. They all look familiar but he doesn’t know any of them. He eats his steak in silence and it turns out to taste pretty good.

At National, Hugh books a flight out to Kennedy. Luckily, there’s a plane leaving soon. He’s carrying a small bag that he keeps misplacing. Every time he goes to the airport restroom or gets a bite to eat or switches his chair because the sun through those large paneled windows is getting in his eyes, he almost leaves the bag behind. There’s not much in it anyway. A few pictures.  All the letters his mother wrote him. A necklace, cheap and tarnished, from a girl he found out in the jungle infested with flies and hardly alive. A few pieces of foreign currency that he wants to give to his sister because he knows she’ll like that sort of thing. Somehow, Hugh still manages to have the bag with him when he makes it from Kennedy to Grand Central Station, and onto the side of the highway in Patterson New Jersey where routes 208 and 4 collide. He throws the bag over his shoulder, now glad that he’s kept it, glad he has something to posses. He holds his thumb up.

The wind and exhaust of cars blows at him and he sucks it into his lungs. They fly by, he thinks. He keeps on thinking that: They fly by. They fly by. He decides he won’t mind if he has to stand out here by the highway all afternoon, even all evening, and into the night. What’s the hurry anyway? There’s nothing for him. His thoughts start to compile and plummet into some kind of plan – the kind in which he’ll never make it home. Luckily, before the thoughts get too far, a woman in a nice town car pulls over and right up to the side of his legs.

The woman is slender and middle aged. She has a wispy layered hair cut, her make-up is neat and refined. He thinks of her first as a woman and is surprised by the thought. She’s the age of mothers, his mother, his friend’s mothers, but it feels like that doesn’t matter any more. Hugh has trouble picturing what he must look like to her. A kid? A man? A lonely solider?

“Where you headed?” he asks her before she gets a chance to say anything. He doesn’t want to send anyone out of their way.

“Wyckoff,” she says.

“Yeah. That’ll work.”

Inside, the car smells new, leathery and stifling.

“My son’s in the air force,” she says first thing. Now Hugh knows just how she pictures him and he feels relieved. “When did you get out?” She asks.

“Well today. I just flew in today.”

“My goodness. Welcome home, honey. I’m sure you mother will be so thrilled to see you.”

She pauses and sighs into the steering wheel.

“Your son, he’ll come too,” Hugh says.

“Will you tell me what it’s like?”

They are driving in the right lane, slow, so that cars keep passing them. One car gets right up behind them and honks it’s horn. The woman doesn’t seem to notice or at least not to mind.

“It’s not like you see on TV,” Hugh says. “It’s not chaos all the time or anything like that. They’ll be some bad days, shots fried, explosions, some civilian detonating a bomb and screaming. But then for weeks there’ll be nothing. Silence. Card playing. Tucking in the sheets. It’s not all crazy like you see on TV, and it’s not all bad. Your son, he’ll be all right.”

“His name is Ryan Ellington. Haven’t heard of him, have you? You wouldn’t know him, would you?”

“I don’t know him.”

“Where’d you say you were going again?” She asks.

“Oh you can let me off in Wyckoff, that’s fine. I’m only a town over, I can walk home from there.”

“I’m bringing you home,” she says. “All the way home.”

They sit in silence for a while, feeling the bumps of the road. The woman flicks on the radio and turns it down about as low as it can go and still be heard.

“Honey, why were you out there by yourself, on the side of the highway?” She asks in a whisper. As if this question is a secret and she’s scared to know the answer.

“When you come home,” Hugh says. “You come home alone.”

The woman takes her hand off the steering wheel and pats him on the arm. The car takes a slight swerve. Hugh is afraid that she might start to cry. In fact, he’s petrified. He thinks if she starts to cry he’ll have to get out of there, open the door, jump and roll. He has to say something to snap her out of it.

“You know how much it cost me to take a cab from Kennedy to Grand Central?” Hugh asks.

The woman removes her patting hand from his arm and says, “No?”

