From East To West: Bicoastal Verse, Summer '08

from east to west: bicoastal verse

Table of Contents: notes, mews & miracles – poetry, Helmuth Filipowitsch & photography, Don Schaeffer p. 17 graffiti – various poets & photographers p. 25 in a rose colored parka – poetry, David Moreau & art, Linda Sienkiewicz p. 38 Contributors p. 3

edited by PJ Nights and Ray Sweatman cover photography by Ulrich Mueller all works © 2008 by each individual poet and artist

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poetry by Helmuth Filipowitsch, photography by Don Schaeffer

Note Left on an Empty Fridge Did you think words would be enough? They stopped short of every bridge as though they were an old man, arms draped across the top of a tumbling fence, eyes with that longing look sunsets leave in the retina's arbors. I wanted to touch, consume the substantial, that meal in a smoky, crowded café tucked into a shoreline of band. I wanted to walk in the jazz waves and touch your jazz hands with a minor persuasive solo. Did you think a novel would explain our convoluted plot? Fantasy doesn't solve every unsolvable problem. We think that way in today's world and we live the lives of clouds.

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Helmuth Filipowitsch/Don Schaeffer

The Miracle When Water Floats This woman who stands immersed in an air of flowers / though it is November on the eyebrows of such dismal clouds / this woman whose hand is on a handrail which has the scent of basil crowding in from a former memory / this woman has already noticed the snow lurking in the doorways and the alleys / heard the faintest cries of genesis in a ground yet unfrozen and this woman wearing yellow in the grey / this woman carrying a nothing which is too heavy / this woman smiling at the crystallizing air / she has no secrets and she feels herself absorbed by everything around her / this woman who has bent herself into the years until she's gained invisibility.

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Helmuth Filipowitsch/Don Schaeffer Dear C, don't feel guilty. No one ever did. In the cradle of the sun setting to rise, no one ever felt. Guilty is a word affixed to verdicts after a trial. By fire, we sat and pondered each action we ever took into the event horizon of a fabricated history. So don't. Feel guilty. Each word we ever heard is a particle in a glacier. We're as frozen as that slow movement of the past until it melts. There is a crashing and an epiphany. We are the cradle of change. And we cradle each word which is a step on a horizon that never existed. At least for a thousand generations of words. So don't. Feel guilty.

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Helmuth Filipowitsch/Don Schaeffer Note to the Hyacinth Lady The last snow has been stolen from sere woods across Lackner Boulevard where I find trilliums and jack-in-the-pulpits impatient (and moss slowly eating horizontal trees limbs). Hyacinths are old news. Geese protect goslings. Lounge chairs crowd the deck along with the cleaned barbecue. Grackles have returned to reclaim the back yard cedars. The snow shovel hangs in the garage. The snow blower is stored off to the side and last fall's unfinished refinishing projects have room to sprawl where a car has so seldom been parked. I am one year closer to the hope I can retire. The kitchen needs a phoenix's touch as does the outside of the house. It's eight o'clock and the sun has yet to set. What time is it now in Afghanistan? Today in the Sunday Sun there was an article about our lost compatriots. For each death was a picture of them young on a black and white beach riding a tricycle or posing for hockey team photos. My mother will be eighty-eight this year. I grew up with her stories of the war in Slovakia. She never forgot the price of exaggerated dreams nor how people can be defined not by who or what they are but by agenda and the need to consume everything the eye can see. She says this is history again and again and again. I will retire this year. The days are warming and lengthening. The gales of November will find me prepared.

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Helmuth Filipowitsch/Don Schaeffer Random Thoughts While Responding to Alarms I've never measured my steps with the exact science of a mathematical sentence not on these streets so far from where I was born not having jumped through the hoop of change so often that there is a blur between coal chutes and ATM's I was torn from my homeland by circumstance and given a country and a culture to learn perhaps I've been in metamorphosis too long to understand one equation from the next one foot placed on concrete the other on a dissolving shoreline just as one arm is placed across your heart the other giving birth to another verse today as I sit at the security desk alarms flash by in ever-changing rhythms dissolving to reform again like this city which renews and grows with cancerous intent the distance between my workplace and home is measured and set the distance between my loves is variable and calculated with potential

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Helmuth Filipowitsch/Don Schaeffer The News is Better as a Joseph Heller Novel (from notes discovered in a notebook) No one weeps anymore. The bombs go off-percussion for the raging song-and we're stunned. No one weeps. In our fantasies and nightmares, we've journeyed through aroused skin, to the heart of the city's heaving lungs, its weathered, concrete boneswe've sipped coffee watching the setting metamorphosis of death. On the catwalks, we've rated this year's sleek fashions and in the fashion quarter-we've seen it hawked in history superstoresretro/retro/retro. The bombs go off and no one weepsit's just this season's colour.

