Chasing
The man looks uptown, spies the alphabet
ducking into a cab, watches as it goes north
toward the river, then starts to follow.
He feels in his pockets for some kind of sign,
finds purple freesias & small lightning bugs,
wilted wings, dim sparks & long, green stems.
He is sure that his search for words stems
from childhood, days of living on alphabet
soup from a can, but the thing that bugs
him most is the way sounds travel north
after nightfall, the tired glow of neon signs
lighting their way, and no choice but to follow.
Now, he wonders which cab he should follow,
wonders if freesias really need their stems
to survive, wonders if the chalkboard sign
down the street is really the alphabet’s
doing—its way of taunting him, teasing him north
to where the river air is riddled with bugs.
He learned somewhere that true bugs
have beak-like mouths; that they follow
the heavy scent of tree sap like a North
star. He studies a map, sees the river stem
out into dead ends. He wants to bet
that each letter goes its own way, a sign
that language is breaking down, a sign
that looking for words is like looking for bugs
in dark woods. He watches the alphabet
slink through the high tide, following
itself to the flanking shore, where a stem
of water reaches out like a blood vessel, a North-
bound body. He marks the North
side of his compass as a way to signify
division, a reminder that the stem
cell divides through mitosis, the way bugs
can split the air in half, and he decides to follow
Zeta all the way to the end. He wants to bet
that he will find a lightning bug among the Northern
lights, its dim pulse a sign that he will need to follow
each stem of the river in order to find the entire alphabet.
Mathew Pereda
New book forthcoming…
from Sweet contributor and kick-ass poet Maggie Smith. It’s called The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison and is the winner of the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize. Pre-order it here!
Karen Craigo
How to Kill a Mouse
The cat emerges from beneath the couch, between my feet, with a mouse in his teeth. It is his fourth mouse of the day. I do not like suffering. I do not like poison. I do not like living with mice. These aversions compete. Ultimately, suffering is the one I allow. It is, at least, natural. It at least brings pleasure to the cat. I wish I knew where they came from, or how to stopper the hole. Mice, I read, can fit through a hole the size of a dime. Although we are middle-aged, this house is our first. I used to think apartments—what felt like an endless series of them—were all we would ever know. Sometimes I still stand outside the kitchen, looking in, thinking how beautiful the marble, the tiles, the way the under-cabinet lighting makes them shine. But the single advantage apartments have is the phone call to the landlord, who takes care of the mice, and you don’t even need to know how. We love our house. It is old. There could be a lot of entry points. Steel wool is recommended, and I bought some. Where to stick it, though, is the question. There are a few standard steps to killing a mouse. First, you grip it by the neck in your teeth. These teeth are sharp. They dig. Next, you whip your head from side to side, give the mouse a good shake. For step three, envision a Little League coach, alternately chucking up pop flies and grounders for his team to practice fielding. Picture how he tosses the ball high in the air and then thwacks it with the bat when it falls. Step three is the toss. Step four, the thwack. A thwacked mouse may end up stunned in the middle of the room, or it may end up dead by a baseboard. The cat is instantly on it, however. It repeats the steps for as long as the game is fun, whether the mouse is alive or dead. The worst part is when the cat gives up the game before the mouse is dead— when the death of the mouse is a near certainty, but the cat has retreated to a spot in the sun to bathe and begin his sixteen hours of napping. Toys, whether living or not, hold no sway. When my husband is home, I can count on the mouse being dispatched. My husband is a better person than I am. He takes the mouse outside and gives it a stomp, putting it quickly past its pain. When I am alone, except for mouse and assailant, I get a napkin and grab the body by the tail. Where I fling it is determined by how brightly it sees the light. If death is assured, he goes in a shrub not far from the door. If death is just a possibility, he goes all the way across the yard into the bayberry bush. Surely something will eat him. I’m not certain, though. Sometimes I’d swear this day’s catch is yesterday’s stunned release, the unhoused housed again. I always look at them closely. Sometimes they seem so familiar.