“Cost twenty-six dollars. For a cab ride. You believe that? I can’t believe it. I think I’ll always remember that number, twenty-six god damned dollars for a cab ride.”

Hugh’s voice has grown loud, too loud. The woman leans towards the steering wheel. They turn off the highway and Hugh directs, saying every few minutes, “We’re just about there, drop me anytime.” He’s still saying this when they pull right up to his street. He’s still saying it when they pull right up to his driveway.

“All the way home,” the woman says as she breaks mid way down Hugh’s long rocky drive.

The farmhouse looks sturdy, white, maybe it has a new paint job. The leaves have turned and the yard is colorful with yellow and red leaves, orange tree’s. It’s pretty much Thanksgiving by the look of it, with his mother’s decorative hay barrels and hardened purple corn stalks on the porch. Hugh walks up his driveway in a slow straight line. He’s nervous like some Charlie’s fast approaching. This is the home he’s been dreaming of for 18 months, here he is at last, and still he can’t seem to get back that old feeling of safety. He climbs the granite slab front steps, unsure of the kind of hurt he might find.

His mother stares at him for a long time before she takes him in her arms and allows him into the house that smells of baking bread and damp carpets and home. He’s afraid to sit down on the couch, to lie on his bed, he’s afraid of what will come to mind, afraid that it will all disappear, the mother, the bread, the house, all of it. He walks around from room to room, waiting for the rest of his family to arrive home, to fill the house with the distractions of their sound. He walks up the stairs and back down, from the kitchen, to the living room to the den. He looks out the window and sees that the woman is still sitting there half way down his driveway. She is staring right into the house as if it were her own house, as if it were her son who’d come home.

.

.

Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Part I. Rules of Poetree

1. Two roots spring from the ground. Call them A and B.
2. One trunk rises. Call it C.
3. There can be, will be, must be, varying branches. As many or as few as the poet desires. For the tree is desire, is the earth pushing forth its memory, the poet pushing forth its child.
4. Branches on the Right side of Poetree take their root A.
5. Branches on the Left side of Poetree take their root B.
6. All branches stemming from the trunk, take on the trunk’s name, C.
7. Branches born of branches need only the letter of their birth. Yes, this one is confusing. (For example, a branch shoot of ACD would take the D and tag it’s own letter on behind it.)
8. A Poetree is read from right to left and from bottom to top. Starting always with the roots, AB and then the trunk C.
9. A Poetree is and a Poetree is. Create!

Part II. Architecture of the Poetree: Sand Piper

Part III. A Poetree: Sand Piper

Sand piper, frantic legged and

on the landscaped sky.

Sand piper on the landscaped sky, so dainty like Danielle,

so frantic legged. And on the landscaped sky I fanaticized at last

that I am dainty like Danielle. A married looping

fantasy. At last unafraid, of splash, of

sand piper on the landscaped. Sky fishing poetry.

Frantic legged and on the landscaped sky

I’ve found my pole.

Catie Jarvis

Response

.

.

Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Response – the Fishwife, by Jim Doran

Inspiration Piece by Maureen O’Donnell

The Shadow of Saint-Quentin

Maureen O’Donnell

The fountain twisted high over a pool studded with tiles of blue and yellow and white. Three stone fish with forever-gaping mouths froze in the air, twisted together in mid leap toward the sky. They laughed water. Anna knew the fountain in her mind, well before she saw it in the square of the town that lay just outside Saint-Quentin.  Her black-laced shoes, too-tight from long walks over several days, scuffed over broken cobbles.  She had not planned to come back to the Square, but that morning she stood in line, bought her ticket, and another for her son.  They were not due in Paris until tomorrow.

She followed a near-invisible path, tugged on by something that fell just shy of memory. She chased the mimic of memory, but it danced ahead, easily outpaced her shuffle. It drew her through the remains of a stone arch that presided over weeds and a discarded bottle.

A pair of small feet tapped out hop-skip-jump on the broken road behind her.  Jump.  Thud.  Thud-thud.  She turned and caught sight of the boy, all long limbs and knobby elbows and a mop of brown curls that she couldn’t bear to shear away.

