Smash Cake

Smash Cake

When you wake up how are you changed
little boy What ropes and pulleys are now joined
in your mind and swaying For each new ability
a new rung on your inner monkey bars Your voice
which comes spilling out of your smile Your small
smile And later your grin The anemones that your hands
become fingers curling in and blooming out How must
it feel when suddenly movement or sensations are newly
available to you An unfamiliar room you find yourself in
that you yourself are building This is why children
love blocks Love tinker toys Love joining two hard bits
that seem unchanging to make a changed third thing
Baby if you will build I will bake you the warm bricks
and hand them to you like cupcakes Bang the world’s pieces
together sweetie Slam your eyelashes up and down
Let your drawbridge mouth release horns and horses
and also mandolin-strumming pacifists who will never
hold a sword

[image above by Lynn Basa]

Poetry/Art Collaboration by Joy Sullivan and Kristin Calhoun

Poems by Joy Sullivan, art by Kristin Calhoun. An absolutely beautiful project! These pieces and more will be on display at EASE Gallery in Columbus, Ohio, as part of the exhibit "The Game Show," centering on collaborative works.

ALB

Tongues lap at open air
as we, sad animals of salt,
move towards the altar
sloughing strands of hair, sweat, skin,
the residue of bodies.

Show me holy.

Bone angle and bent exuberance,
the wafer beneath my tongue, fit of little
disappointments in my fist.

The chalice awakes, its open mouth
as whole and dark as your mouth,
a black-eyed susan toppled from the sun.

I turn and taste the drought.

PUSHING THE BELLY

When you meet the Beluga of your grief
in the open ocean, do not pierce or pet it.
Do not ride or tame it.
Do not feed it anything other than yourself.
Instead, let it roll you in its mouth,
mold you with its gargantuan tongue.

Let it swallow you whole.
Arrive like Jonah in the soft underbelly of lament,
in the whale of your own sorrow, drown.
Settle among the tattered fish, the carnage,
the fishermen's hooks carved into bones of rust.
Push your hands into the raucous heart,
feel it beat wildly against your palms.

Begin to crawl.

Up the colossal throat and past monoliths of teeth,
climb out like a hymn. Rise like a stupid miracle
flung upon some sun-fragrant rock,
shocked and land-hungry, wet with whale spit and resolve.
Cup your hands to your heart---full now with the sonar of sadness
Remember how it propelled you, breathless, towards the shore.

BAPTISTRY

In autumn, I eavesdrop on winter.
I ruddy my cheeks up and go out.

You were my little shark,
cool beside my body, sluicing for blood.

Yet I remain unbroken, innocent as a goat,
clenched white in the lemon trees, sleeved in snow—

these are the shining days.










***

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Joy Sullivan is a poet and educator living in Franklinton, Ohio. Currently, she teaches Creative Writing at Columbus State Community College, Columbus Academy and Thurber House. Joy earned an MA in Poetry from Miami University and her academic work reflects an interest in social justice, community development, and creative education. Her most recent publications include Periodisa Publishing, Boxcar Poetry, and Mirror Dance. Additionally, she currently serves as the Artist-in-Residence for the Wexner Center's Pages Program. 

Kristin Calhoun is an artist and illustrator living in Columbus, Ohio.

"Shiver & You Have Weather," by Matthea Harvey

"Sleeping Beauty," by June Sira

 

 

Shiver & You Have Weather

by Matthea Harvey

 

In the aftermath of calculus

your toast fell butter-side down.

Squirrels swarmed the lawns

in flight patterns. The hovercraft

helped the waves along. From

every corner there was perspective.

On the billboards the diamonds

were real, in the stores, only zirconia.

I cc’ed you. I let you know.

Sat down to write the Black Ice Memo.

Dinner would be meager &

reminiscent of next week’s lunch.

So what if I sat on the sectional?

As always I was beside myself.

 

[Image above by June Sira]

[Poem via Poetry Magazine]

On Creativity: Wendy McVicker

I met Wendy McVicker in 2011 (I believe it was), when I moved back to Ohio. She came to read for Paging Columbus, and I immediately enjoyed her work and warm, playful artist's spirit. Since then, I've enjoyed following her poetry and creative projects, which often draw inspiration from other forms of art. (I especially enjoyed visiting Wendy and Becca J.R. Lachman, who is also featured here on The Storialist. Together, they run this wonderful radio show out of Athens about poetry, and were kind enough to feature me!) Her new chapbook, The Dancer's Notes, is no exception--I found it engaging, full of empathy, humor, and joy.

Here's a little exchange we had about her work (my question is bolded, and then you'll see Wendy's response). Be sure to keep reading after our mini Q and A--you'll find a poem from the book, and Wendy's bio below.


Q: The poems in your chapbook, The Dancer’s Notes, seem to be studies of movement and stillness (often within the same poem). How do you relate to these concepts as you write? Do you feel active/physical while writing? Or still?

