JULY/AUGUST ISSUE
Poetry I (3 from Alison Eastley)
| 1 | On A Cold Night by Alison Eastley
| 2 | Who Cares About Tchaikovsky? by Alison Eastley
| 3 | Three Tattoos by Alison Eastley
Poetry II (3 from Ivan Brkaric)
| 4 | Lake House by Ivan Brkaric
| 5 | Rainy Days by Ivan Brkaric
| 6 | Two Cousins by Ivan Brkaric
Poetic III (2 from Fabio Izzo)
| 7 | Fallen Angel by Fabio Izzo
| 8 | Sad Shell Funeral by Fabio Izzo
Digital Art
| 9 | little blue war by Peter Schwartz
Fiction
| 10 | Towards the Blue Morning by Tom Sheehan
about the authors
Alison Eastley lives in Tasmania, Australia her two sons and various animals. Previous work has been published in Double Dare Press, Mannequin Envy, Cordite, Wicked Alice, Poor Mojo and many other fine literary journals.
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Ivan Brkaric is pushing 30 and working a dead-end job, working nights. He has started writing to stay awake. The poems in this issue of Why Vandalism? are his first published work.
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Fabio Izzo is a post dot beat artist.
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Peter Schwartz has been practicing the craft of poetry for over 20 years. His work has appeared in over 100 print and online journals. Those journals include: Asheville Poetry Review, Epicenter, and VOX to name a few. He's an art editor for the literary sites Mad Hatters' Review and Dogzplot; His own artwork can be seen at: www.sitrahahra.com.
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Tom Sheehan’s Epic Cures, won a 2006 IPPY Award. A Collection of Friends, Pocol Press, was nominated for Albrend Memoir Award. Has nine Pushcart, three Million Writer nominations, a Noted Story nomination, a Silver Rose Award from ART, the Georges Simenon Award for Fiction. Served in Korea, 1951-52. Has published four novels, four books of poetry. Coming are Brief Cases, Short Spans (2008, Press 53) and From the Quickening (2009, Pocol Press). He’s one of the ROMEOs, Retired Old Men Eating Out, (92/80/79/78). They’ve co-edited two books on hometown Saugus, MA, sold 3500 to date of 4500 printed.
On A Cold Night
by Alison Eastley
The wind cries through the eaves,
rain spits against the window
and flames dance on the hearth.
I worry there won't be enough rain,
that the only flame will be the times
I read your words like a mantra
while resting in bed only to find
scenes in my mind and sometimes
I see a seed, sometimes a rock
from a crumbling statue instead of
the rhythm of bodies rocking,
that funny sway from flinging back
the sheets.I like that you want to
fuck me. It's earthier than love
when the heat is too much. On a
cold night I promise you a river.
2
Who Cares About Tchaikovsky?
by Alison Eastley
He's dead
and before he died
his life was nothing but loneliness
alleviated by bouts of heavy
drinking and music
shouting in his head. Tchaikovsky
is dead. He drank a glass
of unboiled water
although some say
a scandal ended in suicide.
What would you do if Tchaikovsky
lived?
Would you step on someones ballet
shoes?
They belong to a famous dancer
with music shouting
inside his head. Sometimes I wonder
why you listen
to opera and say it's like listening
to voices
raised from the dead
when lamentations I know Tchaikovsky
composed the Sixth
Symphony.
He called it pathetic
which is a problem some say
it is more like the torment that arrives with grief.
I could cry myself to sleep
and still,
you shy away from entering my dreams.
3
Three Tattoos
by Alison Eastley
I saw one on each thigh
and one of a mythical
bird with wings
stretched by a song
that would never
be heard
on your back
because your shoulders
are so broad
the mythical bird
looked too small to fly
without being hurt
and as for your name
written in Chinese so it
could mean "wingless
man waiting to burn"
which is more like an insect
injured by a five
year old boy
although all I saw
was the build of a bull
and I thought the third
tattoo, the one with the
letter "H" as in hell
and in heaven
and in the beginning
an inscription
dedicated to your wife
and read by your lover
like graffiti on a wall.
4
Lake House
by Ivan Brkaric
I kid you not.
I use to see the future.
Visions so bright, so clear.
A brown house on a hill, by a tree line, near a lake.
Ducks would fly to and fro.
And the warm wind,
Ah the warm wind, so comfortable, it teased our necks.
From the window we’d watch,
With a cup of coffee in hand.
Down by the dock, we could see the children play.
With nets in hand, they tried to catch those slick and witty frogs.
Only to see them escape in that brown and murky water.
And yet they tried and tried.
She so cute in pig tails.
He sun burnt, red with freckles.
They would play and play without a worry.
