A Magazine of Many Arts

By AYArktos – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1043913

Stolen by Nazis,
hidden by priests,
surviving the onslaughts of war
as Warsaw fell around its tomb,
Chopin’s heart, preserved in a jar
of cognac like fruit in a bottle of liqueur,
forebore the years, the visits
of the faithful.

Now scientists amass, eager
as crows on carrion.
Robed in the mysteries of formulae,
perfumed with formaldehyde,
they descend into the crypt,
pry open the vault
that’s played nothing but rests
these two past centuries,
and assail the heart.

A few quick cuts,
the tiniest of samples,
and the organ’s returned
to its jar, the wax resealed,
re-entombed.

What, they wonder,
does it have to tell them?
They ask and ask
but it doesn’t speak.

Chopin’s heart knows but
a single language,
not the one they’re listening for.

It pronounces tender nocturnes
in the glare of the noontime lab,
singing of moonlit emeralds glinting
on Aurore’s unclothed breasts.

The scientists continue probing,
attuned to their test-tubes,
to the samples simmering in chemical soups,
to the percussion of the computer’s beeps.

The heart despairs,
wanders through minor-key impromptus,
a blizzard of sharps,
thunders in angry polonaises
that promise tigers rioting in Montmartre.

By Coyau / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15459524

1. Two tickets to the opening performance of La Terrestrienne.
2. A miniature sarcophagus carved from Denebian chrysoprase.
3. Four silk shirts, dyed in unfamiliar colors and subtly mis-cut.
4. Self-inserting unhemmed wormhole pockets (don’t match shirts).
5. A velvet-lined case containing 3 uncut amethysts.
6. On closer inspection, inclusions in the flawed stones wriggle.
7. A lyre whose frame has bitten all who tried to grasp it.
8. Books bound in scaled skin. All pages are black. Some stick together.
9. An angular brass whistle bearing the image of something like a dog.
10. A pamphlet explaining how to exorcise the thing like a dog,
    once the whistle has summoned it. The last pages are missing
    and appear to have been both burnt and chewed off.
11. A sensory dodecahedron half-full of tourist vidrecordings.
    In the last recording (calm sea, deck chairs, solicitous stewards)
    a whistle is heard. Then there is screaming.

Photo by Bill Bertram – Bill Bertram, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=565917

i hope someday
they develop
artificial
intelligence
because then we
can act like HIM

plug ourselves in
to design a
new world of peace
by piece construct
first the beasts of
land and monsters
of the sea pests
will come next and
birds of the sky

artificial
flesh will be hard-
est to produce
and fingernails
and hair patterns
and different
noses because
they would need to
change for growth to
initiate

square sonar waves
artificial
intelligence
parades started

l33t 5p34king lives
trading market
downloadable
genocide

worship the chip
the motherboard
and connect to
everything with
one single wire

O Cormorant Queen,
long-necked Lady of black plumage,
can you hear me,
so far from the isle of river reeds
and cormorant-crowded estuaries?

Can prayer ascend without voice,
rhythm shriven of melody,
on heartbeat’s punctuation?

Cobalt-glass lamps swing their twilight
beneath silk-tented ceilings,
transforming the tenants of the room
into dreams.
They are shadows, only shadows.
I shift upon my satin couch,
peering at them with a hawk’s regard.

Those puny pink- or brown-skinned men
who visit seeking ecstasy,
quake at my height,
deem the blues of my flesh
—like spillage of tattoos’ ink
without the blanched page underneath—
unholy, alien, animal.

Some worship me
in the way of precious things.
These deposit sapphires at my feet,
carved beads of lapis lazuli,
as if to say without the aid of speech
(believing I can’t comprehend)
we, we are unlike the rest,
we know your worth,
would chart the rivers, gulfs, the seas
of your amazing skin.

Indigo Mystery,
they call me,
the Blue Odalisque.

Seven years ago I washed ashore
with all the other jetsam,
wreck’s relic wreathed in wrack
and my dead captain’s arms.

Loss still tendrils me,
tender as a lover.
When you give yourself to a man
for the spice of his lips,
for wave-green eyes, sand-gold hair,
heaven-blue arms,
you get what you deserve.

I lie.
It was not just for this that I followed him.
He seduced me with his ship,
blue maiden at the prow,
red sails, strong timbers
that creaked with the jolt of the sea
like a bed of pleasures.

Sister of Sorrows,
Daughter of Thorns,
some have called me in their tongues,
believing I still mourn a lover
drowned now seven years.

