lost and found on the b train in winter by Walter Bjorkman

i first heard the rumble, felt the roar, before i was born
in my mother’s own cave, on her doctor’s way
i first saw the white porcelain straps, felt the frayed straw seats
smelled the wet drying wool before i was one year of age

record snow the christmas eve three months before my birth
then every month thereafter – i rode the rails in that womb
while dirt-crusted plowed snowdrifts piled to the sky
and were covered anew, freshened again

bread factory aromas ran down from the street
the sugary candy factory ones too, the car would
rise and emerge into the light, a city-wide roller coaster ride
coney island began at the train platform edge

a distant cousin lived in an apartment above a store
the el curving just outside his window, near ebbets field
eyes wide at the gaps in the stairs, big enough i could fall through
my father’s hand safely protecting the climb

first neck nuzzles and thigh grabs after ice skating in the city
in the car-end lone double seat, our semi-private room
midnight heads on shoulders, pretending to be tired
while our hands began their moves

i now dream of dark browns, grey and black shadows
dashing, darting through vertical steel pillars, deep in this cave
avoiding screeching blue-sparks from across third rails
my mother holding our hands, safely leading the way

to my father, waiting on the platform across and above

Posted with permission from Walter Bjorkman.
Editor this week: Michelle Elvy

Interview with the poet

This poem opens Walter Bjorkman's new poetry collection, and sets the tone for the group of poems he presents in Strand. I decided the best way to tackle Bjorkman's poetry here was to talk with him directly. So I asked him a few questions and he was kind enough to provide not only his poem but a few more words and images  as well...

ME: Walter, I admire your new collection's opening poem – ‘lost and found on the b train in winter’– very much. It feels like a deeply personal poem, beginning with the mother and ending with the father. Can you tell us more about this poem and why it begins the collection? How does it set the stage – or, better put, mood of your poetry?

WB: Thank you, Michelle. I feel that almost all of my poetry is personal, or at least the poems that I write now. b train is a decade old, and really was the first one in which I broke away from writing poems just for the sake of writing, and put myself wholly into. I had not written poetry since the mid-sixties to the early seventies; those efforts addressed the requisite youthful world angst, and though highly personal, and some quite good, they were riddled with classical references and language that was not my real voice. When I returned to poetry in the late nineties, I at first did mostly descriptive poems, with my occasional personal insight. So this poem was the dividing line between then and what I do now and feel for that reason it was a fit to start the collection.

As to the mother/father transition, you are correct, that was intentional. As background, my dad died when I was nine, and the dream sequence at the end was a recurring dream I had for some years throughout my teens. So much of city life centred on the subways, so it was a natural setting.

ME: The poem ‘driveby’ (the second poem, previously published in Word Riot) strikes me for the simplicity of the moment, especially after the complexities of the opening poem. Can you share where this poem came from?

WB: This poem was written after I returned from a ride, perhaps the third time in two weeks, where on a lonely country road next to an open field, I passed by a very strange person who just stood there looking down the road as I approached, and as I got near, ran into the field and waved his arms to the sky, then fell down to the ground. After the third time I started wondering what it was all about and came up with this scenario, where of course I am writing about what might have led me to be this person.

ME: I hear Dylan in your poems – here and elsewhere. Tell us how music has influenced the way you hear poetry, and the way you write it.

WB: Having played guitar for 48 years now, it is innate. Whether I am writing lyric, narrative, free verse or prose poetry, I want the words to flow in a way that the reader will not stumble or pause over the words. Unless I want them to.

I also grew up listening to music when poetry, in the modern sense, was first infused into folk and rock & roll – Dylan above all, but others like Eric Anderson, Joni Mitchell, et al, so it was just a natural thing. Allen Ginsberg, on first hearing Dylan’s music, wrote, “I heard ‘Hard Rain’ – and wept. Because it seemed that the torch had been passed to another generation, from earlier bohemian, and Beat illumination.” I was part and parcel of that generation, and although I was studying the masters from all movements back to Classic Greek through to the Beats, I could not read or write without the music of poetry, the poetry of music, in my inspiration.

ME: Warblers, starlings, magpies. Why do birds play such a central role in your poetry?

WB: Although a child of the city, I have spent thousands of nights in the country. Even in the city, I always seemed to become more aware when birds were around. They are harbingers, Greek Chorus, life affirmers and life critics. They are descendants of the greatest animals to roam the earth. All parts of nature can ‘talk’ to me in their own way, but none as much as they.

