EUCALYPTUS

In Georges de La Tour’s The Repentant Magdalene, painted more than three hundred years ago, a plain woman in a loose-fitting robe sits at her desk, one hand holding her resting head—she’s large with thought—the other hand touching a skull, as if reading a kind of braille. The skull obscures a candle or a gas lamp; it lights the barest front of this woman, as if knowledge is a slow-moving font of burning light, settling its warmth-in-darkness as afterthought. The woman drifts and I wonder not on her sins or her meditation but on her coming to be: de La Tour’s oils buff and buff the canvas as if rubbing to a source, loving what it finds. The dark pigments circle the center of the canvas where the flame resides, where the skull interrupts, where our eyes drift hungry for the middle, for truth. The dark is nearly all there is but for the gentle sway of the flame licking its way into consciousness.

This is all about how the body disappears. This is about time. How many drafts and how many hours de La Tour lived before this, before this form of the world agreed through desire and thought to come. How de La Tour learned the round world comes moment upon moment until a month goes, until a year drains from the muscles, until it is ready to breed lust and idea.

The time. Driving along US 90 I steer my car between white lines—a kind of discipline, a kind of knowledge—past skeletons of desire-into-form. If you blink you miss a building sprouting up so fast that the jets aiming their progress across time’s skies must dodge them. This is a crowded place we breathe in, the dimensions of living flattening around us into bright color and noise. Stilled in an endless line of locomotion I see around me all sorts of bodies tuning in their radios for urban warmth of information, sighing behind hands propping up heads already sounding toward skulls. Brief flickers of reflection stopped as time speeds itself thin.

Joe Bonomo’s personal essays and prose poems appear recently in American Letters & Commentary, The Laurel Review, Gulf Coast, Sentence, Denver
Quarterly, River Teeth, and online at nidus, DIAGRAM, and In Posse Review. He’s been awarded fellowships in prose and poetry from the Illinois Arts Council, and he teaches at Northern Illinois University.

2006-06-25T12:11:00.000-07:00

Kevin Stoy

In my Tuckerman Ravine insomnia
for Dargie

She jaunts past me through the mountain’s
mouth as I read the dark-eyed Junco sings
like a musical sewing machine in the alpine
guidebook. Then I realize I don’t know
what a musical sewing machine is and feel
better listening to the raucous stream.
Yet, I still find my sanity requires her
company or just the sense of it, however
visible she may be in the marvelous silence
that waits in firs. The thing is, a reality is not
in this ravine; she is the lines
she sleeps in green. Through her
intensity, the mountain stays
the valley, occupying the room in which
I hope to reencounter her song. Not one idea
could mimic that meeting’s intimate
exchange because she will already know only
imitating a composition’s notes scales
love to limit the way summits inhabit sky.
Pollen lifts through air
like rosin rising from the bow hair’s quick saw
across string, the violinist’s pull
both purpose and motion. In this right angle
of dark, moonbeams abbreviate
the ridge ledge to edge with light
so physical I can taste it. A cloud twists
menacingly alive like a monster I once dreamed.
I see the night clear in such a way that day
seemed mere distraction. I rehear her call
color the rocks rusty above then must
admit how willing I am to be alone, with all
that silence won’t let me glean.
In the ravine,
she slips through pines she speaks in sheen.
The thing remains the reality and this time
from which I refuse to turn. A marvelous
silence waits. The Junco’s eyes jut through it.

Kevin Stoy currently resides in Fairfax, Virginia, where he's in his last year of work in the MFA program at George Mason University. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in the SNReview, Triplopia, Stirring and Evening of Odds.

2006-06-11T14:10:00.000-07:00

Sandra Simonds

from Jane Doe

I travel into this city planned at midnight
its freakish architecture, its “antiquated”
rooftops. Seven times I’ve told myself
not to stop at moonlit limbs.
The streets fit loosely around my crooked
neck. I inspect the statues and notice
clumps of earth stuffed into their marble
mouths. I go out among awkward tellings, hip-
wade through the junkyard’s cool murmurs,
still as the watchman twirls his stone baton.
My mouth is a certain ditch. I travel
into this city planned past midnight,
its industrial hardwater, pressed cargo,
towers that twist my lungs into strange
tellings. Eight times I’ve told myself
I will not stay here, cannot stay but sure
enough I press on another grate, tumble
into the abandoned plant’s fluorescing
motors. I strap both iron muzzle and mouthpiece
to the edge of my breath. When I say
this is not the day it’s supposed to be,
this is not the way the city planned to sprawl
he twirls his stone baton.
When I return to my own still furnishings
only dim streams of light hold
my body in place.

