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Atmospherics
Volume 1, no. 2
Fall 1994
Welcome to issue number two of Atmospherics. I was gratified by the
good things that were said about issue one. As you can see from the author
biographies, Atmospherics has reached around the world. Contributions come
from as close as Toronto and as far away as Helsinki, Finland. The styles
are as varied as the home bases of the authors. This makes me feel very
satisfied because I wanted this journal to appeal to a wide range of
authors.
This issue is our poetry issue. I plan to have one special issue
devoted to this genre each year. However, depending on what type of
submissions I receive, I may have more than one special poetry issue a year.
As always, Atmospherics welcome any submissions of short-stories, poems,
and literary essays. Please include a short biography with your submission.
Send them to: Susan Keeping (keeping@vax.library.utoronto.ca or
ag351@freenet.carleton.ca.).
If you wish to receive future Atmospherics via e-mail please send me
your address and I will send out bulk mailings to those interested.
Atmospherics is available on freenet.carleton.ca (the poetry and writers
sigs), it is uploaded to some local Toronto BBS's and is also available
through FTP at: etext.archive.umich.edu. It is also accessible through
Gopher from the same site.
So, enjoy this issue. I hope you find something in it that you like.
Susan Keeping, editor
===================================================
Atmospherics Volume 1, number 2 Autumn 1994
===================================================
Table of Contents:
Poems by:
Colin Morton
Thomas Bell
Scott Dexter
Tuomas Kilpi
John D. Anderson
R.
David Dowker
Pearl Sheil
Happy
Charles P. Schultz
Erik J. Davis
George Belphegore Perry
___________________________________________________________________
This text may be freely shared amongst individuals, but it may not be
republished in any medium without express written consent from the authors
and advance notification of the editor. Rights to stories remain with the
authors. Copyright 1994, the authors.
___________________________________________________________________________
Adrift in Post-traumatic Space
------------------------------
"309.89 Post-traumatic Stress Disorder
A. The person has experienced an event that is outside the
range of usual human..."
Nameless bones spread
maintaining always
appropriate distance.
And there another
psychotic killer
slouches free and loosely
toward Music City.
And Josie
faces Mecca,
and Josie fastens cute buttons
on an ice-blue top,
and Josie steels herself
for facing the
faceless waiting for
Big slices.
B: The traumatic event is persistently reexperienced in at least
one of the following ways:
...numbing of general responsiveness (not present before the
trauma) as indicated by at least three of the following:...
(6) restricted range of affect, e.g., unable to have loving feelings..."
I live in your small dark rooms.
And I wait for a window of opportunity to open.
And I wait. I wait for the shadow
that cannot be named
to overtake us, to overtake me.
Robert
settled for various
adjustments to that
crimson paisley tie.
seeking connection he could tolerate
Clarkesville's quiet shaken by 3 killings
Clarkesville, Tenn. -
Annabelle Brown was washing the dishes from a
spaghetti diner she had cooked for her boyfriend
and two friends when she was shot in the forehead.
"People are just going crazy these days."
Do we admit this to poetry?
Tsvetayeva recoiled in panic at what didn't fit.
In Clarkesville a country singer thinks
he can do whatever he wants
Selling millions gives him the right
to fire his handgun after a common dispute
with three teenagers in Wilson County
over the right to pass.
And in Bosnia
and in Russia
and in Ireland
the world of all religions and ethnicities is dying
for lack of medical treatment.
C. Persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the
trauma or numbing of general responsiveness (not
present before the trauma) as indicated by at least
three of the following:....
1. Silence
and 2. numbness
and 3. staring vacancies
overfill the 4. empty mantels
and 5. guttered castles.
And this is me
and this I cannot control,
this I cannot fix.
Thomas Bell
____________________________________________________________
Preparations for a Journey
I won't be able to drive all the way
I'll reach a point too deep in mud
the road so narrow
overhanging branches scratch the windshield
I'll have to carry on my back
whatever I bring with me
lash together whatever will float
to ferry me.
I'll find some island or mountainside
overlooking all approaches
or a cave so well sheltered
I'll hear nothing but the rush of blood
from heart to head
see no colours but as seen in memory.
Or a bend in the river
where currents pause and circle
on their way to the sea
a coastline scoured by tides
carrying with them remnants
of worn-out continents.
Or in some cave of light
among the dark streets
silent at last after midnight
worn out by abandoned starts
and fits I'll scratch at the page
for words to begin again.
Colin Morton
_____________________________________________________________________
This picture of you I carry
(Hell, its not even Kodak paper)
fills me with exploding Green and
Red and White confetti
-heals my wart covered,diseased body
cleansed me
(dormant no longer)
I am breathing again
allofasuddentheairiscrystalinesunshine
clear again
I'm learning again
teach me the parts of me I've
killed for far to long
I'm going to color your picture
don't ask me to stay in the lines, though
because they're your colors anyway
and they should bleed into
Everything you touch.