ME: Driving and motion seem to be two themes inherent in your work – themes that are, for me, deeply American. Do you agree that there is something about your poetry that captures something intrinsically American?

WB: Of course. Although first generation, and exposed to immigrant traditions at home and church as a kid,  I had the full American experience. My parents wanted me to grow up American, and, growing up in post WWII Brooklyn, I lived through and participated in the turmoil of the sixties in the USA, and all what followed to this present day.  Cars became the ultimate freedom, the means to motion and exploration. Outside of a summer at age ten in Sweden and Norway, and some Caribbean adventures, all my traveling has been in the US – I have been in 47 of the 48 contiguous states and all southern Canadian Provinces. I could not help absorb, and as a result it is reflected in my poetry.

ME: In the last poem – ‘beachcomber’s dirge’ – there’s a sharp sense of loss, and possibly regret. There’s a glance to the past – an echo, as the poem notes. Tell us how this poem found its place as the last in the collection. And how it reaches back to the opening poem and creates the complementary book-end.

WB: I ended the collection with beachcomber’s dirge because of the subject – knowing each year and day I will eventually be coming to my own end. There is some regret in there, but I feel it is more melancholia. I feel it is one of my best, and I wanted the reader to feel some closure, as the naturalist does in this poem. Life to me is a series of loss and gain, and, as Richard Manuel once said, “I just want to break even.”

Thank you, Walter Bjorkman, for the words and images. 

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Walter Bjorkman is a writer, photographer, book & web designer and editor from Brooklyn, NY, now residing in the foothills of the Adirondacks. His works have appeared in Word Riot, Scrambler, Pirene’s Fountain, Poets & Artists, THIS Literary Magazine, Connotation Press, Blue Fifth Review, Foliate Oak, Wilderness House Literary Review, A-Minor, Blue Print Review, Metazen and many others. His collection of short stories, Elsie's World, was published in January 2011 and can be purchased on Amazon here. His poetry chapbook, Strand, is both available from estore here, or Amazon here.

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Michelle Elvy lives and works as a writer, editor and manuscript assessor based in New Zealand and currently sailing in SE Asia. She edits at Blue Five Notebook, Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction and Awkword Paper Cut, where she also curates a monthly column, Writers on Writing. She is also Associate Editor for the forthcoming Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton, 2015). Her poetry, prose, nonfiction and reviews can be found in various print and online journals and anthologies. More at michelleelvy.com, Glow Worm and Momo, her home of eleven years.

Uncoupling by Jac Jenkins

Ice clasps its thorny cloak with filigreed

brittle lace against my breast

bone. The pin sticks my skin when I inhale.

I stay close to his mouth;

his heat breathes an early thaw

as Winter opens its teeth on my throat.

Spring stitches my scabs to scars, my scars

to silver. I am bare beneath bridal lace

and veil. When I inhale, his hands

clasp me like whalebone; I stay close

to the looking glass so I can see

his beaten knuckles.

Summer loosens my stays. I am

bare and bridled on the burning ground.

My tongue is desert when I inhale. He

is dry bone in the sand, stacked

like pyred sticks. I stay close to his clacking

hands. A loop of gold spins on his ring finger.

Autumn leaves my flesh for the carrion-

eaters. He is dry sand scouring my bones.

I am inhaled by the wind, breathed

out over water, looping and spinning,

close to the opening throat

of the ocean.

Dedicated to Christine de Pizan,

Europe's first feminist

Posted with permission from Jac Jenkins. First published 2013 in Takahē.
TP editor this week: Michelle Elvy

I have known the poet Jac Jenkins since I moved to Northland back in 2009. We've been in poetry groups together and shared flash fiction. Last year we even put our heads together when we judged the 2013 Northland Flash Fiction Competition, hosted by Whangarei Libraries. As a writer of both flash and poetry, Jac knows how to create impact with economy. I admire that most about her writing: nothing ever drags; her poetry catches you from the opening line and takes you by surprise.