Sandra Simonds is a PhD student at Florida State University. Her first manuscript has been a finalist for the Ohio State University book prize and Slope and was a semi-finalist for the the Sawtooth book prize. Her poems have appeared in Volt, the New Orleans Review and others. You can reach her at ssimonds23@aol.com

2006-06-11T13:11:00.000-07:00

Mark DeCarteret

Gothic Tale

out to the east
the planet's bloody itinerary
I am now less this body
than this near-golden brand

in the field they are parking
more cars for the air show
ticks loading up on our narratives
to carry w/them into paradise

I have nothing against snow
the sentiment of aged placards
but lord how I feel scrubbed down to cipher
by your blessings & their bristly aftertaste

mother's voice on the answering machine
nowhere less are we these bodies
than the route it has taken us
to arrive here ahead of ourselves

Mark DeCarteret's work has appeared in the anthologies American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2000) and Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader 1988-1998 (Black Sparrow Press, 2000). His latest chapbook The Great Apology was published a few years back by Oyster River Press for which he also co-edited the anthology Under the Legislature of Stars: 62 New Hampshire Poets.

2005-12-14T17:53:00.000-08:00

Ana Bozicevic-Bowling

(Some Notes on) Waking from Afternoon Sleep on a Warm Day in January

I.
A thought. A bell.

Birds in the bare courtyard.
Casual souls.

I lay not sleeping, but in unclothed thought. This river
was many bright currents washing over each other. I knew
work was getting done underground.

II.
Light is going
in the square
of mute blue that lids the courtyard.

Short clouds, still pink, absentminded.

The street must exist, because heard:

fire escapes, flags.

(I hear the things I shouldn’t hear.)
(I see the things I shouldn’t see.)

III.
Room for thought shrinks
inside one who loves:

food elevator, tugging
fire from the kitchens up into the head,
a white profile
back into the stomach.

(In the town square, you speak loudly, play cards
with waitresses.) Moon’s head
stands in for you.

Pythagoras of absence.

(Without rest
someone draws thin circles around me.)

___________________________________________________
Ana Bozicevic-Bowling is a Croatian poet living in NYC and writing in
English. Her poems and translations can be found in 6x6, The Cortland
Review, LIT, The New York Quarterly, Redivider, and other journals.
She edits RealPoetik, an online poetry magazine.

2005-11-02T10:10:00.000-08:00

Joseph Massey

Three poems from Property Line

Honeysuckle
scent like
an open vowel

wrung out
in the rain's
gloss-

olalia.

Swallows
whisk the rifts

dusk dims
between leaves

on the tree
whose name

I refuse to find.

Factory lights
crease night's
farthest seam

where hills
daub black
deeper than

the black en-
compassing.

___________________________________________________
Joe Massey’s latest chapbook is Bramble, available from Hot Whiskey Press. He lives in Arcata, California. Fewer and Further Press will release his fourth chapbook, Property Line, in the spring of 2006. Hear Joe read the poems at the Fewer and Further audio blog.

2005-10-25T12:09:00.000-07:00

Erin Elizabeth

Sonnet for Cynthia Who Left When
Her Boyfriend Found Out
When I saw her last month, there was a pane

of glass between, as if we, predestined,

were caged from sight by our translucent stain.

Two months ago, we laid alone, festooned

in one another's nails. Bavarian

beer, hotel porn. It was the booze, the silk,

our easy, shifting planetarium

of words -- her garland lips struggled to bilk

my own. There was escape: a telephone,

a door to someone else's room. Lick her

eyelid, and you are done.

The nights, they drone,

they simmer on. Apart, we fight, bicker,

create a spring to sleep through. Hawaiian

hibiscus opens, maw like a lion.

___________________________________________
Erin Elizabeth is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Illinois, where she serves as the editor-in-chief of Stirring. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Third Coast, Sojourn, The Ninth Letter, Harpur Palate, and The Adirondack Review among others. She is an alumna of the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets as well as Summer Literary Seminars' program in St. Petersburg, Russia; she is also the winner of the 2005 Marc Penka Poetry Prize.

2005-10-24T07:33:00.000-07:00

Charles Jensen

The Double
Though there were three boys in the world
it wasn’t the woman who thrust them out. Little Eve,
little multiple breast: earliest beard. Adam wore her
over and over.He begged
for more men and would not quiet until
he was swimming in them.

That neighborhood of apple trees
where they lived, those killing fields
sprouting disarticulate heads. Adam,
like a beastmaster, names
everything, even himself. And in the naming
makes another Adam who calls to that blessed body
in the reflexive form of speaking:
I touch myself.

_____________________________________
Charles Jensen is the author of Little Burning Edens, winner of the Red Mountain Review's first chapbook award. (Email T. J. Beitelman at tjbeitelman@asfa.k12.al.us to purchase a copy.) His poems are forthcoming from New England Review, The Journal, Washington Square, and West Branch. He works for the Piper Center for Creative Writing at ASU, where he coordinates community writing opportunities, and for Rio Salado College, where he teaches film studies.

