The other week I had a few dinner guests over and I was bringing up the subject of sainthood and pathology. One bright guest (he attended Harvard) said: “Oh no… I’m tired of all that Freudian analysis of sainthood.” I said: “me, too. I don’t mean it that way, but I think it is interesting that, just as the real flesh of Jesus and his blood appears under the signs of bread and wine, and this is a scandal many cannot accept or that they openly refute, so, too, the presence of sainthood under the ‘Signs’ of pathology and scandal is something I remain interested in. The saint’s unity with the sinner, with the one who is lost, broken, poor, diseased has to it the fullness of Christ’s unity with the sinner on the cross, and so the question is: Do we believe that Simone Weil was an anorexic in [...]

April 11th, 2012: I wake up at 5 am, inspired, and begin to scrawl some hasty haiku on the back of an envelope. It is rare that I am awake before my husband. It is still a kind of grayish-dark outside, and I am lonesome that I’m the only one awake, but also secretly luxuriating in this time alone, which is unlikely since I’m usually either teaching students or spending time with my husband. It’s peculiar: the house so tranquil and quiet, the world still dead with sleep. The haiku I’m writing are ambitious, a bit philosophical, perhaps a tad macrocosmic. I’m pleased with them. As I finish with the last one, the coffee-maker sputters to a halt, drips, and emits a breath of steam. I pour myself a cup of coffee. I have had the nagging suspicion that I might be pregnant for days now; in fact I felt [...]

The Astronomer Just stars, and grassland – ___to stand on the limit of the world ___and then climb upwards. Here is his tower, ______his staircase curled and vagrant as any dream: It is pictured next to the cow. How constant the constellations, this city now wheeling beneath them. Here is his quiet heartbeat. He must have heard the cries of children in his sleep, their lowing. In his tower, you breathe lungfuls of sky. _______________________________________________________ Fiona Wright is a Sydney poet, whose work has been published journals and anthologies in Australia, Asia and the USA. Her work was included in Best Australian Poems 2008, 2009, 2010 (Black Ink) and The Red Room Company’s Toilet Doors Project (2004). Fiona was runner-up in the 2008 John Marsden National Young Writers Award. In 2007, she was awarded an Island of Residencies placement at the Tasmania Writers’ Centre, developing a sequence of poems about [...]

The People of Distress Going through a box of old ephemerae I found a tiny notebook called The People of Distress. The day I found the notebook was the day I started reading up on the gnostic gospels late at night in Vermont, stoned, the laundry rinsed by the thunderstorm, its slow musk behind our ears and inside our wrists. I’m not sure, but I suspect we have all been given the secret kingdom of God. Taking VHS into the shadowy back bedroom; Gesturing to blackflies and moths banging at the windows that we are mighty and merciless— this is how I sit, a box of old papers between my knees, a warrior beyond death. Nothing comes to us. We work with what is already here. We live at the garrison tinfoiling over half-eaten peaches while out in the world there are those who believe Jesus never kissed Mary Magdalene [...]

This entry is part of a series, The Disappearing» Rouse Hill Time travelling on the motorways we watch the landscape change as cramped steel and concrete give way to open space Somehow bare and more exposed Billboards tout BRAND NEW LUXURY HOMES carbon copies of a pre-packaged urban dream past the outback steakhouse past the golden arches Flying high in this distant corner of the empire At our destination vivid white and yellow in the trees A row of cockatoos observes what’s on offer making selections from a drive through menu of their own On the old Windsor Turnpike I look across at Bunnings and realise I’m standing on the front line a battle between past and present History holding the line as the machine of progress threatens to swallow it whole The smell of death lingers on the property rabbits drowned in the heavy rain mosquitoes buzzing Life and [...]

It’s Fair Our life is boring. The fat caterpillar makes a ring on your walking stick. I want to be consumed by wind, the smell of oyster mushrooms and red horses. When folded, things become unrecognizable like hotdog paste. Thank god for the unresolved. The corner of your mouth a heron holding lavender in its beak, headed east and west where the unripe pumpkins jump in the oven by themselves, covered in paint chips. The old house they uprooted from the stinging nettle garden in Brooklyn delivered itself like a baby, like a block of ice sure of itself. Its roof was sleeping swans laying eggs to feed the ghosts trapped there from the era of edible roses. They press the chickens when they pluck them and break the wishbone. __________________________________________________________ Margarita Delcheva is a graduate of the NYU Creative Writing Program. Her recent poems have appeared in Sixth Finch, [...]

BARTAB: AN AFTERHOURS BALLAD Two Handed Engine Press 118 p. ISBN: 978-0982002001 Cesca Janece Waterfield’s poetry is palpably stunning at times. Raw and evocative, her debut book, () veers between profoundly personal poems about the nature of life fueled by substance abuse—and a refusal to accept traditional boundaries—and the prose poem-narrative of two musicians floundering in a world that has little use for impractical brilliance. Her writing is sharp, incisive, and unsparing of self or society. Stylistically, Waterfield is a direct descendant of postmodernist Denise Levertov. She’s also a , which no doubt explains the intrinsic play of rhythm and sound in her lines. Drawing deeply from a lifetime of musicianship, Bartab begins to hum, early on, with a sort of subconscious soundtrack laced with blues-soaked Americana. Waterfield’s tone is conversational and unapologetic, and is concerned with prices and prisons. The price of refusing conformity, of obstinate recklessness in the [...]

