Rupsa Banerjee

2 poems

Report


On 13th September, Dorothy Wordsworth notes in her journal her walk
through the Grampian highlands
—the country “very rocky and irregular” and made bare by famine—
an injunction which exists like land after ice flows, determinate, orientating,
the submerged memories of barrenness reach out to operative landscapes
elsewhere, the same impression of metal on soil yielding harvest or held
hostage; crops grew crepuscular gathered imperceptibly by the scything
moon—the land fleeing regular raids, the spread of weather, collected in drinks
the drainage to spirit and the uncertain flinch across the years, a muscle-pass,
a time-pulse, a clairaudience with reaping songs
The sound overflow anchored the heart-land to the
corrugated ribs coaxing seed burst
the same date again, an introduction to time land occupied by facts
and to a moment more fallow ‘seed time learn’ in attendance of
ripening mounds the naming of history with your words the resonance
for more rinsed water a longing for a language that would take us to
the beginning, ahead of closed chasms, now you are evening fruit
growing through sighted gestures and the responses given through
valley folds the broadening methods of splitting attention across
the slowness of the years. Being small, proverbial, contained
aurally in the measurement of run vegetation—bigha—the inking
of labour into alliteration, reflecting several shades of purple left by
the veined entry.
We were walking the same date before your failing knee and the parallax of
birth, the time owed to us revisited through the recollections of journeys
enduring several listenings.

 

An Absorption


The last living language of a deserted range
pentatonic differently rising same cohesive sky and sight
the ocean bed crystallized spiral shell ophiolites
forced trussing landmassed gabble heard placing
ear to sand only singing to not forget shapes of
unknown words the voice too carries the salt air
before the fissures that were nerves before the nerves
were the lines of runes remembered meetings of
mists and means following pitchered trail and decant
prayer from sediment tongue before the frequent
exchange the kind unable to recognize the dips and
folds evolutionary colour birds queue to surface
morning light the life of us the rest-sought earth
the up-heaving of gifted membranous sea.

 

Rupsa Banerjee’s poems have been published by Lady Chaos Press (New York), Chaour (Kolkata), Earthbound Press (London), and Veer Press (London). Her poem “Turning Towards” was shortlisted for the The River Heron Review Poetry Prize (2019), and she was a semi-finalist for the Janet McCabe poetry prize, Ruminate Magazine (2021). Her poetry is interleaved with the desperation of identity erosion and the longing for a literary anchor that is placed at once in an everywhere and a nowhere. She teaches at St. Xavier’s University, Kolkata, India. Her academic publications include writings on the works of Modernist and late modern poets such as William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, J. H. Prynne and Peter Riley. She has translated the works of Hungry Generation poets of Bengal into English and is currently working on translating the works of J. H. Prynne into English.

Randall Potts

2 poems

Naming


“Douglas Fir”

or Pseudotsuga menziesii is a misnomer
a false trail—not a true Fir or Pine or Spruce—
Pseudotsuga meaning “False Hemlock”
named after another tree it is not.

Its female pinecones are oblong & scaly
not at all like true Firs. Even its common name
“Douglas Fir,” a falsehood, not identity
but only a lineage of colonialism.

“Douglas” for David Douglas, Scottish botanist
who saw living trees as board lengths—
while his rival, Scottish botanist Archibald
Menzies, provides the epithet, “menziesii.”

Its best name is colloquial, “Coast Douglas Fir”
adding only location, repeating the honorific.
There’s no true Anglo name for this native tree
which predates the predation of white men.

Indigenous peoples used the trees for timber
medicine for maladies, even rheumatism
& the common cold. The tree’s seeds feed
Chipmunks, Mice, Shrews, Squirrels.

Behind my house, huge ragged stumps—
Bark crumbling, torn off—the trees’ ghosts
reach up in the wind—likewise, my name
ghosting my body, a false narrative—

my surname, a scar upon my body
a mark of endurance, but not consent.
My disingenuous body is a silent, tight bud
lost to frost, or an unfurled leaf, or a seed

that may not sprout—unless I name myself—

 

Houseplant


You must first deceive the leaves into believing
they are not indoors, which may be achieved by the arranging
of mirrors & the careful resettlement of the nameless

plant (because I cannot say its name) so as to articulate
the ways of illness & unhappiness (so as to impress even the Cat)
with its near-death experiences after

a slight over-watering or sudden undressing of leaves—
a naked rebuke of inattention that will tempt you
to all means of rude interventions, but you must not

confuse the plant with yourself & unscrew your desire
to live but instead draw upon the death wish that will free
you to become the caregiver you never wished to be.