Suminagashi
There is a drawing marathon at the arts center, and a man is showing us the traditional Japanese art of suminagashi. “Us” is me and a half-dozen kids under the age of eight. I make sure each has a place, of course, but then I squeeze in between them, cast my shadow. I don’t want to miss a thing. He has only a few materials: a jar of ink. Two brushes. A flat pan of water. Off to the side, some paper. And here is how you do suminagashi. You drop the smallest drip of ink onto the surface of the water with one brush, the ink brush. And then you take the other brush, which must be dry, and you grab a little oil from your face—the side of your nose is a good area to try. Then you dab this facial oil into the center of the ink circle, and instantly the ink disperses so there is a dark loop around the clear center. Next, you put more ink right in the bulls-eye. Then, making sure that your oil brush is dry, you dab at your face again and tap the center of the ink circle on top of the water. Again, the ink disperses, and you have two concentric circles of black around an empty core. The man says that suminagashi is a contemplative practice, and the artist uses extreme patience to go from ink to oil to ink to oil, building circle within circle within circle. He is exceedingly slow. The children and I know that we’ll get a chance to try when he’s through, but we’re able to remain silent and attentive. The method really does have a meditative quality. We remain in a tight orbit around him. Around us, there is space and then a perimeter of parents—life imitating art. The youngest of us is four. The oldest, me: forty-five. My own child is off drawing somewhere in the building—in some other circle beyond the ring of parents. I know he’s safe, and I hope he’s having fun. I, though, am hooked and will stay where I am. The man says that suminagashi combines all of the elements. There is water. There is ink made of charcoal—wood singed by fire. And finally, there is air. The man invites the two closest children to blow gently on the surface of the water, and as I watch, the circles glide and morph and even break. I think the children have blown too hard—that this art is not meant for children at all. I feel possessive of the man’s pan of oily, inky water. As the last step in the process, the man takes a piece of paper and rests it on the surface of the water. When he pulls it away, it is swirled with alternating gray and emptiness. I realize I’ve seen this type of design many times before, on the marbled endsheets of antiquarian books. Books are made of ink on paper; in books, words are given form. I hadn’t thought of those old volumes as being encased in breath, the breath of a contemplative. I hadn’t thought of them sealed within the sweat of a brow. (As a point of fact, the dispersant can be, and usually is, some other kind of thin oil, not facial oil at all.) My son approaches when there are only two kids in front of me. I am the last in line. I quickly explain to my son the suminagachi process, and when we are up, I coach him through the steps. But I feel like he does it wrong. Too much ink. Oil dropped in the wrong spot. Let me help, I say, and then dab and drop and blow like I’m the only one in the room. People are probably looking. Over and over, I dry the brush, then mine my T-zone for dispersant. All of us did. With this very brush, in fact. I put that thought aside while I work. I need to explain that there is so little oil on the face brush that it looks clean and dry. And that is what has me flummoxed, truthfully—the merest suggestion of my essence, of anyone’s essence, demands space. It creates an aura, a boundary.
It doesn’t mix. It remains fully itself. It has distinct edges, unless blown or stirred with any kind of vigor. It is composed.
So often in art, the intrigue inhabits the spaces and gaps, and absence is as articulate as presence. When I hold up my paper and look at the swirls of gray, I confront traces of myself, each demanding its own unsullied place. I’m going to buy some sumi-e ink. Some rice paper. Two very fine brushes, maybe made of bamboo. I could write a poem, but I think there’s something to be learned from the poem my breath writes, from these empty places formed from my skin.
Helen Wickes
Secret Lives of Trees
January afternoon, the wind puts its nose on its paws,
sun shining gamely through a sky the blue
of purest gold—seven geese nosing the pond’s edge,
post and rail fences guarding their meadows. Have you
noticed how bare trees truly become themselves in winter;
they have secret lives, they hold up their secrets, their skeletal,
irrefutable beauty shows up, breathing the past
down our necks, silver puffs in the air. These trees.
No reason to go to town today, our hours and years
contracting, an immeasurable world floating away.
Amorak Huey
Nocturne with Poor Decisions
That time, say, you shoved me against the wall
and we pretended we liked things rough.
We don’t have to live in separate states
to call it a long-distance relationship. We don’t
write, don’t call, we get lost in the hazy outlines
of our own front porch at dusk. I drink tequila
from your lips, swim buzzingly
through the tangle and mystery of your hair,
I can’t tell which wounds are happening,
have happened, could happen.
We have differing tastes in music
though I’ll listen to anything
if it gets you to open your mouth.
Let’s say I stand, stumble. Let’s say
fall. Say follow and fire. Say we end up
in the crawlspace, brushing away spiderwebs,
our knees on stones and broken glass.