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Helmuth Filipowitsch/Don Schaeffer A Forgotten Conversation We Must Have Had Mostly meaning is a place-setting of words while weighty matters occur around the event of cobbling together a sentence to explain. (When nothing touches or feels.) Then we parse back to genesis, congratulate ourselves, sleuths discovering that need. A poem, a book, the way a table is slanted to the door just so, just so. And the wave rises again because all waves are forgotten once they reach the shivering beach. Only the pebbles and sand retain a fading memory of having been at a place and at a time. (For a while, no more than that.)

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Helmuth Filipowitsch/Don Schaeffer The Little Star Opera -Nell, gone to the store, back in a minuteNote carefully placed on kitchen table-beside cereal in a bowl, incomplete without milk-and time is a taut instrument, snapping at expectation's impatient touch. And DNA's binding moments have crumbled as though the frail accountant-who envied tape measures and sawdust while aligning debits and credits-as though the accountant-who considered wood grain a forest's spreadsheet in the calculation of taxes for condos, marinas; for flop houses and jazz bars; for sunsets and world cruises-as though the trembling accountant with self-determination determined a left turn was imperative, yet his heart veered right into lingering morning shadows clutched like lovers by suburban streets. There had to be another world, another side. His ease with Raisin Bran breakfasts, apples at afternoon break, brush and floss before bedtime-his facility with grocery shopping Saturday mornings-Zehrs-following one large, black, Tim Horton's coffee before the drive somewhere through the kingdom-his facility with a cloak of cold, calculated consumption weighed heavy on things as fragile as knots in old pine furniture, a passing kiss on cedar deck, new roses in summer garden, monarch butterflies tap-dancing the catwalks of September rain.

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Helmuth Filipowitsch/Don Schaeffer Perhaps it was always far too late to shed life's excess pounds, to dance fresh dances across the square of stale relationships, to live drinking artesian rhythms-nomadic, a floodplain wanderer spilling dreams onto the roofs of cities choked with fabricated activity. Above his crib, the mobile twistedslowly to a simple song in the fragile key of life. Ten, he sat in the schoolyard's brooding maple tree, deep into the short lifespan of a moon that now bounced along the horizon's spine, crashing into roofs, sliding down alleyways-until impatient, it-veered into the stars. twenty-five, he reclined in his car at outlook point, the city, ocean below his perspective, each light a buoy illuminating a dangerous, hidden route. Middle-aged, walking the dog along the pilgrimage of subdivision sidewalks, he was always a shadow reflection of shadows behind drawn curtains. Light rivers flowed from windows, filled the oxbow night and he hummed, 'Twinkle, twinkle….' During the final days, he was always going Nowhere, accomplishing, I don't know, seeing, Oh nothing, reading, Just some stuff, dreaming, Oh, I'm sorry, I wasn't listening.

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Helmuth Filipowitsch/Don Schaeffer During the final days, he watched the opening doors of indistinct stars, he imagined each shadow encountered another shade of amber-during the final days, he reached out to the mobile and as his hand approached the source of body song, he danced.

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Helmuth Filipowitsch/Don Schaeffer

The Door Still Lets in Hallway The last thing you did was slam the door so hard it bounced back open and I saw that splatter of blood on the wall from the Friday murder-resembling a Munch sky, or the cod's mouth as it lay in the bucket gasping for ocean, unable to comprehend the difference between one side of a split second and the other.

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various poets & photographers

~poem by Jim Knowles, photography by Jacob Robinson

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graffiti

~ poem by Pris Campbell, photography by Laura Frenkel

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graffiti

~ Courtney Campbell

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graffiti

~ poem by Linda K. Sienkiewicz, photography by Halina Przeszlo previously published in Heartlands

