#5: Portraiture

NOTEs on #5

What of an apparition? A lost child, their parents not more than voices in a cathedral of chants; an orphan offering their voice in song; the self-portrait, mirror-self; the act of regarding another and making manifest their image, an apparition as illusory metaphor. Portraiture as ghost-making; the art of refurbishing the self in the image of an other; a reflection as agent of being; how a photograph captures the shapes of light and nothing more, a poem captures form in this way; auto-ekphrastic, and, forever engaged in the devious search for our children, find these orphans we have drawn, like so many Rachels.

“...You / become the fearless arms / of earth, falling / apart under watersong” (Adriana Stimola, “Rachel, At the Edge”); like an infinity in quadrants (Cheol yu Kim, “Infinity”), “a ghost roams in the upper room, dressed in velvet / & purple, counting the petals of flowers on a rosary // bead” (Ifeoluwa Ayandele, “How Home turns into a Rickety Bicycle”); the uncertainty of what the found can mean (Katie Zychowski , “Found photo of birds or planes, pine trees”). We search on, buoyed on empty coffins, until we find “...there, / a worm still wriggling through / the voweled heart of a word / you will never be able to read” (Corinna Schroeder, “At the Exhumation, the Coffin Speaks”); the diminished or bolstered symbol or found object (Todd Molinari, “Trickster”) “—proof, insofar as beauty can be, of what / happens where love is, without instruction” (Toby Goostree, “Rachels”); where portraiture is search for self or other; where portraiture is an apparition of what has been found, regained, this issue’s works stand.

Greg Stapp

Managing Editor

July 2020

How Home Turns Into a Rickety Bicycle

I set my story on deaf ears, death has gone

before me. Yet, if you stay away too long

from home, know that a Purple Hibiscus tree

has been planted in the yard, above mom’s grave

to remember how she became a flower one afternoon

& how she wore a twilight as shadows, climbing

a ladder to explore a kingdom of spirits. -& now, 

a ghost roams in the upper room, dressed in velvet

& purple, counting the petals of flowers on a rosary

bead. I undress the ghost & my mind grows

into a flower vase for ghosts.-& if you ever remember

home, at least for once, you will understand 

how your absence here is an ajar door for deaf things—

love & how home turns into a  rickety bicycle that mom

rides into a kingdom of ghosts & I am her flower vase.

Ifeoluwa Ayandele

RACHEL, AT THE EDGE

It’s the way you

talk about the shoreline, turn

toward her, word-after-

word; the way that, whelk,

makes the muscles 

in your mouth move. You 

become the fearless arms 

of earth, falling

apart under watersong. 

I am dew 

at your altar—drops

of a yesterday, nothing

more than condensation 

on the glass of our creation,

beading at the thought

of consecration.

Adriana Stimola

What If When We Introduced Ourselves We Told These Stories Instead

I thought I knew God once as a girl in New Hampshire climbing a mountain so big and glorious and flooded with sunlight I nearly gave way only half-through the forests and rocks and streams, but something lifted me I still can’t name. I’ll never be sure.

Every time it rains a real rain in any of the small towns I find myself living in, which is to say towns where I begin falling asleep absently over time and building routines around dish drains and the cat’s polite shits piling in his box underneath plastic bags filled with other plastic grocery bags, I look at how the water leaps out the gutters like it’s escaping the house and I remember it rained the day I saw the Colosseum in Rome. I remember it was loud. Like I was under a jar. And the gargoyles were shouting back what the sky kept yelling.

Twice I’ve traveled the entire east-west of Iowa by train. Fresh-eyed boys playing guitar in the lounge car, cornfield skies swallowing light down the windows. Amish families filling seats with some hidden steadiness I envied. The hauntings they carried were ancestors. Mine were worries wringing their invisible hands. In one memory, rickety in my footing between rail cars, my husband and I want hot food so much we pay seven dollars each for plastic bowls of reheated macaroni and cheese.

One time I stole toilet paper from the 19th floor of a Japanese office building. About a dozen others went with me. We needed it. We had lost our jobs there. We needed the gesture, too—that tiny, useless revenge we could bring with us to our bathrooms and meter out privately in little ribbons of loss.