You strike the match. I touch flame to fuse.
Jennifer K. Sweeney
On Not Being an Axeman
Swing the apple blade,
maul the ash. A cutting
of late honeysuckle
in a penny vase. I have romanced
hawks and fieldstone
and the notion that in another life
I would have made a fine axeman,
splitting knots in the flannel dusk
to make clean a work of private
knowledge. Is a life more than
a landscape of choices so minor
they are shrugs of mind
that impose a narrative
grander at a distance?
To breathe sharply this dark
air, ignore the animal
dash and rustle and fix steady
on the turning of, returning to
the task of my whatever
hour. Like the tree
etched with secrecy,
striations wound in a brindly mass,
grooveworks and spirals
grow crooked the unsplittable.
How much I fail at knowing
trees and my neverlasting self
is what binds us.
It might have been such a shrug
not becoming axeman,
or man, fly, tree. Can I know then
it is not a violence
this splitting of the wood,
(can I feel) the arc
cutting no-sound into sound
stump-stopped and waving through
my unstruck body?
Janice Pockett
Her name like a warning at the edge of the woods
and also green metallic bicycle empty envelope
butterfly-under-rock.
Whoever made her disappear did it entirely.
Had the kennel released its hounds
the dogs would have found nothing
before the decades of nothing.
How far back to trace a vanishing—
butterfly that crossed her path days before just so,
the one her hands finally caught
and the impulse that made her hide
it under that rock. Afternoons later
how she wanted to retrieve it or
the time it took to scavenge the drawers
for an envelope to carry it home and so
and so. No. That isn’t right.
No life should lean on such fine margins.
Janice Pockett, we 70s children sleeved your name
in our bodies like an orange flash in the wind.
Your name became prayer.
Your mother is still searching the woods
for the rock, the room for the envelope,
the quick bright wings for your voice.
When we rode off on banana seats toward
our granted days, we wanted to bring you home.
When we said your name, we whispered.
Sheila Squillante
You Would Become
Some nights
you lie next
to him as he
sleeps, shadowy
light striping
his face, and think
you would do anything
to enter him.
You would become
music, some orchestral
or unsteady beat,
or swathes of color
flicking, particulate,
on the skin screen
behind his eyelids.
Turn yourself
into whispered
fricatives, be his teeth
and tongue teasing
sound from soft palate.
First language
then lungs.
Exhalation, respiration.
Autonomic nervous
system. Lower
brain-stem. Digestion
and dilation, salivation
and arousal.
A sensory spectacle,
cellular melt, this
marriage.
It Takes Strength to Be Gentle and Kind
–after Moz
My governing emotion is poignancy.
I don’t love it unless it hurts
or threatens to. Yesterday, someone asked
me when I was going to write
something happy. I’m in this poem
now, and want out, want to disappear
into I don’t know where else to go.
Honestly, I felt just fine when I left
the house today, muscles full of forward
motion, gone to glee. Glad to go.
But now, surrounded by spines,
books I cannot bear
to open, friends I cannot manage
to meet–well, I just don’t know.
Do you think you can help me?
A word I used to use too much
was diaphanous, and thought of sea water
in afternoon sun. I would describe
poems that way, remember? I meant that
in reading them, I could peer through
a scrim or a veil or is curtain really the image
I want here of water falling between words
and just make out the shape of things.
I loved that blurry world, but now crave
definition, want to slide my hand down
the side of our oh well enough said,
feel its contours heave
beneath my callus. Drag lips,
soft, along the curve of it, until something snags,
peels away in small, thin strips. I need you
more than I love you. Sweetheart,
the perfect poem is something crass and kissing,
full of assumptions, is green and gamey,
a field of chamomile or nettles,
filigreed, and lit from within.
Sandra Kolankiewicz
Hippotherapy
I cannot remember a time when
you weren’t strange, dressed up in your white tights
and turtleneck, become the white mare,
barefoot galloping the yard on your
hands and feet, daily disappointed
your human knees bent forward instead
of backwards like a horse’s, which sounds
charming, but you wouldn’t stop, just lifted
your fine head and tossed your mane at us
even when we lighted from the bus,
lost in a world we could only mock
or dream of. You stomped a hoof, flicked your
tail while your mother braided your hair,
the only one who didn’t blink when
you whinnied from the back yard, saving
from alimony to build a barn
and find you a gentle companion.