And Jac has enjoyed increasing recognition for both poetry and prose in the last couple years, most recently winning the 2013 Takahē Poetry Competition with the poem I posted today. Even better than me writing about Jac's winning poem, 'Uncoupling', I leave it to judge Joanna Preston, who wrote:

 The winning poem, “Uncoupling” by Jac Jenkins, is one I tried to resist, but couldn’t. I was wary of how many of my own personal preferences it seemed to tick – startlingly good images? Check. Vaguely gothic/medieval/fantastical feel to it? Check. As full of song as a Welsh football stadium? Check. (Wish like heck I’d written it myself? Check.) Even now I can’t tell you what it’s about, except by quoting it back verbatim – to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, it ‘resists the intelligence almost successfully’. But I could pull almost any line at random and offer it as an example of lovely workmanship. The way words and images return and modulate – from breast bone to whalebone to dry bones to my bones, from brittle lace to bridal lace to bare and bridled. Intoxicating sounds, and repeated phrases that shift their meaning as they flicker through the poem. A worthy winner, and a poem that still makes me catch my breath. I am envious and in awe. 

You can read all of Joanna Preston's comments in the full 2013 Takahē Poetry Competition Judge's Report here.

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Jac Jenkins is a poet and flash fiction writer from rural Whangarei. She works as a librarian but is looking forward to a three-month writing sabbatical in Australia late in 2014, hopefully in a location that challenges her with new experiences and allows her doctor-partner, Alistair, to practise medicine in a different context. Jac’s writing has found its way into the Northern Advocate, Flash Frontier and Take Flight, and she has recently celebrated winning the 2013 Takahē Poetry Competition and also enjoyed success in the Northwrite Collaboration Competition with Alistair. She was also awarded a NZ Society of Authors poetry mentorship in 2012, during which she worked closely with poet Sue Wootton. 

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Michelle Elvy lives and works as an editor and manuscript assessor based in the Bay of Islands but is travelling this year in Indonesia. She edits at Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction and Blue Five Notebook. Her poetry and prose can be found in print and online, most recently or forthcoming in Poets & Artists, Takahē, 2014: A Year in Stories (Pure Slush) and Eastbourne: An Anthology (Makaro Press). A member of the NZ Association of Manuscript Assessors, Michelle can be found at michelleelvy.com, and her Tuesday Poem posts can be found at her blog, Glow Worm. 

* When you've got to grips with Uncoupling, please check out the other Tuesday Poets in the blog sidebar. Riches there. 

Some Last Things by Sam Rasnake

So many words to say now he'll never say though

he feels their weight in silence, though he needs

their meanings, he knows he won't find them,

still they bite at his tongue  –  what he once questioned

he knows for fact, what he once believed, he's long since

forgotten or dreamed away  – if you whisper your truths,

they'll disappear, he'd say, so he never whispers them  – 

and when he does speak, his voice is the wild thud

of trees falling, oceans from here in cool shimmers

of rain, in the hot curl of asphalt, in all the time needed

though there's so little now to do, and he's prayed deep

into the hole of his aching, but that's not how it ends  – 

in a hush, in the beetle's scratching at the baseboard,

a bullfrog's croaking from the dark rocks in his pond,

his cane leaning against the opened window

first published 2012 at fwriction: review 

Editor: Michelle Elvy

I've come to appreciate Sam Rasnake's poetry over the last several years, and this poem, to me, exemplifies the way he balances the personal and the universal. I asked him about this, and I'm pleased to put his response here, in full. Like Rasnake's poetry, his commentary is both thoughtful and truthful. 

ELVY:  One of the things I always admire in your poetry is that you seem to achieve a specificity of place and mood with a more universal appeal to intellect and emotion. I wonder if you can comment on this, the way it  captures specific details but also contains elements of language and humanity that reach a wide audience. How do you balance the specifics with the universality of poetry -- both of which are, perhaps, vital?

RASNAKE: In my work the balance is already in place when the poem begins to take shape in its voice stage, which is always in the beginning. I say my lines before I write them.  The sound of the lines, syntax, and phrasing is how the poem arrives.  Voice is the foundation. If I’m true to the voice in listening to the beginning stage of each poem, the work will be more personal. The more personal the work, the more universal the scope. That is, of course, if I’m allowing the work to be what is intended – what the work is, and not what I may want it to be or even what I think it should be. 