 

Randall Potts is the author of two poetry collections Trickster (Kohl House Poets Series, University of Iowa Press, 2014) and Collision Center (O Books, 1994) as well as a chapbook Recant (A Revision) (Leave Books, 1994). Their work has appeared widely in periodicals such as American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, The Colorado Review, Interim, Poetry Northwest, Beyond Queer Words Anthology 2021, and Ekphrasis Magazine. New work is forthcoming in The Bennington Review. They live in Bellingham, Washington and identify as nonbinary.

Norman Finkelstein

1 excerpt

from The Adventures of Pascal Wanderlust

 
1.


Pascal sent forth with a temporary familiar:
Sprechenbaum’s cat. The resentment is palpable
on both sides. “I’d rather be back in my room.”
“I’d rather be napping on the Professor’s couch.”
Below them, endless birch trees shiver in the wind
as the aero passes. Wanderlust opens the file.
The narrative is sketchy, the photos are blurry,
and drifting off, Pascal picks up a weird Cold War
vibe. In dreams, only in dreams… the emperor
wears shades, holds an orb, the plaintive voice
swelling into a great chorus. “Old Church
Slavonic,” says the cat. “We’re getting close.”


2.


She kept the ghosts in a linen backpack from Minsk,
binding them with spells from farther east. Whoever
taught her those spells had taught her well. Later,
the cat’s report would document seismic shifts
in the Bray scale, intermittent thinning of dark matter,
and unaccountable temporal tremors. The ectoplasm
was peculiarly volatile; samples disappeared within
minutes, even under the most secure conditions.
None of this could have possibly been known
at the time. At the time there was only Wanderlust
face down on the ground, blasted into ecstasy,
and the cat hissing, not knowing which way to turn.


3.


“Unaccountable temporal tremors”: at what time
did this or that happen? Not merely a break in
the narrative, but a break in the narration as well.
And the narrator? Also susceptible to temporal
turbulence, shifts in the atmosphere of sung story,
storied song. In illo tempore. Myths of origin
assume deities, primal scenes, seeds of time
from which spring demi-gods and their heroic
deeds, the dark embrace of love and death,
the birth of wisdom and the passage into truth.
From a blank page, the cat looks out at me.
“You really have no idea. Let me tell you.”


4.


So he tells me the story of Pascal and the shaman,
of the last lesson learned, and of the price paid.
Of her hunger, her appetite, of Wanderlust’s desire,
and Pascal’s resistance. Of her powers of deception,
the hungry ghosts evaporating, just at the moment
Wanderlust came to. How they flew back bewildered,
dissatisfied, chagrinned, the forests and steppes
dissolving into mist below them. “Would you tell me,
please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That
depends a good deal on where you want to get to,”
says the cat. He’s already slowly vanishing, leaving
nothing but a grin on the page. “We’re all mad here.”


5.


These stories then—are they the means through which
we seek to contain our madness? Pascal contemplates
misfortune, contemplates a narrative of failure, failed
narrative, a breakdown in reportage leading (per
Sprechenbaum) to success. The shaman’s yurt was full
of wonders, none of which (per Sprechenbaum), Pascal
is able to recall. More bower than yurt, more psyche
than bower. “I wandered in, tempted by the magic
of her soul. But desire always leads us to a haunted
house, as I soon learned. No wonder then my familiar
could not aid me. No wonder then the story ended
so disastrously and so soon.” The cat nods, nods off.


6.


We long to be haunted. We are haunted, haunted
houses, inhabited by others who are ourselves.
Our arts are haunted, and by our arts we haunt
those others who long to be ourselves. Identity
is nothing; the soul has no politics, no polis,
no marketplace nor temple that is not
the habitation of ghosts. Wanderlust, wounded
by love, finds a romantic old apartment, haunted
by lovers, the politicians of desire. What meetings
took place here, what noisy gatherings and intimate
rendezvous? Displacements, encoded messages,
substitutions—Pascal feels the specters gather round.


7.


The cat reports to Sprechenbaum, Sprechenbaum
reports to the Committee, the Committee reports
to the Board of Directors, the Directors leak
the report to the various cabals and sub-cabals,
Sprechenbaum, as a member of various cabals
and sub-cabals, gets the report again, and shares it
with the cat. In the apartment, the spirits are moving
the furniture while Pascal looks on. Otherworldly
feng shui, ectoplasmic ergonomics. According
to the report, Wanderlust’s ecstatic trance, courtesy
of the shaman, amounted to little more than the standard
response to amanita muscaria. The report is inaccurate.


8.