It’s not his loss that brims my eyes,
leaves me shuddering,
adrift.

Nor is it merely homeland I pine for,
who traversed mountains just to heed
their winds’ secret dialects.

Not even freedom’s loss
drags my lips into their purple frown,
no matter how I long to trade
the stale stench of gardenias for
shores’ brine or hay-sweet meadowlands.

No, it is language I mourn.

Not inarticulate,
merely untranslatable, I—

I could sing the song of the smoke,
recite the epics of the moths of the moon,
chant the ballad of the wine
till my listeners sweated from the sun
that once fell on the vine.

How can I tell my tales?
How can I let my heart be known?
These foreigners lack the grace to make
the subtle shifts of note and vowel,
gesture’s aid to naked speech,
that give Jenaharese its eloquence.

How many secret mornings have I
grunted and stuttered
in a hundred un-blue tongues,
finding their words veinless,
old parchment rubbed dry and torn,
maps on which the lines of
rivers, roads, have vanished.

So I recline,
cloaked in kingfisher feathers
and mute misery.

O Cormorant Queen,
hear these prayers that flutter
to you on frayed wings.
Let my voice dive deep
into my listeners’ hearts.
See me home.

Meanwhile, the waters of Jenahar
still flow in me,
blood’s blue currents
sing the ancient tales for me alone.
I sway, listening inwards.

Understanding dawns in the eyes
of the little sister at the lute.
Her sure, swift fingers
echo the unsung songs
that rise from the prison
of my dusty throat,
from my damp blue body which,
clasped daily by a multitude of foreign arms,
also gives itself to no one.

These letters wait for your return.
I write them when I should be sleeping.
The babies wait for your return.
These letters wait their chance to burn.
The days are full of burping, feeding.
I still have energy to yearn.
These letters wait for your return.
I write them when I should be sleeping.

Sevilla’s eyes all watch the wharves.
Your voyage is this eight-days’ wonder.
Unless it’s New World, it’s ignored.
Sevilla’s gossip floods the wharves:
your name, the risk, what you might plunder.
I hold my breath; you’re sailing foreign shores.
Sevilla’s eyes all watch the wharves.
Eight days.  Eighty.  Now just I wonder.

You’re not the only one with dreams.
Wealth, yes, but most:  stability
and nights of drip-less, arid dreams.
You’re not the only one who dreams:
I want a husband and a family,
a home in Portugal with no view of the sea.
You’re not the only one with dreams
but mine lack waves, crave rock stability.

The streets are flush with orange scent,
evening guitars, lovers out walking.
A young don holds his elbow bent.
The streets are flush with orange scent,
my heart beats faster just from walking.
He talks of gold, and you, and I stop, gawking.
The streets are flush with orange scent,
evening guitars, his footsteps walking.

I’ll find you in the underworld.
I predecease you—and you don’t return.
You nearly circumnavigate the world
but all the roads in hell are curved.
These letters wait for your return.
Was it new?  Or just more same-old world?
Better than my body’s world?
The babies wait for your return.

damned
test-tube refuse,
love-
lessness grown in tanks and bottles
we stirred fertility en masse
at minimal risk,
same blood, same genes
our co-flesh,
(could we have foreseen
the pillaging and plundering?)

our similarities have become our differences,
same face yet deviant actions—exhibit
the pattern of autoimmune failure.
our soldier selves stand at the front lines.
how many dead?
they hold artificial lives at gunpoint.
triggers assume a life of their own,
becoming thunder claps
and then silence

Did you
never wonder, my love,
why your briars parted for me,
why I came to you
unscratched by thorns?

Did you
never glimpse, my love,
the bones of princes,
caught against
your castle walls?

I am
half ogre, my love.
My mother consumes
the flesh of children.
I steal kisses
from sleeping maidens,
and lick blood from
their tender lips.

Seven
fairies
watch us
as we dance.

Come,
raise your fingers
to my lips.
Your roses cry out
for water and blood.



“Nebula2” by Patrick Hoesly – http://www.flickr.com/photos/zooboing/5610784475/. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nebula2.jpg#/media/File:Nebula2.jpg

The red of passion isn’t the only fire.
Things burn in different hues,
the varying blues of intensity,
the suspicious yellow nearing outtage
and green, just another element.

Darkness, too, is fire
when love is neither
present or absent.
The chilling heat
chars extremities
with the bitter
you-could-have–
things unsaid always did like
to fester
in meteoric crevices or
black holes or even stars.

Nothing ever burns out
because space never runs out
of refuse.