No system can endure perfection. All systems thrive on defining imperfections either by way of “sin,” “error” being inappropriate, being “unprofessional” or being “counter–revolutionary.” Such offenses are punished or censored when it is an “I,” reformed when it is a “we,” and revamped or improved upon when in relation to an “it.” The one act that cannot be forgiven by any system and must be punished either by death, exile, or expulsion is perfect and true obedience. We would think all systems would welcome perfect obedience. I will qualify: perfect conformity to the outward tenets of the system will be tolerated, and even rewarded (though such perfection is frowned upon and often accused of arrogance, or meanness of spirit). Perfect obedience, both in an outward obedience to the tenets of the system, and to an inward perfection of obedience to the system must be punished or converted into the dyslogistic [...]

This entry is part of a series, In a Dark Room» It was late in the smoke-painted bar, a quarter past the blue hour, when The Interviewer pulled The Poet into an even darker room. And in the dark of that darkness, came the first question. Tell me, said the Interviewer, where do your poems live? Most of my poems are conjured between the pages of old fairy-tale books and on flickering screens. It’s true that many of them wield swords. Lately, they’ve been exploring the disappeared home of my childhood in Tennessee. The home I grew up with no longer exists, the gardens and woods I remember wandering nothing but ugly rubble I can only bear to look at on Google Earth once in a great while. They have never done anything with the rubble, so I must regrow everything from memory. The rocks and roots, the violets and [...]

This entry is part of a series, The Disappearing» Charlotte Street The pavement is a narrow procession of footsteps returning home in darkness. There is a raw gas-smell past Island Street, the rancidness of lamb-fat that clings to plum-coloured brickwork. A palm tree rustles perpetually through the windless night with percussion of heavy plastic. There is a crumbling border a child might walk tentatively, giddy with the danger of falling into fathoms of lantana. As you follow in sequence, muffling your pursuing steps, you notice the graded curvature of hairstyle against the nape, the way jeans shape and angle the leg, the sculpting of muscle by the tilt of heels. You pass the private hotel with all its yellow windows lit, Victorian and ornate, transient figures flitting within its walls, a church illuminated by orange spotlights, the fluorescence of a shop you have never entered - then turn from the [...]

from [Practicing Vigilance] I’m looting the altars of my former forgiveness like a cacophony of snow blowers I’m between making dinner plans and opening a can of sunshine onto the supernal room standing in a very quiet desert forcing the mean soliloquies out with their un-simulated volcanic ash hardening my exact replica. I used to put a miniature rosebush in the ground each year to counteract my squalor. Don’t tell me that definition of madness, doing the same thing over again etcetera. The definition of madness is a certain enthusiasm, then there has to be another person there to not share in it—who is oppressed by it who can only stare into it. Tell it to the bluebird rustling over my head. Tell it to a satellite orbiting in its delusion of being a moon. I’m coaxing the black bull out of my mouth with a red flag and a [...]

Conformity is motivated by a need for communal belonging or acceptance, or to deflect the worse pains and consequences of failing to be accepted by one’s desired group. Based on the anxiety of expulsion, punishment and ostracism, or disapproval and towards the enjoyment of privilege and status. When failing to conform, or when losing face, the resulting wounded pride or shame may lead to acts of disobedience, or to acts of slinking off for comfort in groups that suffer the same fate. May also lead to a temporary “mystical” epiphany that displays the hysterical shadow of the conformist self. A species of adolescent narcissism continued into one’s dotage, and, if, not so much willed as merely assumed: beyond the possibility of true action. Literary figures associated with true conformity as I define it: Ivan Illyich and the husband of Anna in Anna Karenina. George in A Doll’s House. Ivan’s final [...]

This entry is part of a series, In a Dark Room» It was late in the smoke-painted bar, a quarter past the blue hour, when The Interviewer pulled The Poet into an even darker room. And in the dark of that darkness, came the first question. Tell me, said the Interviewer, where do your poems live? “Hello Darkness, you smell like hot dogs.” (from my poem “Ralph Wiggum, Redacted” – part of the chapbook ) Most of my poems reside at . The dark room was the color of closed eyelids now. Music reached in through a window deprived of its pane. With his eyes on the music, The Interviewer asked What was the last sin your poems committed? A few of them got all dressed up in their Sunday best and presented themselves to the editors of some of the more prestigious, pretentious literary journals, who said things like [...]

This entry is part of a series, The Disappearing» 58, black-most lot, collapsible ceiling and underground lung ward My dear RG. Crates are melting under enamel and asbestos; whalers are jumping ship for a slant of this rummy sham. Open the archive to check the mobility, there’s a rotten panorama of a hundred years of surplus. First the compositers, bakers, and small-time boiled sweet bankers stocked the clout; second, the house trapped the labour ‘til it moulded the beams. Bad advice suggests that if you grant small debts to your neighbours—tins of beef, tins of milk, tins of tabacco, tins of paraffin—you will keep their loyalty and gratitude. My advice: follow the neighbourhood kids. Born in robbery, tucked into their dance gear you’ll find notes from the ocean, shanties for mutiny, or else wetted and folded pamphlets of every non-rum language, calling for nutmeg, vinegary kippers, split peas and rabbit [...]