Pine Hills Review LOW-LIFE MALIBU (a #poem)

Adventurous lit journal Pine Hills Review is published at The College of St Rose in Albany, New York. 

Pine Hills Review, "Low Life, Malibu" by Sarah Sarai. 

Dig it. And also, the perfect image.“Lunch Break” by Nicole Monroe. That's what life felt like when I was young and shiftless. 

Check out the PHR submission policies for art and poetry and prose. 

The end. (Sorry to be so brief.)

Their Every Yellow Leaf #poem #NewOhioReview

Aspen leaves still green but ever fluttery.

https://budburst.org/plants/38

Their Every Yellow Leaf

 

Jacinth looks at the pig and 

asks what she did in another lifetime

to be so beautiful. 

Maybe not everyone would see it

but she’s perfect.

I am not everyone. I agree. 

Alice is perfect, 

a hippopotamus made compact. 

I stroke her dark hide and feed her 

fruit cup from breakfast. 

Cauliflower and a toasted bagel. 

Plum jam. 

With the pig, Jacinth 

and I break bread. 

Jacob, who is new to this poem,

buries his cigarette in a late Fall lawn 

to take a call from Quebec. 

In bright sunlight Alice considers

eternally recycling life. Is my guess. 

Jacinth has no interest in me or Jacob 

and praises only the pig, who is complete. 

Is her guess. The heart gets lonely 

some days. Is Jacob’s guess. 

Feeding Alice renders longing and irritation 

irrelevant, without obliterating either. 

Aspens snap their every yellow leaf. 

The trees expected we’d be gone by now. 

Their every yellow leaves don’t guess. 

 

Thank you to the editors of New Ohio Review, 2023 for selecting this poem.

Renegade Sonnets Once Removed

"September" by Gerhard Richter
Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.C.

Renegade Sonnets Rendered via Ekphrasis

A few notes on Rob Stanton’s Once Removed (Nono Press/2022)

 

by Sarah Sarai

 
We look to the past to understand the past. Also repetitive disorders and daily stupidities. We look to the past to understand a shared present, greed and hauteur acted out, to divine a future we pretend we can’t foresee. Or we try to persuade our leaders in a pursuit of common sense, kindness, equality. One much-studied and globally shared event of the past, the attack on the Twin Towers, is interrogated by Rob Stanton in his ekphrastic chapbook Once Removed. 
 
The object of Stanton’s contemplation is, of course, not the attack but the remarkable painting September by Gerhard Richter, whose work often magnetizes viewers. I’ve watched museum patrons squint and study his canvases in a manner that feels unique from interrogations of other artwork. Strictly anecdotal, on my part. 
 
Nudged by an anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers and through a study of Richter’s 2005 painting, Stanton created these stencil sonnets. My term. They are a cry from a heftier sonnet of classical literary history and the many contemporary iterations. They are stripped. As in September. Neither better nor worse than earlier iterations of a loved form of poetry, each wee sonnet is comprised of four stanzas: two brief, each four lines, all short; then two stanzas, three lines each. Each a puff of word or each word is a puff of smoke. Appropriate by design as September depicts the Towers after the second building was hit. Matching what we witnessed on that day, in Richter’s work the structures are discernable only through menace of dust and aggregation. From Rob Stanton’s Sonnet 154:
 
A corona of suddenly
insignificant 
 
                        litter spills
                        Blow back.
                        blow back 
 
On the twentieth anniversary of the attack I broke down and watched the documentaries. That’s what there was, “litter spill.” For the record, Richter was flying to New York in a commercial plane that had to be diverted to Halifax. But that fact makes him no more privy to this wound that will not heal than anyone else. 
 
From “160.” “...already / pockets of flouted sky / cerulean blue / are being tendered.” 
 
Once Removed is a Nono Press venture, as is Sonnets 1-159, in a longer work “dedicated to the work of Luc Tuymans.” 
 
 
 
A native of the UK, Rob Stanton teaches in Austin, Texas. He is the author of The Method (Penned in the Margins, 2011) and Trip- (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2013). Contact him for more information.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Blackbird v Blackbird: Stevens v Sarai: Two Poems

"The End of November: The Birds That Didn't Learn How to Fly" by Thornton Dial, 2007. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, N.Y.

I am close to embarrassed, but what would be the point. I already know that I am not Wallace Stevens, and he is not Sarah Sarai. That being established may I say I had Stevens’ poem in mind as I wrote “Another Way of Looking.” I was responding to Stevens. Saying, Click a prism and you will see different perspectives with each time. But now that I see my poem adjacent to the great Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Thirteen Ways...” Well. Yikes and all that. Sigh. I plow on. First my poem. Then his. Thanks to the editor of Prelude, Stu Watson.

Another Way of Looking
by Sarah Sarai

The poem on the page
remains on the page

the page with the poem is
the page with the poem it

may lift it self (up)

or snack and nap

but there it is on the page

in all its theory

in all its wisdom which

is not all wisdom

hey, a blackbird knows wisdom

just one blackbird

no need to cast shade over

the whole of them

from Prelude Journal, Stu Watson, ed.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
by Wallace Stevens

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,   
The only moving thing   
Was the eye of the blackbird.   

II
I was of three minds,   
Like a tree   
In which there are three blackbirds.   