He disappeared behind the tumbled-over wall, and panic squeezed Anna’s chest.  Then she saw him, twisting and leaping through the neglected space.

#

Children dash through the square. They shriek, the fountain laughs, adults whisper words that escape loud anyway. Somewhere a siren complains.  Anna squirms inside the dry, starched weight of a white pinafore.  The crisp white folds lock her down, reflect the sunshine with the cheerful reminder that she’s not to go and play.  Fingers pull her hair into barrettes, but curls and girl resist. She makes a bid for freedom, toward the fountain. A record crackles to life and spills a woman’s voice from above the Square.

“There’ll come a time, now don’t forget it,” she croons around faint crackling sounds.  A record she hasn’t heard before.  Anna looks up, and tries to count the open windows, find the new sound.  One.  Two.

#

Time had battered the windows above the town square into listless black eyes that stared down on an abandoned space that made the grown woman small. She tugged at the lace collar of her dress, and felt the pull of the fountain and the fish.

#

“Non! Anna!”

Her mother’s cry was a thing of the past, a thing to be dodged if she was quick enough.  She felt the collar of her pinafore loosen and laughed.

“There’ll come a time, when you’ll regret it…” The music rambled on. The little girl wove between people great and small, and burst through a knot of children gathered around the tiled pool. She dipped her hands into clear, cold water, and it flew off her fingertips and over their heads. Motors coughed and sputtered; bodies twitched; people and sirens screamed.

A woman sang, en Anglaise, “when you grow lonely, Your heart will break like…”

The record skipped to a stop. Anna clung to the fountain and stared, wild-eyed, at knees and shoes. The world was motion, all but her.  She was frozen, mouth gaping, frozen like the fish above her head.

#

Her fingers scrabble dust. The world explodes into fire and became a cheerful afternoon. She tastes grit and metal in her mouth, realizes her lower lip is between her teeth. Phantoms tug at her messy, little-girl curls. They run across the square, shout like people, then ghosts, then like people again.  Planes drone overhead, through the thick cotton-fuzz she now feels in her ears.  It is Sunday, but Anna cannot hear the bells of Saint Quentin, or the singing.

#

Loam-brown eyes, mimics of her own, meet hers. She clings to a fountain that today has neither fish nor tiles.

“Maman,” the young boy says. “Maman, do you know this place? Do you know it from before the war?”

They are in the Square: she sits, he stands, in the broken space that makes her feel small again. Open windows eye them suspiciously. It is 1914 in the town outside Saint-Quentin, and pointed helmets wink at the sun. It’s 1918, and bombs strip skin from buildings and shatter foundations of men, and the world becomes just a little more like hell. 1934, and her son stares at her with a child’s eyes, eyes that can never know war.

“Do you know this place, Maman?” he asks her.  She clutches a fountain that is hers but has no fish.

October of 1918, the Germans run: she is a child, one of many refugees. One of many and all alone. Music plays in a funny-smelling army tent while she sits on a cot and swings her feet, asks for her mother.  Still alone.

Summer of 1934, somewhere in the town that is not so empty, an old jazz record spins to life, and the American woman sings. The boy doesn’t seem to notice.

“Your heart will break like mine and you’ll want me only, After you’ve gone…”

“No,” Anna says to her son.

The singer answers, “after you’ve gone away.”

—

“After you’ve gone.” (1918) Music by Turner Layton, lyrics by Henry Creamer. Broadway Music Corporation, New York. (Public Domain)

Cheryl Leibovitz
Unrequited Love
Acrylic mixed media
Response

Night
By DJ Asson
Inspiration piece

Quin knelt down by her chair, collapsed really. He knew he shouldn’t have drunk so much. But, it felt right. Being with her at this moment felt right. Without looking up at Teagan, he placed his head on her knees, tilting his face ever so slightly so his cheek rested against the worn blue denim of her jeans. There was an intimacy about it, but it wasn’t sexual. It was something different, something better. It was like home is supposed to be, where happiness is the norm and feeling safe is taken for granted. Quin’s home life wasn’t like that, but before his melancholy could cast a gloom over the evening, he tried to focus on the present moment. He wanted to savor every second, every feeling, all the while desperately trying not to black out.