So carefree, so beautiful.
But the visions are no longer clear or bright.
Fading, darker and darker is the house on the hill.
All I can see are the black shadows of a moonless night.
As they haunt the dock, near the lake, by the brown house.
And yet, it’s hard to believe that I once saw the future.
5
Rainy Days
by
This morning I woke to the harmonic sounds of uniformed tears.
They fell from heaven, with perfect harmony and perfect rhythm.
This morning, raindrops caressed our vacated home.
It is rare to see rain fall on our barren and lifeless earth.
Sometimes, I tell my friends in ‘white suits‘
How I once yearned for rainy days.
How as a child, I once played in green pastures.
And when the rain would stop and the mist would rise.
I would look for salamanders.
There were so many of them.
I would fill my bucket and covered in mud, I would return home.
My mother would boil and she would scold me.
“I’ve told you a hundred times to leave those salamanders alone!”
She would yell and then she would remind me.
That someday I might not have anymore salamanders to put in my bucket.
Only if she was alive today.
She would see that it is forbidden to talk of rainy days.
How nobody plays in the rain and how it is no longer allowed.
I would tell her of my friends in ‘white suits’ and how they sedate me.
Especially when I talk too much of rainy days.
They say I am crazy!
I must be, to talk of such rainy days.
6
Two Cousins
by Ivan Brkaric
Everyone is asleep, except for us.
And a lot more drinks we’ll have.
Cousin you ask me “How I’ve been?”
I tell you I’m down and out.
You offer me a place to stay in the big city.
I‘m a country boy not used to the city and the excuses I make.
But what I want to say is I don’t need your charity.
Your charity always has a price to pay.
And so I say, cousin let me express this to you.
Picture- I’m a cowboy hopelessly lost in a desert.
On my person, I carry a pistol with one round and an empty canteen.
If I don’t find water I will surely die, and so you find me already half-dead.
You offer to fill my canteen, but I have a premonition.
That little amount of water you give me
Will forever change my life and from that point my life will be better.
All the riches I ever wanted, I will receive.
A beautiful wife and children.
A house with a two car garage.
But, the price I’d pay
Is for you to constantly remind me of the water that you gave me.
The premonition must be true.
So, instead I elect to throw my canteen aside.
I reach for my holster and unsheathe my pistol.
I slowly raise it to my temple and I squeeze the trigger.
Cousin, how disgusted you look and you reply.
“That’s so stupid we’re family!”
“I guess you’re right” I say.
And so I think to myself, we really can’t choose our family.
7
Fallen Angel
by
the Wounded superhero
one more funny appetizer
write and wrong
Danger!Mosquito!Sex!
reducing abortions
latin days are here again?
let me worship as I am
“If He were here, it would be different”
joining the ‘out’ club, together again
the Crucifixion and ice cream
the obese should have to pay more for Paradise tickets
8
Sad Shell Funeral
by
Stolen ripped friend
alone in the end
Venus, Botticelli
poems and gasoline
Welcome to a sad shell funeral
near the sea locked to the water
there no mother
never mention credit's father
with no measure born
as a sad shell
music from undersea drummer
lost Atlantis' citizen prayer
sad shell funeral
in a forgiven language
motor's engine supernatural
little blue war
by Peter Schwartz
10
Towards the Blue Morning
by Tom Sheehan
With the most concentration he had ever mustered, the cowboy Rawlick Jensen, alone at a cool fire spot, knew he was sharing something bigger than the wide plains or the highest mountains sitting in the distance. He could not measure the impact with some animate and close things grabbing for attention. His horse, Big Fella, stood off a few steps, at attention and tethered to a small bush, making small noises. Morning had been coming alive for a matter of hours.
At that same moment, Jensen felt energy escape from him, felt it slide into the morning air where it might disappear forever. All this was his due; he had earned all that was coming at him from somewhere beyond his reckoning; he was still alive, though hurting, and the six horses he’d found were long gone after the lightning had scattered them the night before like compass points. Out of a blind canyon he had brought them a day earlier, recognizing B-Bar-Ell’s brand on them. Sugar Bates the owner would appreciate their return, and wondering aloud why they had ended up in that far canyon, a good dozen miles from their pasturage.
Above the lone cowboy, the blue sky had summoned the highest peaks and the peaks had acceded, slipping into that wide sense of blue, wide as welcome. He felt part of that universe, even as he heard a coyote give out his own acceptance of all that surrounded him. Perhaps that coyote was on the thin ledge he could see, like a line of thread on the face of the nearest foothill. Both their energies had become part of all that was around them, had been accepted. Behind him, to where he sent his long line of sight, the plains extended for close to eleven or twelve miles until they too were accepted up into the unique skies, the way a seaman had once told him the horizon, in reality, falls away from everything.