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graffiti

~ poem by Ray Sweatman, photography by Tracy Moore

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graffiti

~ poem by Jim D. Deuchars, photography by Vova Pomortzeff

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graffiti

~ poem by Ray Sweatman, photography by Margarita Borodina

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graffiti

~ poem by Pris Campbell, photograpy by Konstantins Visnevskis

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graffiti

~Courtney Campbell

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graffiti

~poem by Jim Knowles, photography by Jacob Robinson

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graffiti

~poem by Gil Helmick, photography by Alexey Klementievœ

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graffiti

poem by Pris Campbell, photography by Pavel Losevsky

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graffiti

~poem by James Lineberger, photography by Kirill Zdorov

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graffiti

poem by Jim D. Deuchars, photography by Ivan Mikhaylov 27

graffiti

~ Gil Helmick

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graffiti

~poem by Jim Knowles, photography by Jacob Robinson

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poetry by David Moreau, art by Linda Sienkiewicz

At a Bus Stop, San Francisco 1980 Swaying across the street a ripe young woman in a red dress resembles a tangle of honeysuckle ready for a swarm of bees. A gay man leans toward his companion and hisses, “Oh ASS her.” Down the corner an old drunk dances unsteadily, bends low and bellows, “Ah played with John COLTRANE. Do ya heah me? Ah played with JOHN COLtrane!” The others waiting for the twenty-two Fillmore roll their eyes and snicker and I can’t claim that I believe him, but acknowledge that somewhere in the sad history of the world the solo he plays tonight harmonizes a mournful and passionate song.

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David Moreau/Linda Sienkiewicz

Love Poem to a Nineteen Year Old Girl Waiting for me, she sits on a porch step, watching children playing down the street. They, too, are in love with her. The youngest boys come to her with bottle caps and bits of colored glass, stand back as if she dazzled as bright as Snow White. I come to her with a six-pack of beer and a joint in my pocket, brag of hitching down to Syracuse, of seeing Bob Dylan in concert. I act as if the world were a brand new day, although, in truth, I am as self reliant as a child tossed into the sea and there is little chance that I can keep her near me. She used to say, cold hands warm heart, but when she broke up with me, I said, cold hands cold heart. Thirty years later I still use the same joke and remember the color of her eyes and the letters she wrote. The repetition of our story is as common as a t-shirt on a six year old, the collar stretched and stained with Popsicle. I go and go and go, contribute to the world as a whole, remember the way she brushed her hair and her voice on the telephone. For, once, I was a new friend with words and hands to interest and excite and she was the sound of the wind in the night. I go and go and go, contribute to the world as a whole.

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David Moreau/Linda Sienkiewicz For My Sister Patty After watching Peter Pan on TV Patty cried all night because she couldn’t fly. She had allergies and nightmares about dying. Growing up, she fought with Mom all the time, about wearing jeans to church or folding laundry. I’d come home at midnight, find them screaming in the living room and sneak up the back stairs, unnoticed. Patty got married when she was barely eighteen, so no one could tell her what to do. Jerry used to like to drive up north, to the edge of a lake he knew, smoke pot and sleep outside, staring at the stars. Patty wore granny glasses and no bra. They were always listening to the Grateful Dead, Brown eyed women and red grenadine, the bottle was dusty, but the liquor was clean. Then, all at once, they were reading the Bible and talking about the last days, until, a few months later, Jerry was back smoking pot again. But it was clear he wasn’t right in the head. I was scared the time I drove her back to the house in Little Falls to pick up the kids’ clothes and she told me how he shot her cat in front of her and then laughed. Now she’s been married twenty years to a deacon in her church and he makes good money in the cleaning business, but, there’s more than a little, I’m going to heaven and you’re not, about them. In Sunday school when we were young, the nuns made sure we knew that heaven goes on forever and ever and I still can’t figure that out, but know it was what Patty was afraid of with her nightmares, though, I don’t see us ever talking about it now.

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David Moreau/Linda Sienkiewicz

For the Russian Children at Beslan The radio intrudes with noise of sirens and mothers screaming, but we’re practiced at this and the death toll seems modest. Later, more sirens and more screams and more children in the gymnasium than first admitted and the death toll rises like warm dough in a bread bowl. While Russia bites its lip, prepares to continue a war where freedom is a nuisance, and the Chechens say, Who cares for our children when the bombs are dropping? we pause and mutter and say some prayers, then go on making supper. On the first day of school my children ate pancakes for breakfast, waited gladly for the yellow bus, and later I hear that Leo gave out candy, although he did yell at the eighth graders. Like wildebeests on Animal Planet, grazing within sight of lions gorging on the slow brother, the living are concerned with themselves. The earth is always springing forward somewhere turning green the dead ground, and birth will mostly balance death for as long as we know it, but human acts determine whether children laugh or tremble. Hand to hand and mouth to mouth in constant motion, human acts are borne everywhere on this small planet and more than supper is needed now, or gas in the car, or books returned to the library.