A: Movement and stillness: the teeter-totter where I have spent my life trying to find balance. I was a bookworm growing up, but always took long walks, and played for hours and days in the woods with my brothers and other neighborhood kids. As a philosophy student in college, I took dance classes to get away from the desk and the library. After graduation, I debated grad school in English versus more dancing, and then followed love to Europe, where I had to learn to live in a new language: dance became my means of expression, while my love of language was stirred every day as I became more nimble in French.

Poetry is another way of seeking balance on this seesaw. Although in love with words — or maybe because I am in love with words — I am fascinated by and drawn to silence. My first “adult” poems bloomed in the silence of Quaker Meeting, after I had returned (with my love, and a toddler son) to America, and my mother tongue. Silence is where I find the words, and it is the setting for all the words. I think that this is why I like to have a lot of white space in my poems: the silence that surrounds the words is always present.

In much the same way, dance is born of stillness: each gesture arises from stillness, and there are no movements that are not the intended gesture. This is the goal, at least, just as the poet’s goal is to have not a single extraneous mark on the page.

I sit (or lounge) to write, in any number of places, at home and elsewhere, but I do take frequent breaks for fresh air and moving. I once lived by a long bike path, and would take lines I was working on to that path, and murmur them to the rhythm of my walking. I know writers who listen to music while they work. I can’t do this: if there’s music on, I have to get up and dance.  But then dance circles back to the poems and the poetry practice. In The Dancer’s Notes, I try to find words for this dance of the spirit — sometimes they come from stillness, sometimes from movement. It is a dance that never ends.
***

a poem from The Dancer's Notes


Big jump up

A fence, or stile
A river rock sunken
in the grass —

Leaping, once, as a child
she crashed
into the top rail —

pain, bright
firewheels splashing
in her skull, the vast
black sky and her mother

chiding — she
who hesitates is
lost — Now

she leaps and clears
the other kneeling
in light, and her heart
too lifts —
a big jump up —

her face spangled
with gold

***

About Wendy McVicker

Wendy McVicker is a Teaching Artist and Literature Field Consultant with the Ohio Arts Council’s Arts Learning program. She has always tried to balance writing and moving, contemplation and action. At Webster University, she studied both philosophy and dance, and her life in poetry is paralleled by her life in karate. She lived in French-speaking Switzerland for seven years, and her response to returning to her native tongue was to dive into poetry. Her poems have appeared in small journals online and in print, and in the anthology A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford (ed. Becca J.R. Lachman). In addition to offering poetry workshops and residencies in schools, galleries, libraries, community centers, prisons, and hospitals, McVicker performs with instrumentalist Emily Prince under the name another language altogether, often with dancers and other musicians. The Dancer’s Notes (Finishing Line Press, 2015) is her first chapbook.

Lo Kwa Mei-en, "Pinnochia, we loved you enough"

 

"Floating Away," by Andrew Hem

Pinnochia, we loved you enough
by Lo Kwa Mei-en

to dream up a simple boat that could, with confidence,
slice through a continent’s wet shelf for new gold and
other precious curio, and then we put you in it, dear
thing, but not before a real hand came down to carve

the map of worldly want into your brow, so you may
but look overboard, once lost, to know your place.
We will imagine you, unsinkable girl, stirring the seas
from Tsae to Tsew, and the sea sniffing at the cherry

notes of your bones, of the fresh wound of your head,
a daydream of something like blood as you row and
row for days. Pinnochia, you have been loved. Hard,
unsaying hips and tongue, you are indelible, we love

you that much. We dreamed a shark’s awl of a face
and mechanical thrust, dreamed the dream of you, half
-in, half-out his throat. So the hand came down kind
and sanded your breasts away for speed, for seconds

you, half-in, half-out of a devil, must cast your
-self away. Pinnochia, we could not bear to see you
destructed even in our sleep. Pinnochia, you will never
die. We bless you, living ghost of treasure, imagined

back into coffers wide enough for you to sleep in,
the half-sweet smell of you radiating from the walls.
There you will intuit all things done for a reason, so
you will do great things, we knew, as the hand came

down into your legs, making of two things one, brief
tableaus of hind light, spine, and blue, green, blue run
through the mind of the hand as he gave you the body
that could outrun the tides, and so we deliver you

into the oceanic womb, half-girl, new beast, and you will
go forth, reborn in the image of how we loved you: like
a bride, Pinnochia, like a thousand golden fish in the sea,
alive in the mouth of the coffer, the realest thing for days.



****
From Yearling (Alice James Books, 2015) / Originally published in Gulf Coast

Lo Kwa Mei-en is a Kundiman fellow and the author of two books of poetry, Yearling (Alice James Books, 2015) and The Bees Make Money in the Lion (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2016). She is from Singapore and Ohio, where she now lives and works in Cincinnati. You can also find her at www.lokwameien.com.