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Silk Road vol.3 issue 1, 2008
Artists in this Issue
Pete Fromm, Xu Xi and more.
What the Day Has Done
a poem by R.T. Castleberry
As the sun recedes,
ranges long across grassy median,
turns tree shade to deepening shadows,
daylight’s outline sheds definition,
snarls like snapped phone lines.
A chemical musk of herbicide and fertilizer
floats the wet ground.
People draw close to their homes,
halogen’s fierce light flaring behind falling curtains.
Men and women shed their work skins
for Indian gin, video bondage,
unease around the dinner table.
I don’t remember happiness.
I remember the graffiti sprawl of rent strikes,
tents on fire in Homestead Park,
beds without sheets, the beggar’s canto.
I remember struggle.
This is a border ward—
near the harbor, near an artist’s hostel.
Asian tailors, convenience stores, coffeehouses
fringe the nearby streets.
A cop ends his shift, furtive as a burglar.
Runner’s colors flash a track
between construction crane and security wire.
I enjoy the daze of my neighbors,
their possibilities blank as stretched canvas.
My bookcases are filled
with biographies of willful musicians,
half-read anthologies of Absurdist theology,
volumes that chart the curse of coincidence.
An egoist’s ephemera lays heaped on a table:
Temper stick, coup stick, Monte Carlo dice.
At my desk, a PC screensaver rolls and spirals,
a Nikon N60 sits by the scanner.
Photos from four lovers
are framed in key corners of the house.
Through the upstairs windows
I can feel the light of a dingy silver moon
as it rises nightly from the mercury waves.
Summer is an empty menace.
Thunder rolls. The rain passes.
A writer, editor, social critic and wit, R.T. Castleberry is a co-founder and director of a literary performance group, the Flying Dutchman Writers Troupe, and former co-editor/publisher of the poetry publication Curbside Review. His work has been published in Green Mountains Review, Texas Review, The Alembic, Common Ground Review, Pacific Review, Poet Lore and myriad other journals, both nationally and internationally. Mr. Castleberry was a judge for the 2001 Houston Poetry Fest and for the 2006 Austin Poetry Society poetry contest. Mr. Castleberry lives and works in Houston, Texas.
Silk Road vol.2 issue 1, 2007
Artists in this Issue
Halina Ablamowicz
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Victor E. Gonzolez
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Irene Praitis
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An excerpt from Looking for Soapstone
by Betty Lynch Husted
So why had I picked up a walking stick this morning?
I never use one- a stick jars my stride, beats a noisy
tattoo on the earth. And just what do you think you
could fend off with a walking stick, anyway? I asked
myself. But the voice in my head had not been thinking
of cougars or bears . A woman alone, a woman alone.
That warning I've been hearing all my life. And resisting:
it's a trap, I protested when I felt it descending around
me as a teenager. A socially- imposed imprisonment of
fear. Yet there I was, gripping a twisted tree branch as
if it were a weapon.
(Read the full story in Vol. 2)
The Sanguine Earth
a poem by Ron Giles
From the dark marrow of the earth, up
through crisscrossing tunnels of water,
richness swells in Red Vein maples,
threads the underside of leaves, blushes
in chokeberries, and reddens the skin
of braeburns.
Once, chopping cotton
after rain in early June, a shoeless boy
felt his feet would always leech to life
oozing from the quick, spongy clay.
Later, clearing
new ground, he saw
burning stumps, like empty drums; rise
from flat land, where twitching flames
underlit the autumn dusk, smoke drifting
toward sunset, marooned in a far grove
of sweet gum.
Though he couldn't see leaves,
detaching in their maiden flight,
as if to seek the fall-dry, pasture pool,
he fell too, suddenly to stanched earth,
where purple forever impounds his heart.[for Jimmy, who died in Vietnam]
Silk Road vol.1 issue 1,2006
Artists in this Issue
Deborah Ager
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Stephanie Dickinson
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Natasha Kochicheril Moni
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An excerpt from Stephanie Dickinson’s Big Charity.
The baby and I floated in the red lake of the mercury ’s
back seat. Bluejay had tried to blanket her with a hand
towel but each time the Marquis bounced over a crack
in the highway, the lake sloshed, and her tiny fingers
curled like flower stems. “Memory, how are you doing
there?” Bluejays’s voice reached for me. “Hang on
darling we’re almost to Charity.” Charity Hospital.
Girls
from the ninth ward came here to have their babies.
Grandma Lolie brought me to the emergency when I
fell from the tulip tree. It was where the yardman
Lionel went when he was shot over a game of dominoes.
Big Charity, New Orleans’ jewel since 1736.
There were so many traffic stops, red lights. He began running them. “Hang on,
Mem. I’m going as fast as I can. I wont let you down.”
But I didn’t have to hang on; I was admiring her eyelashes, I’d never seen anything more beautiful. Her cheeks were pink and purple; my favorite colors, and wrinkled around the ears because she looked minutes and hundreds of years old at the same time. I kept sliding as I struggled to hold her. I loved her. It wasn’t her fault she had been born in a hotel room. (read the full story in Vol. 1)
You Are Here
a poem by David Vincenti
See the city that laid flat, subway lines
Delivering men like blood to the blocks
that need their hands.
You are here.
See the mall stacked stories deep
with what you did not come here for,
acres of children acting grown
and grownups dressing young
and the promise of money
in every room.
You are here.
See the line of geologic time from
creatures large enough to lose us
in their toes through all the times the ice
crept in with it’s promise and it’s
dire predictions.
You are here.
See me, across this table wet
with short rib bones and spilled rosé
laughing too loud in a room
too fond of quiet.
You are here.
See me across this table.
You are here.