Rebecca Macijeski

At the Movies with God as Projectionist

I admit I believe the film is beamed in     via invisible waves

I admit I doubt They are there     at the projector even if I shout 

those magic words get this film running     deus ex machina pronto

I believe nothing happens     if I can’t see it happen

I admit I came here for sanctuary     as I admit one

myself in with a ticket     I was given 

I wonder if They are the ticket seller     or ticket taker

if They are behind concessions stand     will I treat Them

as I would be treated     & there is remaining work 

there is a needed movie     I admit I wonder 

if They are the film     itself I wonder if this is not 35 mm

but a 3 mm film my belief     so tiny this film that I squint

as I tell my sons not to worry     about this darkness

that we practice a discipline     to participate in the story

that the story can’t be seen    without darkness

Dennis Etzel, Jr.

At the Exhumation, the Coffin Speaks 

In February 1862, Lizzie Siddal died of a laudanum overdose, which may have been an intentional suicide. Her husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, placed a journal of his poems in her coffin, telling a friend that “I have often been writing at these poems when Lizzie was ill and suffering, and I might have been attending to her, and now they shall go.” Several years later, in October 1869, Rossetti decided he wanted the poems back so he could include them in a new volume of verse that he was about to publish. 

Close back the lid on her face. 

 Put out your lantern and shovel 

   glint. You couldn’t resettle

  the careful folds of her dress, 

the brittle red dust of her hair,

  if you tried. In your shoes’

 tread, the soft relics of mouse shit 

that honored this shrine. 

 Don’t you see? The moss 

   will grow again to the stone’s 

  very lip. The leaves of hornbeam, 

hazel, ash, and sweet chestnut 

  will sweep themselves back 

 to where they were. The faithful 

  will mourn. Under a white knuckle

 of moon, moles with silver-raven

   fur, the fox and her pups, tawny

  owl. Pocket your soft hands

and lock the gate. Let me hold her 

  as we were under our winter 

 blanket of dirt. Don’t you see?

  The pages you sought are filled

 with holes. Holes shaped like pears,

   like scythes, like a mouth

  calling back, cackling. There, 

a worm still wriggling through

  the voweled heart of a word 

 you will never be able to read.

Corinna McClanahan Schroeder

Bowline, Pigeon Point Light Station

for O 

Your father kept a piece of blue cord 

in his pocket, like the one wrapped around

the small, red pears of your feet 

when you wailed into the world. 

He knotted and burned the pocket cord

with a gas station lighter, slipped

it onto my wedding finger. 

It wasn’t because 

you were growing there, he said, 

a swell under the sleeping bag, under the searching

gaze of the lighthouse lantern. 

In defiance you look so like him, 

when you blame me for the way I love 

everyone too soon. 

Your father said exactly that 

in the days that were supposed 

to be saltwater sweet. I should have jumped 

on my bicycle, kept pedaling,

would have, maybe, but I sensed you

there already, unfolding your cells

in the mystery, and I wanted you 

to know him, to see how his lips 

quiver in nervousness, like that night 

when he said the knot would unravel, 

fall away, not to mistake its loosening

for something we’d lost. 

Patricia Caspers

Self-Portrait as a Reliquary 

Here is where the bones go, 

those little lonesome shards, 

and here 

the splinters, 

here the dice 

which gambled for the robes; 

the spikes upon the Catherine 

wheel, 

the thorn plucked from 

a lion’s paw—and do you feel 

a striking radioactive afterglow 

still burning from the folds and 

tucks upon the shroud 

and gold 

or some penumbra vaguely like it 

returning where this martyr died? 

The residue of miracles is grafted 

on such ordinary 

lumber, fabric,

flesh; on any piece of fallen star. 

And yet 

reticulated throughout 

its sacred inflorescence 

a touch-

and-go of far-off powers rupture 

into one moment when the earth

is pressed to heaven: 

still, ridicule it all 

you like—we are its vessels. We 

burst like flowers in a stony cup. 

Will Cordeiro 

 The Photograph of a Duck

I photographed a duck

that stood on a wooden trunk

to show you the duck and the trunk

or to say: there was a duck.

I spend the rest of the day applying make-up

and then watching myself,

observing myself from the distance, until I

recognize myself, and wave hello.

When I am done, I say: this is a mouth 

or, this kind of of mouth:

and I immerse my lips into the seeds 

of a big pomegranate

and say Pomegranate,

there was a pomegranate,

this kind of pomegranate.

and then swallow it whole.

I only appear for myself

and these acts are accompanied by storms

from a low sky of treetops,

locusts and crickets.

They are actually the same creature,

only one had long lost its cry

when it buried it in the earth

to shelter it

and then forgot it.