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David Moreau/Linda Sienkiewicz Reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader To My Daughter She has a cold tonight and brings the plastic bag she’s putting her dirty tissues in to bed with her, my bed and drools a little on my pillow. They have reached the island at the beginning of the end of the world, Caspian, King of Narnia, his loyal subjects and Lucy, Edmund and Eustace too, from our world. Ramandu who once was a real star in the sky explains that to break the enchantment they must continue sailing to the very end of the world and there one of them must remain forever. I pause and call her name making sure she’s awake inside the blankets and she grunts insulted that I should question such a thing and while I sometimes do have to read pages over again usually she remembers everything, the names of Mrs. Whatsit’s friends in A Wrinkle in Time and what Ma cooked for supper Christmas day on the banks of Plum Creek. She will surely remember how before the brave crew may consider their hearts Reepicheep calls the honor, the fearless mouse, declaring he will sail east as far as the ship will go, then sail east in his own boat, then swim as far as he may and if need be sink below the water pointed east to Aslan and something great and new.

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David Moreau/Linda Sienkiewicz Storm Coming That big oil by Winslow Homer of the guy in the boat rowing back to the ship stopped us in our tracks alright. The canvas showing fourteen kinds of weather, blue sky, then a rainbow of gray and in the top left hand corner a hell of a storm coming. Miller knew all about the fishing, how they used hand lines from dories, in the open sea on the Georges bank, bringing cod back to the schooners for salting - cheap protein for the city poor and good money for the fishing bosses. Though magnificent, the guy in the painting was no boss. Great muscles straining in his forearms, broad back bent to the oars, three fish the size of children flopping at his feet, head turned, fixed on the schooner which was turned hard away from him. Miller assured me the little boat was stable and they’d come back for him after the storm but I couldn’t get over leaving him there and spluttered while we stood gaping, both of us with our own private knowledge of betrayal. I was safe on the big ship that day, a wife at home who loves me, but Miller was headed into a storm, divorced six months later. He didn’t talk about it and we left soon after, heading cross the Fens to the ball park, in time for batting practice.

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David Moreau/Linda Sienkiewicz Nel Dalheim’s Dream A couple of times lately neighbors have asked for a ride into town. In the car they get going just like me. One noting his mother and father both were dead by the age he is now and he wants to live before he dies. The other remembering a dream where she’s driving her mother’s big car and her mother’s five cats are escaping. She looks and looks for them, but as she returns one another slips out. When she realizes she can not hold them back she is filled with incredible sadness. In the morning she discovers she’s had a miscarriage. I tell them my mother lives so far away and I wish I could see her more often. The next day, their cars registered or repaired, I drive alone to work and watch the sun climb out of the gray clouds over Androscoggin Lake like a friendly child in a rose colored parka.

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David Moreau/Linda Sienkiewicz

Quest for Fire In the movie the hero’s tribe cannot make fire. They keep a lantern made of bones smoldering, protected. When attacked and driven to the swamp the holder of the fire sinks into the water and their world is plunged into cold and dark. On the quest the hero helps a skinny, screechy, mud-caked girl who teaches him how to copulate face to face. Later, his eyes widen as a man from her tribe turns a round stick on a wooden base while feeding straw that catches into fire. Such possibilities in the world! He takes the girl home and she makes the fire. In the notebook after a long day I try to hold on to what I’ve seen, as if what I know could slide into a great dark pool unless I hold it high enough. What I want to learn is how to make fire. To carry nothing and bring spark from what I find. No need to fear the night when the hands know that.

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Featured Poets

Helmuth Filipowitsch was born in Germany. He emigrated to Ontario, Canada, into the heart of Mennonite country where he remained to be heavily influenced by that German/agrarian/urban melting pot. He has a BA in English and Geography, and is married with flown children. In 1999, he discovered a poetry community at the Atlantic Unbound. H returned to a long-neglected interest, made friends, traveled the world with poets and wrote poems. He has one thin self-published chapbook written for a trip to New Orleans the summer before Katrina. Now retired, he is passionate about music, travel, photography and that insanity called language.

David Moreau lives in Wayne, Maine with his wife, son and daughter. He works in Lewiston with adults who are developmentally disabled. For years now he has considered sex, death, and baseball to be the three greatest subjects worthy of poetry. David's second chapbook, You Can Still Go To Hell...and Other Truths About Being A Helping Professional, published in spring 2007, struck a chord with readers (and Writer's Almanac listeners) all over the world, and hundreds of copies of the book have been sold. He is the author of one other chapbook, titled Children are Ugly Little Monsters (But You Have to Love Them Anyway).

