#6: Winter

An old joke goes: How many Surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? And the punchline is: fish. The kind of joke that registers half a grin, at best, but I remember it well because it struck me when I first heard it how the out-of-context-fish had somehow become the quintessential symbol for Surrealism. More recently, the melting clock has gained ground as an icon for Surrealism, but the fish will always have its place because of Andre Breton’s Soluble Fish, if not for how often it has shown up in Surrealist paintings. In Harbor Review’s sixth issue, our winter issue that marks the end of 2020, two of the poems specifically mention fish and two works of art depict bodies of water (which made me think of fish), another work of art is in the Surrealist mode, and several other works of both poetry and art have Surrealist elements. As I have studied this issue, these elements keep jumping out at me, reminding me of Gertrude Stein’s “Single Fish,” Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not A Painter,” and René Magritte’s “La Trahison des Images (The Treason of Images).”

French intellectual Julien Benda wrote La Trahison des Clercs in 1927, a work, apropos to 2020, about the treason of the intelligentsia against their own intelligence. Magritte’s famous pipe first made its appearance in 1929, ostensibly about the treason of an image against itself. Surreal and Treason have come to mind often this past year as the world has transformed into a canvas of images that fly in the face of expectation, that betray our trust; as events have unfolded erratically, unexpectedly, fishily. Harbor Review’s sixth issue appeals continuously to these ideas, as a surreal reflection of the year we’ve had. Everything here has an element of the surreal or the imaginary-treasonous. We can, “sip your quiet elements from a jar” as Jordan Escobar puts it in his poem, “Hypodermic September,” or stare into the iridescent depths of Jocelyn Ulevicus’ “The Mooring,” and come away with a sense of the surreal. We can wonder at the depth of passion conveyed by so few lines in Maurice Moore’s “First Kiss,” “or some / chaotic chimera involving / all three—a beautiful toy” (Rachel Stempel, “Aquaria”).

Gregory Stapp

Editor-in-Chief

January 2021

River of the Estranged City

From the first when I came to to come to you I came to you 

I’d’ve sworn lorn: did swear a piece of netting and tear torn the sky a plastic 

caught in the park’s naked tree a golden net Fish stared from ice beds

and I eyed all along the avenue my thumb Light cut in 

where it could and couldn’t I fancied myself gone

down a hole, and you invited others in birds too I found 

where women go when women go to keep our own 

perilous company I made a song for you I built a cardboard accordion, 

slid you inside a fold and now myself I cannot find I called it—

Everything I cannot find the East River has 

Everything I cannot have I want

Zoë Ryder White & Nicole Callihan

Healing Rubric 

Soon I will hear I am a hero for 

what I did to survive. I am 

certain, plainly, that those who 

will speak know nothing 

of ache seasoned in bloodguilt. My 

therapist was reasonable: 

Daniel, he’s gone. I did not say, 

Tell that to his memory. Tell that 

to the left side of my bed. 

Instead, simpler: Shut up. At this 

point, it seems I’ve sung, 

void of hope, for years. As I 

understand it, the point 

was making a rubric to healing 

without ever trying on the 

bandages. I was told a life, 

if it can be called that, exists— 

in it, I am happy. 

They won’t understand: I could 

not have that sentence end 

on without him. I needed to put 

something between it all— 

a period, his gentle fists. What’s 

a synonym for everything, 

but bigger? Love, I think. 

I heard there’s that, too, waiting 

for me in this perhaps-life 

I can one day perhaps-live in, 

all of it for my self. Make no 

mistake: I will not be better 

for this. I will hold no valor 

for coming away from love, 

changed only by that 

I killed it. Keep the flowers. 

Whether by eye 

or finger, I wouldn’t know 

what to do with that which is 

worth holding only in 

its snipped abbreviation. 

I barely can grapple holding 

myself, still. How pleased 

the therapist will be to hear 

of blood in the mouth, how 

I took my love out back & blew it 

so high some of the pieces 

landed in Heaven, the heart’s 

still-pulse a bloodwail siren 

of still-whose: his, his, his. 

Daniel garcia

Summer in Reykjavik

it does not get night before the sun.

pulse lodged like a stone

inside my throat

i burst with tears

a man sells fish and looks at me like

i too am a fish

pulls scales from my mouth

tosses my spine into the sea

a girl holds my hand

and lets me taste needing

on the tip of a tongue.

—

the sun has forgotten how to set

and midnight is dawn is dusk,

the sun has forgotten how to set

so then what have i forgotten

i touch the stove three times

and return in fear, awaiting blaze

and smoke

i watch a man breathe fire

and follow ‘til his lungs crumble ash,

howl through the blackless night to learn

how my mouth can wrap around a name—

it does not get night before the sun.