Green on the eyes, red on the lips,

the other held on to its cry

and got a badminton racket,

a racket like the one which we,

as children, used to strike flying beetles

and some used to, after knocking them down,

halve them with the racket’s edges,

crooking its rims

and ripping its net,

but not me.

This morning, the duck ate pomegranate.

Or, it had yesterday hatched that pomegranate.

It was red,

with a red beak and a red tail,

it was as green,

as a locust, a cricket,

as red and as green as meat sitting on grass.

The day is as standard

as the wounds on the knees, elbows,

calves and thighs of the girls,

playing football,

on a minefield,

in grass rising above their waist.

Marija Dejanović

Translated by Hana Samaržija

Upon Viewing Katrín Sigurdardóttir’s Metamorphic 

at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University

/ craft paper / plaster / marble /

This tatty couch, that stiff chair, the calico floor strewn with a few somethings—

a child’s room. All the gray relic of our worst imaginations set out spaciously 

and patterned with blocks of soft sun pouring through gridded glass behind 

and to the left—eye level. No bed. / bland / You could 

walk right into the maze, sit down in the center, begin playing 

/ reconstructing / but for the blurred bodies in the doorway watching. One shuffles 

her feet, the other straightens her coat. Paid positions. How to explain 

that, sometimes, we must get as close to a thing as we can, crawl into the faux 

arrangement, lie on the couch, sit in the chair, pretend there is TV, drink 

a glass of milk /not there / sitting on a little table. How to explain 

the poems we write incessantly in the corner of the room, backed up against 

/ imaginary / walls that keep us folded in place, the embrace of a few strewn 

pillows, the /unfurnished / blanket we pull over shoulders 

hunched against the backside of yet another chair, the toys, the thrown toys; you 

there, me here—he / she / they reenacting memories, and the way there are not 

pillows or blankets or diversions enough, nor contextualization / hours of light /. 

Kimberly Ann Priest

Living Doll

Between Alma’s marriages, there was Oskar

Kokoschka and his 400 love letters,

his 450 drawings and paintings of her.

He was the only one she really loved,

though she politely declined his proposal,

objected, when he wanted to be slapped.

How she summed it up: Never before 

have I experienced so much strain, 

so much hell and so much paradise.

Once she left him, he ordered a life-

sized doll version. He asked for teeth 

and tongue, instructed the maker 

to pay particular attention to the feel of its skin.

The doll-maker, a woman, took six months

and obstructed him,

covered fake-Alma with white feathers.

Kokoschka was disappointed, compared 

his doll to a polar bear, but drew 

and painted depictions of it anyway. 

A mannequin wouldn’t get an abortion,

wouldn’t leave him for another.

He took the doll to the opera and on long 

carriage rides. In a self-portrait—with doll, 

anatomically correct—he points 

at its nether region as if issuing an invitation.

He knew he couldn’t destroy real-Alma,

his darling bitch.

Cured of his passion, and drunk, 

he beheaded fake-Alma in his Dresden garden; 

over her handsome handmade head, 

he smashed a bottle of good red wine.

Susana H. Case

Velázquez and the Princess

“Infanta Margarita Teresa in blue dress” (1659) 

by Diego Velázquez, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Velázquez, you didn’t lie 

about the princess, drowning girl 

in her voluminous weighted gown, 

her almost-frown, hanging limp 

from her hand, a soft dead animal muff, 

plush sable brown, still and cold, 

against the silvered crinoline.

The canvas crowded with sorrow,

invisible remains of the brother 

who slipped early to the grave 

taking with him the king’s heart 

and affection—No more love, 

their father decreed, no more grief.

And so she sways in blue, this little girl,

soon Holy Roman Empress, held

in place by the stave of her dress.

Mary Buchinger

Rachels

“When the Lord saw that Leah was not loved, 

he enabled her to conceive” —Genesis 29:31

In lieu of a flu shot, antivenom?

Because I need a reason less generous

than that—when the Lord saw that Leah

was not loved.  What would be one?  

        If she was

loved, not just provided for. —Even if 

she wasn’t loved, provided as its own

reward.  On purpose.  For— no what-ifs, 

buts, or ors.  If sex wasn’t her only 

power, or if it was stronger: no doctors.

—Doctors!  If Clomid, Femara, Follistim,

Menopur.  If mourning-noon-and-night.  —Longer!

If inefficient, slow, involved, firsthand

—proof, insofar as beauty can be, of what 

happens where love is, without instruction.

Toby Goostree