Rawlick Jensen’s thoughts, he knew, were larger than he was, deeper, more solemn at times, sadder by some minutes so that he could shake himself to sleep. Then they might come so raw and real that he could almost touch them, taste them. Why the blue and green and thin yellow colors of things around him? How were they determined? Why did the coyote’s cry come like a signal he could not understand yet could invoke images with it. Realization said his own words would fall away into silence after they were uttered, after minor echoes came along too, the way the coyote’s yell softened at length and disappeared. The two voices, perhaps, the two sounds, the energies of them, merging down the trail somewhere, becoming one thing or one nothing.
He shook his head again. What was at him? Where was the joker in this deal of cards? There was no way he was able to recount the times such an experience had hit him before. Came the sudden thought it was an omen of sorts. With a solid sense of comfort, no fright lingering on the edges, he tried to play that thought to some conclusion. That effort, too, fell away under the blue sky, the high mountain, the vast prairie leaving him or trying to catch up to him.
The coyote called again.
The sound brought another reality scene with it, another image. The bunkhouse was so different, so ordinary yet so real, that it could also capture his full attention. “Them cows can smell water from ten miles away, I swear,” July Reginess once said, amid the smell of bread and beans and beef and blackened onions all carrying an edge of burnt smell with them.”Cut loose past me, a bunch a them, took me half an hour to head ‘em back.” The conversation carried on over an hour about the sense of smell and what some of the riders had experienced or guessed or had heard about, most all of it on an unbelievable level, and not one of them had mentioned the odors existing about them all that same time, their appetites so sated.
The loose horses, not at all his responsibilities until the moment he had them gathered, were most likely scattered and would move to water or the smell of water as soon as they could. He’d try the foothill falls first, where generally a soft drop came off the face of a small cliff. One or two might be there. Sugar Bates would thank him for their return, offer supper, a place to stay the night, a job if there was one open, and sing a song before the night was over. Such possibilities were real.
Then the blue sky called out again, and the coyote, and a distant thought kicking around some place in his mind, waiting to be framed, formulated, come into being. He finally said to himself, in a sense of wonder, “I am a complex person.” He tried to remember the last book he had read, so long back he had forgotten the name of the book and the name of the author. Much of it had gone with the echoes. He had loose grips on other things that his mind scratched for. When Big Fella looked his way, Jensen tried to imagine what was in his mind, and then he began to speak aloud, to no one but himself, though he definitely knew the tone of his voice would be known by the horse.
“You at thinking like I am, Big Fella? You get caught up in stuff like this or does water and greens and healthy oats set the order for you?” He moved both hands in slow motion, sort of setting the tone, and he studied the horse’s eyes, his head the way it sat. For sure, there was acceptance of his soft voice, his smooth, and slow, hand movement, his apparent inertness. “Anybody from the bunkhouse, any outriders or line boys come up on us in this here conversation, they’ll be some uneasy about us, eh, Fella?”
His horse snickered, kicked a stick loose in the ground, seemed to be waiting for closer company. He gave the horse another drink, put the saddle blanket in place, then the saddle. The sun touched him as he did so, the slow warmth creeping along his back side as he noted how golden his wrist hairs had become. They had not turned gray yet, but that was just around the next bend, up the next waddi. The image of old Thurman Gosgrove came from out of nowhere, sitting beside a bunkhouse fireplace, the flames blinking on his legs gone too soft for the ride, one hand near frozen with stiffness that made both gun and rope useless, leather straps of reins of no further use.
The sadness rode through him like a flash flood in a forgotten canyon. When he couldn’t see one piece of old Thurman’s face, it bit deeper, sure as a snake bite. The mountain out there and the ones behind him, would be here long after he was gone. He wondered what they would see that he would like to see, what he would miss the most. Even Thurman had missed what he was thinking about now, the wonder and the doubt and the endless questions.
“We come a long way, Fella, a lot of work and a lot of chasing the dream, if that’s what it is. You think about mares the way I do, like about ten times an hour?” He patted Big Fella on his flanks as he stepped in the stirrup and swung a leg over. The horse shook, swung his head, accepted the weight.
“We ought to head into town, after we get them horses for Sugar. He’ll be somewhat surprised I’ll bet, then we’ll bust up all this need in small pieces. Yes, sir, old Fella, into small pieces so we can handle it all. No rush. Just walk in kind of slow and get done.”
In the distance he saw the Sugar’s horses at a water hole he thought was dry. “World is full of all kinds of surprises, Fella. All kinds. Now we’ll see what town brings.”
The horses looked up but stayed where they were, as if waiting on him.