He lay still, feeling the room spin, but not so much as when he was leaning against the bar. And it was infinitely better than when he staggered to the bathroom a few minutes ago. Thankfully, that confined space kept him from falling down while he relieved himself of several bitter pints. He practically took a swim in the stained and chipped basin that once passed for a sink. The cool water helped steady him, temporarily, for the short shuffle back to the table.

He’d gotten drunk much too quickly tonight. Teagan and he came here directly from the office, joined by two colleagues. They were simply four friends coming into a dark bar on a nondescript street for a few drinks to wash away the fatigue of performing monotonous tasks for slow-witted managers. They stood at the bar for the first round, since it was quicker to get drinks but also because there were no free tables. After ordering their second round, they scored a table and ordered a large pizza with pepperoni, some fries and the best damn onion rings in town.

That was hours ago. The sunlight shining through the cigarette smoke-discolored windows had been replaced by a dirty yellowish light from a few streetlights and the occasional set of high beams from cars turning around outside Finnegan’s. Quin’s world, however, was focused solely on Teagan. He sighed, sure that his breathing registered on her body. She put her hand on his head, slowly tracing circles in his hair with her long fingers. As if a threshold had been crossed, Quin relaxed, stress seeping away from his body as his neck loosened and his shoulders dropped. He’d have gone completely limp but he knew he’d fall to the floor. He tensed his knees and thighs just enough to keep him from falling so as to let this moment last as long as possible.

“You know…” she started to say, still moving her hand through his brown hair. She relaxed her legs, ever so slightly, and his head sunk a little deeper into her lap.

“Mmmmmm,” he muttered, more a vibration from deep down his throat, resonating on her leg, rather than an audible sound.

“If only we’d met earlier, before…”

Quin mustered all his strength, physical and emotional, to pull his head up so he could look into Teagan’s eyes. The floor spun and the room was fuzzy, but he concentrated and her face came into focus. Even from this extreme angle and seen through the haze of a long night of drinking, she was beautiful. Her dirty blond hair shimmered on the left side of her head, highlighted by the diffused light from the neon advertising sign over the bar. Her mouth was still slightly open, her lips parted from uttering her last words. She was looking in his direction but she wasn’t looking at him or at anything else, really. It was as if she was remembering something past, something important.

Or, he hoped, she was savoring this moment as much as he was. He loved her but never said it directly to her. They were just colleagues who went out for drinks regularly. She meant so much to him and at times he sensed a reciprocal sparkle when they were together. She’d catch his eye for a private laugh when they were in a meeting, or she’d purposely bump into him in the hallway while he was talking with someone. She’d flip her head over her left shoulder and look back at him and her lips would curl into a slight smile. Then she’d be gone and he’d be left to figure out what his conversation partner had been saying in the previous few moments.

Teagan closed her lips and furrowed her eyebrows. She looked directly at Quin, locking eyes for the first time since he knelt down beside her. Her brow relaxed and her lips curled up ever so slightly into a contented smile. It was like they were in a hallway at the office again, but something was different. Gone was the playfulness and simple office flirtation. It was replaced by an intensity of emotion. Even more, her eyes conveyed that she’d come to a realization. Quin was certain it was about him, about them, and he struggled to stay coherent for a little longer. He was desperate to know what happens tomorrow, when the bar would be closed and the alcohol gone from his body. Where, if anywhere, would their relationship be when the sun’s light replaced the bar’s neon glow?

He kept his eyes locked on Teagan. She slid her hand down the back of his head to his neck and then around to cup the side of his face, his chin resting on her wrist. He was startled by the contrast in the heat emanating from her fingertips and the icy coldness from the silver knotted bracelet she always wore on her wrist. She widened her eyes, took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. “I love you,” she whispered and then slowly turned to look down at the floor, away from his face.