Cailin Wile

On the Mountain Path

the Grapevine makes me sad

too casual a reminder

of Nero and Pony Boy

between gas station Pringles snaps

I am on the mountain path

where the oaks can’t stand

and the yellow rolling tinder blinks

thankful that we burn our leaves

two hours from downtown

too casual a reminder

something about the state we’re in

something about a golden wonder

except months later

when you leave Trader Joe’s

a grapefruit sun sown in ash

and you know it is gone

the next time I go to the Bay

anticipating what I tried to forget

a shade of black for modernist houses

miles of the imminent

attach future metaphor

to the phrase scorched earth

except resolute fingers

charred for the gales

they’ll snap I know

a sea of wasps a tender crack

falling sinking

fodder for future tinder

volcanic ash bears the best fruit

something phylloxera could tell you

how many time do you taste soot

until you’ve retrieved a vintage

Sebastian Moya

windekind farm, vt

i watch my lover

as he paints this indigo mountain

again, all over

white

in thick blight

the bluet’s wings are heavy

with his paint’s toxicity

so it sputters, the bluet

half-drowned wings

fluttering in

half-steps.

what belongs, here?

the cherry stems, what about

its pits

covered in human saliva? how

do i enter—

the forced communion

of tongue

of this meadow-mountain loam

of this fruit laid bare?

i ask my lover to take a photo of me, in indigo,

here, brown, on this farm in vermont.

i wonder, if i take my shirt off, will i fit

into this american-scape, this

blooded-scape

this bodied-scape?

perilous, words

see, this color intrudes

the crickets cry, until

their song goes white.

Victoria Stitt

Waiting

In the complete women’s care office

babies line the walls in gilded picture frames

the siblings in the field at golden hour

backlit by the sun, awash in something

that must be halo-light, and the portrait

of the triplets, all captured in various stages

of movement, I breathe and see their eyes blink

their mouths move, and all the infants

swaddled in pink and blue, one newborn

splayed in a giant scallop shell, raw and quivering

they call my name, take me to a room without

children on the wall, just gulls lifting into the sky

one by one.

kindra mcdonald

Coats of Lamb

Snow doesn’t believe in ends,

the same as the highway.

It pretends to know

where it goes,

vacuums out memory in reverse,

winter from our marrow;

they both burden yellow,

the way a nimbostratus cloud

gives the city a cold.

White reminds me of Mom.

Outside of Austin,

we picked cotton.

Fifteen years never thought I’d

miss those dormant ears

of blue corn.

It was the year her test

came back positive.

She was not pregnant

like the fields. She

would give coats of lamb,

salt as an offering, build an altar

out of bone and her thin, winter

body asking for home and

to warm itself on asphalt.

Would the sign at the end of

our road offer solace?

It was our winter solstice;

we gave it coats of lamb,

salt as an offering, built an altar

to ward away wildlife.

I feared for my mother’s life

as the snow fell, careless,

the breast cancer cell floated

into a lymph node.

I watched the Dead End sign

through a fogged window

and wondered which word

would go white;

I gave it coats of lamb,

salt as an offering, built an altar

to ward away wildlife. I’ve never

seen a docile moose,

but I’d like to.

Kaci Skiles Laws

Hypodermic September

Somewhere in California doves are falling out of the sky and you have not yet learned

how to ride your bicycle past transience and needles dotting the grass

like fresh blooms. This is an autumn 3000 miles away. A separate coast. A separate sky.

And separations are the hard bruises that keep: The blotch of hair sprouting 

from your forearm. Blonde wisps on a dune of sand. In some surfy memory, you lick

the salt from an upper lip as the stubble on your chin glistens in dry light.

Now fade like bike tires over sidewalk. Feathers might still be raining down

with gunpowder and ash, a gray-patterned question that asks:

What floats just beneath the skin? The bubble of some not too distant childhood. 

Your grandfather’s gun close-cradled in your arms. Give me this day, my daily limit.

Fill my bags with birds. A spark is all it takes to keep those hills ablaze,

like lover’s eyes flickering at midnight. Trace your hand over a naked spine. 

You want to whisper to all the muscular links, vertebra to vertebra. 

The nude moon glances through the treetops. This night is warm enough to see

blank stars wheeling down the highway. Sip your quiet elements from a jar. Everyday

a new commute rises from the shapeless dawn. Our bodies remain vessels to be filled.

Jordan Escobar

a demy trilogy spinoff

your mother is thanking god on the internet and you’re crying in your bedroom, your knees are hitting the ceiling, again. i’m dreaming of catherine deneuve and debussy making love on the shallow bench of an upright piano and you ask me if that’s from a book. “people only die from heartbreak in the movies,” deneuve says. no, that was her mother. your mother tells me that she loves that actress, she has no idea who it is, i’m not judging, i’m just clearing the glasses. the coffee’s bitter but i make love to it anyway. your mother sends you a prayer on your facebook wall. someone you haven’t seen since high school presses “like.” i put cream in my coffee for the first time in a year, throat coat like blood, thick and musky. catherine is lonely but it’s buried in coyote fur. i’m thinking maybe catherine will have a baby for me, name him siavash, let him feed off me. we’ll never leave the floor and i’ll feed all of us. skin and furs. your mother will sing about our sins quietly, something only i can hear. catherine will sing our lullabies; meanwhile you knee the ceiling and get blood on the stucco. if this was my life i could live like this—bloody tongue lending the coffee a stir stick.

Jessica anne Robinson

AQUARIA

/ 

i am a professional animal

cage & need to rehome 

my angelfish. she’s lost

her edge & feeds 

on empty lines.

/

honey gourami caused all three

of my formative childhood traumas. 

but, they were a handsome serious.

/ 

an angler dons a crown 

or halo 

or pillory & my mother, 

the marine biologist, opens 

the floodgate. 

/ 

i take unwanted 

fish & am on the market

for an eighty-five-gallon wave tank.

/

the loch ness monster may be a giant 

eel or catfish or the middle-

aged accountant from akron type

or some 

chaotic chimera involving 

all three—a beautiful toy.

Rachel Stempel