2005-10-24T05:01:00.000-07:00

Andrew Lux

Retirement
My wife is a lion tamer. She takes too many baths to forget how I convinced the stitches of her heart to come undone. I call the wooden finger a prodigious baton. She calls me a destroyer of all hearts. She soaks the finger for protection against spirits. I think she does it to protect herself from me. She waves it around and chants small words. She remembers the darkness. The unopened letters I hid under the couch. The lions crying out for the moon. The ring I tried to slide onto the balsam digit without scratching the lacquer. She says, “I do” under the big top with all the lions at her side ready to make a man of me.

____________________________________________
Andrew Lux lives in Rhode Island. While studying for an MA in Education he is working as a sales associate for the world's largest supplier of recycled inkjet and laser cartridges. He can be reached at vonseamonster@yahoo.com.

2005-10-23T23:35:00.000-07:00

Graham Foust

Scraps After Reverdy

Near embers, tears.

Still warm here.

Where’s that hand.

Sky
sinks

to float
its clouds.

A wave gives
up, the field
continues. You could

stay. We could sleep.
I could drop things,
die. The wind’s no
slave. Flames worship it.

Loose shingles are perfect for poems.

_____________________________________
Graham Foust wrote As in Every Deafness and Leave the Room to Itself. He teaches in the graduate and undergraduate writing programs at Saint Mary's College of California.

2005-10-23T11:34:00.000-07:00

Stuart Greenhouse

Off on a Tangent
If you had
a rock in a sling, a tangent is
what would happen if you let it fly.

Death, were you what my grandfather heard
in those last years
or where his hearing went, in place of?
Can’t hear us now, pop, earth shot deep:
six feet of dirt in your ear.

We place stones to show we had been here,
fragile pyramidal pile, quiet
set not to disturb
what they hold
past down.
Primitive. Better a circle
to entrance.

If earth were to let you
be, and the sun, all that is
gravity to you (which is all),
that would be a tangent.
An aside of what is, a hypothetical line going nowhere
hearing can follow.

O
giant untranscience, what are we
to move through
you? Strike through, or glance
even thusly?
O
Primitive.

If I above this settling mound
whistled hard, round
like a robin
like my grandfather did for boy-me
through what sadness is to
what am I and the robin am,
let loose off my circumference
and touched in passing his,
that would be a tangent.
That would be song
like the song you don’t hear or sing
but by not listening.

_________________________________
Stuart Greenhouse’s poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Chelsea, Fence, Paris Review, and Ploughshares, among other journals. His chapbook, “What Remains,” will be published by the Poetry Society of America in December of 2005.

2005-10-23T11:15:00.000-07:00

Clay Matthews

Another Lesson Learned, Again

Tell the countertop I’m alone today, drinking coffee

and wondering how long it’s been since I last ate

rhubarb pie. The waitress stares at the big clock

on the wall, and I think she’s expecting patriarchy

to end at the top of the hour. I’m tempted to say

give it up. But my face is not that kind of face

and I’ve seen the way she moves around a grease

fire. I’m reading the back of a stranger’s newspaper

and have therefore also been marginalized. How sad

to be a third-page story. How sad to be pasted on

the fridge. The soup comes and already I have

envisioned burning my mouth. This time tomorrow

you might find me eating slower. Cursing the future

I saw but went on with—skin hanging from the mouth’s roof

like a white apron on a hook by the door.

_______________________________________
Clay Matthews’ work has been published (or will be) in H_NGM_N, Black Warrior Review, the tiny, Poet Lore, DIAGRAM, Forklift, Ohio, and elsewhere. Recently, his poems have been selected for inclusion in Best New Poets 2005 and were selected as finalists for Drunken Boat’s Panliterary Awards. HIs chapbook, Muffler, is forthcoming from H_NGM_N B_ _KS in fall of 2005. He currently serves as associate editor for the Cimarron Review while pursuing a Ph.D. at Oklahoma State.

2005-10-22T22:53:00.000-07:00

Heather Moss

Passenger List

I.
Your scheme to save the pepper plants despite
the drought succeeded. The fire out there
moved in to save our soup. We’ll take the broth,

my Lucky Silver Spoon. Has anyone
conveyed the meaning of our trip to these
detractors? No? Itineraries should

have gone to every leading man and lady.
We’ll make them act it out in corsets
and braces, and the weather will perform

the villain’s role. Our craft will sail at eight
o’ clock so meet us fifty inches from
the tide and wear that fetching dappled dress.

II.
The dictionary and the almanac
provide a clever hiding place for jokes
we might tell after May, but I’m afraid

to pack my photo of the violin.
Whenever we arrive (if we arrive)
I’ll never steal another symphony.