In Retirement
Every other day the same meeting at
the recycling center, unable to
hold on to my trash any longer than
you can even if something useful could
be made of it. You know everyone’s names;
I can’t remember who works here, all in
rags to toss their loads, protecting their best.
You have nowhere else to go, the shed with
bottles and scraps of tin the only place
that gives you pleasure. Like me, you recall
the war when we saved everything. Why are
you always alone? Then I recognize
the signs: a demented wife at home, your
grief and loneliness crisp as the short sleeved
shirt that a daughter must iron for you,
or that you still have the money to drop
off at the cleaners, unwilling to give
up the old fabrics. Someone else takes an
hour from the day so you can drive here to
this outpost, then visit the grocery
on your way home, weaving among tourists
who mistake you for a visitor, who
park where they please, changing the prices of
our daily essentials with each season.
Jessie Carty
Muscling Memory
Every time you get in the car
you check the height of your seat,
the mirror placement, try to remember
if this is the way the wheel always feels.
You check even though you
are the only one who drives the car.
Sometimes you get to a destination
and you don’t recall the trip.
This scares you. You treasure
memory. You fear its opposite –
something empty like a newly shaken
Etch-a-Sketch.
You never mastered
the precise combination
of dial turns needed to make
more than stair stepping
blocky letters. If you made an arc
it was a mistake.
Once you tried to open up
the whole board by creating
tight up, down and left, right lines
like you were mowing a plastic yard.
What is revealed are the cross
of two bars and a cone shaped stylus–
very geometric. You feel how basic
you are, centered within rectangles:
the car, the toy, your body.
As if you are waiting for someone–
something–to move.
Stone Letter
–after the movie “Departures”
I want to send you a letter,
but I rarely compose
in stone.
To send you the right
rock I need to know
not only what I want to say,
but how you will take it.
If I pick a heavy brick
will you think I’m angry?
If I choose a shade of pink
will you feel I’m calling you
weak? And what of the arrow’s
story? If the tip breaks
will its message
be off center?
Letter from the Editor
“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road
In September I set off on a road trip starting in Tampa and reaching as far west as Saratoga, Wyoming. I was on the road for over two months, staying on friends’ couches or cheap hotels, listening to this 10,000-song playlist that seemed to privilege tunes by Lady Gaga and Journey. During the day, I drove and stopped in nature-y places to hike and take photos. I ate almonds and popcorn and sampled BBQ in Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado. I made sure to vary my days, never rushing, never waking up at the same time, never knowing where I was headed or where I would lay my head for the night. If I saw something on the interstate—say, an antique mall in Nebraska—I stopped. On the nights of sleeplessness, I’d climb into the car and take late night strolls. This freedom felt like shedding skin. I had been, for a long time, stuck in routine. I had been teaching non-stop for the last fifteen or so years, and I could feel myself falling into a complacent state of mind. I didn’t realize how much of a ritualistic doldrum I was in until I took to the road. I understand how blessed I am to have a job that allowed me to take a few months off to…well…take off. And I did, in the physical and spiritual sense.
As I drove the landscape changed. This change was spectacular to witness—from the lush green of the south to the wide-open flatness that spanned the middle of the country to the slate grey mountains of the Rockies. The longer I was on the road, the season changed. It was late summer when I left, and as I entered early autumn, the trees transformed, became palettes of color, bright and brilliant, as those on the hills of Tennessee. In Illinois and Missouri, the green stalks of corn withered into yellow. In Colorado and Wyoming, the aspens and cottonwoods were like clusters of bright yellow lights. Then the weather changed, too. Soon I abandoned my shorts and T-shirts and flip-flops and adopted the light jacket and sweaters, and at the tail end of my trip, when I spent a couple of weeks in Chicago, the heavy jackets and knitted hat and gloves because the temperature dipped into the teens.
Change is the inspiration for the Sweet makeover. Over the last two months, members of the Sweet staff have talked about giving our website a facelift, and this issue is a celebration of that change. We also say goodbye to our webmaster, Bob Varghese, who has been with us for the past three years, and welcome Andy Braithwaite to our staff. I hope you like the changes to our site. Though the look is different, Sweet still aims to publish poetry and creative nonfiction to tantalize, challenge, and satisfy the mind’s palate. So keep reading. Keep loving. Keep thinking Sweet.
—Ira Sukrungruang