Pascal thinks of the sign in Sprechenbaum’s window.
Maybe a shingle outside the apartment door? Saying—
what? naïve young adventurer, no mission too big
or too small. occult consultant, free estimates.
How about a sidekick? A wirehaired terrier might be
nice, to put that cat in his place. A raven or two,
whispering secrets? No, no sidekicks, no familiars.
Myths transformed into boys’ (or girls’) adventures,
comic books with one author and a rotating staff
of artists: in the debate between reason and imagination,
imaginative souls are far more pleased with themselves
than the prudent and reasonable tend to be. Or are they?


9.


The imagination leaves us hungry, and Pascal
is always hungry, alone in that apartment
or out on the road. Wanderlust on assignment
seeks fulfillment, seeks gratification, seeks
a world that only fantasy can provide. Hunger:
it sends us forth, assigns a mission, and we
imagine how fulfillment might appear. Pascal
begins to understand. A knock on the door,
a voice from the Beyond—it’s all the same.
The ghosts who followed Wanderlust back
from the steppes thump about the apartment,
making themselves at home. Time to go.


10.


Pascal reworks the text, walks it back
not in space but in time. Revisionism:
neither creed nor cult, neither devotion
nor transgression. A way of being? Not
quite—a mode of utterance requiring
initiation. The adept’s double meaning
turns the commonplace into the angelic,
however it may sound like nonsense.
Would we cling to the commonplace
or hear angelic speech? Can even the
initiated tell them apart? Wanderlust
has a headache. Puts down the book.


11.


Foolishly we wander about in time. The past
does not belong to us, nor does the future.
We remember, we anticipate, we never live
in the present moment where we belong.
We are burglars of our own chronologies,
perennially out of phase. Pascal’s imagination
has a temporal screw loose. That’s how it is.
We see what stands before us, but it’s never
enough. Such is Wanderlust’s fate at every
crossroad. Flash back, flash forward—
the imagination has its own reasons,
reasoning continually, in and out of time.


12.


In and out of time, Pascal imagines ancient
starlight continually falling, illuminating
innumerable paths, uncountable adventures.
Wanderlust’s time may not be our time, but
like ancient starlight, it penetrates our time,
saturating all we see. Gleaming domes and
towers. Auroras in the polar wastes. We imagine
Wanderlust’s adventures, and they become our own.
Wanderlust’s adventures, in and out of time, are
inscribed in ancient starlight along innumerable
paths, which neither we nor Pascal Wanderlust can
choose. What did you imagine, says Pascal.

 
 

Norman Finkelstein is a poet, critic, and Emeritus Professor of English at Xavier University. His most recent books of poetry are In a Broken Star (Dos Madres Press, 2021) and Thirty-Six / Two Lives, co-authored with Tirzah Goldenberg (Dos Madres Press, 2021). The author of six critical studies, he has published widely in the fields of modern poetry and Jewish literature. He writes and edits the poetry review blog Restless Messengers.

Nika Novich

8 pieces

 

Nika Novich is a Polish digital artist living in Ediburgh, Scotland. She divides her time between her career as a Chinese Medicine practitioner and her life as a creative. The main thread running through her work is a relationship of humans with nature as well as various explorations of the bizarre interdependencies of dream and reality.

From a recent show: ''Nika doesn’t arrange her images, she summons them. Like dreams they emerge from the aether to organise and create themselves. Crowded with wild Jungian cyphers, they mimic those liminal edge-lands where our deeper minds make mad mythic sense of our cramped little lives. With light, life, colour, texture, and movement they sing, cajole and sometimes sweetly corrupt. Her collage works make mad oneiric sense, and they’ll teach you a thing or two about creative living if you’ll let them.''

Leah Oates

1 image

 

Leah Oates has a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design, an M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a Fulbright Fellow for study at Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland.

Oates has had solo shows in Toronto at Black Cat Artspace and in the NYC area at Susan Eley Fine Art, The Central Park Arsenal Gallery, The Center for Book Arts, Real Art Ways, The Brooklyn Public Library and at the MTA Arts and Design Lightbox Project.

Oates was in group shows in Toronto at the Gladstone Hotel, John. Aird Gallery, Connections Gallery, Gallery 1313, Propeller Gallery, Wychwood Barns Community Gallery , Arta Gallery and at Papermill Gallery. Oates has been in numerous group shows in NYC at Wave Hill, Edward Hopper House, Chashama, WAH Center, Metaphor Contemporary Art, Denise Bibro Fine Art, Nurture Art Gallery and The Pen and Brush Gallery.

http://leahoates.com/

Ellery Beck

3 images

 

Ellery Beck has a BA in Creative Writing from Salisbury University and has recently been experimenting in more genres than just poetry. They have art published or forthcoming in New Delta Review, Phoebe, Santa Clara Review and So to Speak. They’re also a reader for Poet Lore as well as one of the co-founders of Beaver Magazine.