'Truth' in my writing, at least as I understand it, is not in factual information. That doesn’t interest me at all, so that is one of the reasons why the works find me as they do. The writing finds me. I do not find it, nor do I search for it. There are certainly emotional, psychological, and spiritual truths that are far more vital than mere facts. For example, the truth in “Some Last Things” is not bound by factual detail even though the specifics in the poem are image-driven. I think the poem is quite visual. The closing lines  --

in a hush, in the beetle’s scratching at the baseboard,

a bullfrog’s croaking from the dark rocks in his pond,

his cane leaning against the opened window

--   are true in the poem though they only brush against the facts in my life. The opened window at the end is based on the real window in my parents’ den that is above a pond my father built beside the house, but the window has never been opened since that room was built. The frogs can still be heard and are always present in their enemy stance against the coy and goldfish that live in the pond. The beetle’s scratching is a striking metaphor that I never heard there but was necessary to the closing of the poem.  That line is the finishing touch to the poem’s dark tone. My father who loved to work with wood made his own canes.  He leaned his canes throughout his house, but never placed one against the wall below that specific window.  But, there’s an emotional truth in placing the cane against the den window that is more real and true to the poem than if another wall – an actual moment in his or my life -- had been used. My favorite part of this poem is that final line.  In the line, the cane is already in place, but its silence in resting there must show the quiet tap of the cane’s handle touching wood. That sound is outside the poem though it certainly impacts the poem.

I wrote this poem before my father died.  He struggled against bone cancer for several years. My connection to the poem is envisioning the silence of his death which I knew was coming. Maybe that is the reason the poem ends with the sounds taking place and the action of a cane’s leaning – forever in the poem – against the window.

Thinking about that closing image just now, I feel a sense of relief. The moment is not closed, but is open to me, and will remain so. That, most likely, is the reason the poem came to me in the first place. I’m glad I listened. I like very little of my work, but this poem is one of the few satisfactory writing moments I’ve ever had.

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Sam Rasnake’s works, receiving five nominations for the Pushcart Prize, have appeared in OCHO, Wigleaf, Big Muddy,Literal Latté, Poem, Pebble Lake Review, Poets/Artists, New World Writing, Dead Mule School of Southern Literature,Santa Fe Literary Review, as well as the anthologies MiPOesias Companion 2012, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Best of the Web 2009, LUMMOX 2012, Flash Fiction Fridays, BOXCAR Poetry Review Anthology 2, Deep River Apartments, The Lost Children, and Dogzplot Flash Fiction 2011. 

Rasnake is the author of Necessary Motions (Sow’s Ear Press, 1998), Religions of the Blood (Pudding House Press, 1998), Lessons in Morphology (GOSS183, 2010) and Inside a Broken Clock (Finishing Line Press, 2010).  His latest collection, Cinéma Vérité, is forthcoming from A Minor Press later in 2013. 

Rasnake is chapbook editor for Sow’s Ear Poetry Review and has served as a judge for the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, University of California, Berkeley, and from 2001-2010 was editor of Blue Fifth Review. Since 2011, Rasnake has edited, along with Michelle Elvy, the Blue Five Notebook Series from Bluefifth Review.

Once you've read Sam Rasnake, climb aboard the other Tuesday Poets in the sidebar.

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The Tuesday Poem editor this week is Michelle Elvy. You can find Michelle this month in the mosh pit at FLASH MOB 2013 (one day left to submit, folks!), or more formally offering assistance at New Zealand's National Flash Fiction Day, or enjoying poetry and flash at Blue Five Notebook and Flash Frontier. You can also find her at Glow Worm.

BOMB by Sian Williams

As the plate-glass façade of the university library disintegrated, Miranda looked up from her essay on symbolism in Germanic folk-tale and thought:

it’s true

      in an explosion

              everything

                      

                         really

                                       does

                                                     happen

                                                                   in slo-mo.

In the blinding flash, as the Japanese history student near the window was vaporised, the relevance of Hiroshima’s thousand suns was lost upon Miranda.

And as the pressure wave ballooned into the building and that creepy astrophysics guy at the next table was reduced to his constituent particles, the analogy of a new universe created by this Big Bang and now expanding exponentially did not cross her mind.

But as the twinkling blast-front neared, and the light fittings above her desk swayed elegantly in unison and exploded, Miranda thought briefly about Snow White motionless in her glass coffin: sleeping yet not sleeping, alive yet not alive, undead. And Cinderella, the Ash Girl, leaving her glass slipper on the steps and running — running ragged — into the night.