He knew that she meant it. He also knew that she was closing the door on anything between them. They both knew it wasn’t going to happen; they’d met each other too late. But she wanted Quin to know that he was important to her too; that there was something they shared. She needed to vocalize it.

Quin returned his head to her lap. He sighed once more and closed his eyes. The room wasn’t spinning as fast as before. Teagan put her hand on his head, keeping it still this time. Her bracelet dangled just above his skin. He felt neither warm nor cold.

.

.

Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Music: Pavane for oboe, cello and harp by Mark Owen Martin

 They

By Sarah Krouse

 A father and daughter sit across from each other at a table in the back of the French restaurant across from Ford’s Theater.

They order wine. The father tells him about her mother. That she was jealous that only the father would get to have dinner with the daughter. He had driven six hours from Connecticut for dinner.

“Mommy was pissy to me all week because of this,” he said with a smile. “I think she wanted to come, but it was one of those situations where you just can’t do both.”

The mother had tickets to a concert he had bought her for Christmas and wondered: Did he plan to go see the daughter without her all along?

 The daughter sits next to a man at a bar. They are friends. The kind of friends that have kissed and cried and held onto one another.

They talk about their current lovers, the ones they will probably marry. They talk about wants – he wants stability. She wants power, success.

They talk about sex – they both get enough. It’s passionate. It’s plenty.

Their legs touch under the bar with no agenda.

 Can a man and a woman’s leg touch with no agenda?

 The father and daughter eat foie gras. He tells a story of the time he was sitting in the teachers’ lounge at his school when a student was in the room making up a test. He tells the daughter about how he helped the student.

“What do you have?” he had asked. He didn’t know how to solve the problem, he said, but he knew what to ask to help the student solve it. And that, he said, is what makes a good teacher.

 The daughter remembered the father helping her with math homework.

The tears, the yelling.

“What do you have? Look at what you have!,” he screamed.

The daughter made a joke about never actually figuring out the math.

No, no, he said to his full-grown daughter.

 She got it eventually.

 There is a reason you force-feed the goose.

 The friends, the daughter and the man, are on their third round, and talk turns to the past, of drinking of watching of each others’ lovers.

“You were the one person I had to tell her about,” the man says of his current love. “The only sticking point.”

She tells him she’d started her relationship with a conversation with her lover about this friendship. That it would remain and her lover could stay or leave.

They toasted each others’ partners.

 “Thank goodness we each found people who are okay with this. To them,” they toasted.

 The father and daughter tell what they should not: “Your sister needs your mother more than you ever will.”

“Even if you are right, I will side with my sister.”

“Your mother doesn’t clean the house like she used to.”

“I will never live at home again.”

 They’ve told truths they’ve never told.

 The daughter remembers riding in the car with her mother. The rants about the father needing attention, wishing the daughters were still children.

The daughter wonders: Did the mother want to keep her from sharing truths with her father?

 The friends drink. The woman flips her curly hair to the side and catches herself.

They talk about the late nights during their teenage years when they used to drive. When he would pick her up at her house – as friends – and they would drive in circles. Around their Connecticut town. To the next town over. To the state line. To the school football field where she kissed him the night before graduation.

 The woman plays with a ring she wears, moving it from her right middle to ring finger and back.

The man leans on the bar, on both elbows, head bowed. He looks up at her and takes a sip of beer.

 The father and daughter finish a bottle of wine. The foie gras, dinner, coffee. He will get back in his car and drive six hours home. The mother will already be home, waiting.

 The friend’s father had died. After surgery, after a stroke that left his father’s speech slurred ever so slightly. The stroke in the wee hours of the morning, when she drove to the hospital, caught his mother when she fainted, and drove him to the beach to watch him yell at the ocean.

The woman had sat in the back row of the church, in black, during the funeral.  The friend’s wife-to-be sat in the front. He’d looked during the eulogy at his friend, the daughter who has been eating foie gras with her father.

 Their legs rest on each others under the bar.

Cheryl Leibovitz
Acrylic mixed media on paper
Responses

Music by Mark Owen Martin: Scherzo
Inspiration piece

.

——————————————————
Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.