~ Dimitris Kolyris

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featured artists

Don Schaeffer

established Enthalpy Press and has published 5 chap books including "Time Meat" and "The Word Cow and the Pig O' Love." ISBN series: 0-9687017 Recent poetry has been published in Ascent Aspirations, Loch Raven Review, Quills, Aust Cai Hong Ying and North American Maple (in Chinese Translation and English), Lilly Lit, Burning Effigy Press, Understanding Magazine, Melange, Tryst, and others. His first book of poetry, Almost Full was published in 2006. His second book, A Body Event was published in June 2008. Don holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from City University of New York (1975) and lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba with his wife, Joyce.

Linda K. Sienkiewicz is an artist and writer whose poetry, essays, short stories and art have appeared in over thirty literary journals including Prairie Schooner, Spoon River Poetry Review, CALYX and Slipstream. She won a poetry chapbook award from Heartlands and is a Pushcart Prize nominee. She is working on her MFA in Fiction from Stonecoast. Note that in addition to her art in this issue, Linda also has a poem in the “graffiti” feature.

graffiti poets & photographers

Courtney J. Campbell was born in Michigan but has lived in South America since 2001. Currently she lives in Brazil where she teaches English in a Binational Center and is a graduate student at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco. Her research centers on the causes of the spread of the English language in the Northeastern Region of Brazil. Her poetry and essays can be found in print and electronic publications as well as on her MySpace blog.

Pris Campbell's

free verse poetry has been published in journals and collections such as Poems Niederngasse, MiPo Publications (print/digital/radio), Boxcar Poetry Review (her poem in the May 2007 issue won the issue's peer award), The Dead Mule: An Anthology of Southern Literature, In The Fray, Empowerment4Women, Tears in the Fence and Thunder Sandwich. She has two chapbooks, Abrasions and Interchangeable Goddesses, the latter with Tammy Trendle. Pris has published her haiga/haiku in Sketchbook, Simply Haiku, Haigaonline and Moonset. Raised in the Carolinas, she has lived in the midwest, Hawaii, New England and now lives in the greater West Palm Beach, Florida with her husband, a spoiled dog and a cat who sleeps on her rough poetry drafts. Formerly a clinical psychologist, she has been sidelined with CFIDS since 1990.

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graffiti poets & photographers

Jim D. Deuchars

is an American poet born in Waukesha, WI. He currently resides in Pittsburgh, PA. His third chapbook, Pieces of Eight will be released in May, 2008, as part of the Kendra Steiner Editions.

Gil Helmick graduated with Honors and Distinction in English from the California State University in Sonoma, California in 1976. During the early 1980s, Gil wrote was published in small California anthologies and performed upwards to forty public readings. In March of 1985, Gil decided to pursue fiction and flew to Paraguay and Brazil. Gil completed two novels, The Accomplice and Wounded Angels . Twenty years eclipsed his writing as Ani, his wife, and he built, operated and sold a business. As of February of 2007, Gil returned to writing exclusively. Those years included residing in Mexico, New Orleans, Pennsylvania and Nova Scotia. Gil currently resides on an island of the coast of Maine. During 2007, he completed a collection of poetry, Wounded by Zen.

Jim Knowles

grew up in Maine and lives in the Wilmington Forest in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in Mipoesia's Best of Cafe Cafe series and in the air at open mics.

James Lineberger is a retired screenwriter, sometime playwright, and full-time poet.

His screen adaptation for Twentieth Century Fox film of the Devery Freeman novel Father Sky was filmed as Taps.

Jacob Robinson is the

Director of Web Presence for Sony Online Entertainment LLC (SOE), a recognized worldwide leader in massively multiplayer online games, with millions of gamers around the globe having enjoyed the company’s products over the years. He has been creating and producing web sites for the Interactive Entertainment Industry for the past 10 years, bringing along with him extensive experience from all types of industry categories including game peripherals (Mad Catz/GameShark), publishing (SOE, Atari), online gaming services (Mplayer/GameSpy) and creative agency (FirstWeb). from east to west thanks him for the wonderful free hi-res textures available at Darknews.com.

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graffiti poets & photographers

Ray Sweatman has a sexy southern drawl and is the talented co-editor of from east to west: bicoastal verse.

Photos by other photographers

in the “graffiti” feature were purchased from

Dreamstime.com.

“Graffiti Fairy” by Kelliem

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