sgd 5/23/94
Scott Dexter
__________________________________________________________________________
Wet Flesh
1. why on earth books, magazines or television programmes never talk about
the true mysteries of life, such as why do twins always wear the same kind
of clothes, or why do blind blues singers wear sun glasses and why in
coaches there are these tiny hammers in front of emergency exits and you
are supposed to break the windows with them, come on you can hardly scratch
a champagne glass with them, none of it makes any sense, do they think it
is fun to bang a window for hours after a crash on the side of a road among
all the blood and gas, there should be a serious tool so you could smash
the glass with one blow, but no, the news is always full of some stupid
congress and real questions are never answered
2. headless sumo wrestlers are being lifted into a truck in heavy snowfall,
dancing figures in the church yard, too much sake or plain gravity, arctic
duel, plastic carcasses sliding against each other, hands groping a feel
from oiled bodies, the engine kicks in, the man strikes a board with chalk,
free your mind but not like this, not into these words, fractals made by
computers, the second letter of the alphabet is running around screaming
its head off and a huge m falls from the sky, a final solution to small
problems and frozen japanese escape to the highway hugging one another
warmly
3. why don't we have restaurants for cannibals just like vegetarians,
everybody could sell his or her body in advance to be used as food, kind
of like organ donations, and after your death you are not taken to the
cemetery but to the kitchen where they will prepare steaks, kidney pie and
bone soup, human flesh might have an interesting taste and why is all this
protein being buried while others are starving, besides it would be
ethically more pleasing to be eaten by your fellow people than to end up
as food for the worms
4. i saw a woman who looked just like you in the underground, and all the
way from central i melted as wet flesh onto the rails, a three minute
orgasm on a red plastic seat, legs twitching, hands holding a steel rail,
a senseless grin on my face, an old man facing me glued his eyes to the
ceiling where they were stuck and left tangling among ads, city
announcements and blurred tags, a pair of blind eyes hanging in mid-air
5. maybe evolution starts to work so that we end up as more simple species,
arms getting longer, backs arching, hanging around in trees, hair growing
all over our bodies, soon the cities will be populated by reptiles with
peanut brains, trees vanish and we wade into water, becoming even smaller,
until there are just a few cells left, tossing around in the ocean, and
then not even them, just a plain and empty planet that has time to think
what went wrong and why.
Tuomas Kilpi
__________________________________________________________________________
If I could name every colour in this sky
The eighteen shades of gray
The pinks, purples, magentas
The bruised blues, the white blues
The so-dark-they're-black blues
If only I could name them all before they're gone
@ Happy, 1994
_________________________________________________________________________
Remember the future?
The Star Weekly features
effortless households of 2001
their model cities, skyways always clear
and the colour of a pack of Players?
We believed it!
Though we'd looked down the bomb-sights
of The Twentieth Century
had lain on our backs in the schoolyard
watching far off vapour trails
of B-52s heading north
we grew up expert in self-deception
able to leap contradictions
in a single bound.
We cycled home from school
in the mad adventure of air-raid drill
supposing two minutes would save us
and we'd rise from the wreckage of our homes
to a life fit for heroes.
Summer nights in the schoolyard
far from city lights
we stared up at Cassiopeia
the North Star the Pleiades and talked
of the eons their light took to reach us
how we'd reverse that distance some day
and what we would find beyond.
Colin Morton
__________________________________________________________________________
Fingers of a Man's Hand
Daniel 5:5
Attached and breeding bold arabesques
Of Mystery, this untenable abbotry shifts and settles,
Clasps its fingers, casts a glance to the Lord:
Animates this yellowed hillside with silent neophants
In silent occupations, vessels of a fractious light.
Detached and brooding on sinuous testaments
Of piety, these obsolescent heirophants return in the night,
Sated by simonious days, auctioning
Seraglios of seraphim: the cheek pat or nose turned --
Shook, foiled intentions; these keepers of God.
Matching the braided rhythm of the fading
Potency of day, this one transcendent telling --
A lamp at the feet, a light on the path --
Rings the robes in to tranced sup:
Stance and station penned, with no reverse.
Meaning and meaning recked on fingers
Taken in canvas
Parsed 'neath the knife.
Take what was left on the altar; the offer:
The giving and the handing down, the raining down --
Down in the valley where the heathen chant like believers,
Where thieves wear robes and proselytize:
Decanters emptied, incantations cast like spider webs.
Leave what was cleft on the table; the body:
The sympathizing of your tents and 'tentions,
Your rooms of coming and going (of meaning and meaning parsed),
Ascending the babbling heights on a fractured stair
Step up, each cloven fractured step.
Cleave what was taken to your breast; the graal:
The controlling and the telling of, the trolling and the song
Chanced upon -- the minstrel beggar's only coin.
Down in the valley, I quested and questioned,
Tra la la la, tra la la la la.
Erik J. Davis
_______________________________________________________________________
I remember you said you had seen that wicked bird again
"The Devil will pick your nose for a nickel" he said
Can't smell anything other than coming events now
I can see through your nipple
Red, white and blue Jalapeno pepper
Throw from the mound to the catcher
Imperial police force, the corporate cops
Squeeze the pepper on an open sore
Lots and Lots of lotion--Jalapeno lotion
Nose Lotion
George Belphegore Perry
__________________________________________________________________________
from "Machine Language"
Crickets stitch the silence.
Sleigh bells phase
surf pulse
conduit.
Syntactic insect architecture
as cosmic background noise or alien radio
constellations.
(There is no silence.)
Sound
reasons.
Registers
interference patterns,
imponderable
density of information.
Meanwhile
matter
mutters.
Incessant hydrogen whisper
through summer filters even
the soles of our feet
communicate.