Lastly she thought about The Snow Queen in which the wizard’s magic mirror, when dropped to earth, shivers into a million fragments. Distorting, perverting, corrupting. She was Gerda, barefoot in the snow, bent into the howling ice-storm, searching for the transparent palace where Kay sits alone with shards of glass in his eyes and his heart — and now she was Kay —  trying to piece together the puzzle of a shattered frozen lake, to form the word Eternity.

First published at Flash Frontier, May 2012.

Editor, Michelle Elvy

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This Friday, 22 June 2012, marks National Flash Fiction Day and I'm honoured to be the Guest Editor here this week and bring you this short short story. It's written by my co-editor at Flash Frontier, a journal we launched back in January. Flash is both challenging and inspiring. Capturing the essence of something in such a short space requires a certain skill, and flash fiction -- despite its very trim word limit -- allows both freedom and experimentation. 

Sian wrote this story for the Flash Frontier issue themed splinters. I find it a marvellous example of short short fiction -- beautifully written, simple at first glance with layers to unpack. 

I asked Sian a few questions to accompany this story (three, to be precise: this is flash, after all). The story speaks for itself, but I always enjoy hearing more from the author, too. 

ME: How did the idea for this story come to you -- this one moment in time, slowed almost to a stopping point?

SW: It started with an image in my mind of shards of glass suspended in the air slowly twisting and twinkling in a beautiful, yet sinister, way. I began thinking about explosions and remember watching slow-motion video of the nuclear tests in the Pacific. When the film was slowed right down, the individual forces created by the blast could be identified and separated --  the light, the pressure wave, the sound. The anatomy of the explosion became visible and I started to think about a story which examined these different components and presented them as a series of freeze-frame images. 

ME: The weaving of fairy tale into reality adds a wonderful element to this piece. Can you tell us why these particular fairy tales came to you? 

SW: I was thinking about materials which splinter, and in particular about ice and glass, and their relationship to each other. Ice and glass are recurrent motifs in many fairy tales, and the three fairy tales mentioned in the story all feature glass: Snow White's glass coffin, Cinderella's glass slipper. The Snow Queen begins with the breaking of the broken magician’s mirror, and later snow and ice feature strongly. I'm interested in how the themes and motifs used in fairy tales relate to our lives today, and it seemed to me that Miranda's experience in the explosion was in many ways an infinitely condensed version of the children's experience in The Snow Queen.

The glass coffin is interesting because it's an example of a serendipitous moment in writing when everything comes together. In addition to being made of glass, the coffin introduces the idea of suspended animation (an idea which crops up in a number of fairy tales including Snow White and Sleeping Beauty) and is the perfect image for this story as Miranda sees herself momentarily in suspended animation, caught motionless in the space between life and death. 

ME: In this very short story, you question in subtle ways the relevance of history, of science, of time itself -- and whether these are best viewed as a whole or as fragments. Tell us, do the fragments matter more, or does the whole?

SW: In this case the fragments are important; this story is about splinters, fragments of lives, things blown apart. What I tried to say here is that the way we experience life, even a shattering moment like this one, perhaps especially a moment like this one, is shaped by our own particular frame of reference, our context and place in the world. The Japanese history student experiences the explosion in terms of the bombing of Hiroshima, the astrophysicist in terms of the Big Bang, and Miranda in terms of the fairy tales she is studying. We all experience the same event in different ways, we are individual fragments.

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You can read more about Sian Williams, whose recent accomplishments include being short-listed for the Flash 500 Competition and the Fish Publishing Flash Competition, here. Or you can meet her in Auckland on Friday, 22 June -- National Flash Fiction Day.  

Visit the NFFD site and find out about the competition's Short List and also events happening in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Whangarei. 


And please do enjoy the poetry and flash posted this week by other members of the Tuesday Poem collective. You can find their posts in the sidebar to the left. 

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Michelle Elvy lives and writes on her sailboat in Northland, but she's in Auckland much of this winter, researching and writing a collection of flash fiction set across the landscape of New Zealand history -- thanks to a grant from the NZSA and Auckland Museum Library. You can find her at National Flash Fiction Day on June 22 or at Poetry Live on July 17, where she will be the Guest Poet.  Michelle is also online at: Flash Frontier / Blue Five Notebook / A Baker's Dozen / 52|250: A Year of Flash / An Aotearoa Affair: A Blog Fest from Kiel to Kaitaia