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.   
It was a small part of the pantomime.   

IV
A man and a woman   
Are one.   
A man and a woman and a blackbird   
Are one.   

V
I do not know which to prefer,   
The beauty of inflections   
Or the beauty of innuendoes,   
The blackbird whistling   
Or just after.   

VI
Icicles filled the long window   
With barbaric glass.   
The shadow of the blackbird   
Crossed it, to and fro.   
The mood   
Traced in the shadow   
An indecipherable cause.   

VII
O thin men of Haddam,   
Why do you imagine golden birds?   
Do you not see how the blackbird   
Walks around the feet   
Of the women about you?  

VIII
I know noble accents   
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;   
But I know, too,   
That the blackbird is involved   
In what I know.   

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,   
It marked the edge   
Of one of many circles.   

X
At the sight of blackbirds   
Flying in a green light,   
Even the bawds of euphony   
Would cry out sharply.   

XI
He rode over Connecticut   
In a glass coach.   
Once, a fear pierced him,   
In that he mistook   
The shadow of his equipage   
For blackbirds.   

XII
The river is moving.   
The blackbird must be flying.   

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.   
It was snowing   
And it was going to snow.   
The blackbird sat   
In the cedar-limbs.

from the Poetry Foundation website.

Sarah Sarai's Editorial Services (to be continued)

First draft, 2/11/23. I'm a stone cold, birthright English major who can edit the sense out of the angels and proofread the evil out of Satan's cold soul. 

Hildegard of Bingen

12th-century editor (and writer) 

In Brief

I am an editor of most anything with words. Fiction. Nonfiction. Poetry. Your manuscript. 

My rates are in accord with the Editorial Freelancer Association's rate sheet. I charge by the number of pages plus the challenge your writing may present (i.e., scholarly; medical; fiction or memoir; poetry...). 

 

How It Works

We talk and/or email. I look at your manuscript (or a portion) and make an estimate in accord with the Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA) rate sheet, so there is no mystery. If you approve, I draw up a contract which includes a projection of due dates for both of us. I've never had any problem getting paid, but the contract lays out what to can expect, including a timeline. I require a downpayment before I begin, and full payment on completion.

My Story 

(Feel Free to Skip This. I'm Interest in Process and How the Backstory of Journeys so 

I Am Revealing a Bit of Mine)

I was about twenty-five years old when I first realized I could edit. I hadn't thought about it, rarely used the word "edit." But my oldest sister mailed me a few of her poems. I read them, and realized they could use a change here or there. And I would never make a suggestion to my sister about anything. I both worshipped her and found her a bit scary. It's a shame I didn't speak up. I buried my editing self to read read read, smoke marijuana, go back to school for a secondary diploma, teach high school English for three years. That was all in Los Angeles. I moved to Seattle, where I was invited to participate in a small workshop for writers. I was writing short fiction. A woman in the workshop very much appreciated my editing finesse and mentioned me to her supervisor who hired me, when the woman (let's say Queen of Queens) left. For four year I was the Writing Lab person at Antioch College in Seattle. That's close to editing. 

Even closer to editing is editing. I became the editor-in-chief of Northwest Ethnic News. I don't know how. I'd taken one class in journalism in college and felt kinda sorta shamed by the grumpy geezer journalists in charge. I fled to English Lit. Thomas Hardy. Like that. But there I was and there I stayed for four years, working on a monthly newspaper. The original job of NWEN editors was to publish articles about the many types of Scandinavians in the Pacific Northwest and their dances, artwork, and such. Its ... (I'm not finished here.)

(I hope this isn't too much. I'm incredibly shy yet incredibly pushy. Go figure.)

Sarah Sarai

Hi, 2023! + "O Faded Elegant World" + MacQueen's Quinterly

These kids predate me, I suspect, but still, happy 

and goofy kids is what kindergarten is about. 

 

I started the year with a long walk, longer than expected, on the sidewalks of musty New York, first to a bar where I discovered an event had been canceled then across town to a building complex that demands I walk an extra ten blocks in the wrong direction before it will allow me into its time-honored walls. Every time. There, people I know, all warm smiles, warm hugs.  And in-between the Lower East Side and the evasive building down some from the Whitney Museum I ran into a friend. And that was unexpected - insofar as, what! you? yay! - and delightful. An unexpected, impromptu, generous meet-up. Somehow helped me clear a bit of the baggage I was hauling from 2022. 

After seeing some warm acquaintances, and friends, on top of two-and-a-half hours of walking on sidewalks, I caught a bus, but only part way. It gets complicated. Once home I popped into bed, fully clothed, fell asleep. Woke. Did some things people do when awake, such as removing a sports bra, reading a poem, watching a t.v. show I knew would lull me back to sleep.

So no booze, no big parties. I like booze and I like big parties. Another time. Soon!

One more event. When I woke for the small portion of time I saw that new work of mine had been published. A Flash autobiographical essay* of mine was online. "O Faded Elegant World" in MacQueen's Quinterly. That surely wins the prize for a journal name. It mixes the hip and the quaint. My mini-essay is personal history as recalled by the personal historian who was seven? six? when the events took place. So. Grain of sand. Definitely with a toss of salt over your left shoulder. And truth.

Here's to 2023! Peace and sanity, please. 

*500 words or less, in this case