III.
Such stale work, leaving home. You sold our
machines because you tore apart the bed
and found a primrose at the foot, intact.

You paid my passage west and no return.
Your father said I always looked sopping
on sunny afternoons. Dried old raisin,

I never told you how I learned to swim.
I counted up my coins and lacked enough,
so I waded in the statue pool and slipped.

Tonight before I float I’ll make the bed
and kiss the baby’s curling eyelashes.
The bitterest medicine could cure you yet.

_________________________________________
Heather Moss lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her poems have
appeared in Croonenberg's Fly and Best American Poetry 2003.

2005-10-21T14:23:00.000-07:00

D.A. Powell

Democrac

does god bless discriminately slashing some bright flags, amendments?
even far above stifled yawns of civil service some pale heaven waits

mortar the mosque means build not bomb—spire that prayer-blue vault
only an honest fellow [please provide] might parley “bombs away” away

christ, this machinery made of helmets, prosthetic limbs, human skin
runs day & night stinking of petrol: now it’s the dinosaurs who laugh

as economy expands; contracts each wheeze of the bellows
consumption: hacked last bloody nights in the neon light of the y

____________________________
D. A. Powell's most recent book, Cocktails, was a finalist for the National Book Critic's Circle Award. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including American Letters & Commentary, Chicago Review, Tin House and Court Green. Powell teaches at University of San Francisco.

2005-10-20T20:49:00.000-07:00

Nate Pritts

Hard Times
I can whistle & pretend
it’s 2001, just like I can pretend the clouds,

all fluffy & white & surrounded by blue,
are gathering cunningly in the open air,

huddled for protection.
I can make up any old thing

to distract me from my future, my now,
from the clouds gone black, the storm.

All the machinery is visible
& then it’s not, but its influence is always yes.

My head a broken-down time machine,
I live in any old world that will have me,

these hard times I looked forward to
& talked about & talked about & now I’m speechless.

_____________________________________________
Nate Pritts' new work can be/will be seen in print from The Southern Review, POOL, Pacific Review, Bird Dog & Forklift, Ohio & online at DIAGRAM, storySouth, Coconut, Unpleasant Event Schedule & 42opus. His chapbook, THE HAPPY SEASONS, is online from Swannigan & Wright; a new chapbook, WINTER CONSTELLATIONS, is forthcoming from horse less press. The editor & sole shareholder of H_NGM_N, an online journal of poetry, poetics, &c., Nate lives in Natchitoches, LA. His wife is Rhonda; his kids are Kate, Dylan & Laney. His dog is Oscar.

2005-10-20T10:44:00.001-07:00

Brandon Shimoda

Lake the Twelfth

There's a mare pulling up in the grass,
lifting her leg up slightly. She is
waiting for you to finish your killing--

I am mistaken: the balls are inedible.
They have not a lick of sponsor-foam left
to give. The mare
beats in the shade.

Tonguing the eggs
in her feedbag. She is but one,
though it is then just me--
by hoof have I been split in three:

part green (says sis), part green (says bro),
part damsel in the grass:
carried down from the leaders,
bright and back-breaking.

Everyone else is busy
beyond the bicolor, the soft-soldierly willa:
you're my baby, neighing
though no body. I am of no use.

She is growing inside
of you. Wild and like-lady, she has you
by the Brandon-hands of a different color.

________________________________________
Brandon Shimoda was born in Tarzana, California, and has since lived ineight states and five countries. Poems and pictures of these places have appeared in POOL, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Barrow Street, The Pines (with Phil Cordelli), and elsewhere, as well as in galleries in Connecticut, New Yorkand Vermont. He currently lives in Missoula, Montana.

2005-10-19T23:36:00.000-07:00

Christopher Wells

Belphegor Unsettles Gula
Before they died, everything they had experienced coalesced into memories of hunger, which had always been their single condition. They never knew to ask for safety. In their bedroom they told themselves stories. "Someone motions to a man and woman as they stiffen with death, who appears to be a god. From the sky an entrance bends down to them and opens, offering admittance. Between themselves, the door and the god, the end as they envisioned it has altered drastically. Everything sounds different. 'Mortals, what is it you want now?' asks the god (who is only a doorkeeper)--'you're insatiable.' 'But we are only trying to reach admittance, as we have all our lives.' 'How does it happen, then, that in your last minute I'm the one condescending to you?'"

"But it is only human to be insatiable," she interrupts. "For life. This life. The next is only a metaphor."

"It is also human to believe you're at your worst in a very good year."

They were at a great disadvantage. The doorkeeper would have seen this. Eventually their size began to fail them. The doorkeeper would have roared: "But do you honestly think it makes any difference?"

So what happened?

His body fell from the door. The doorkeeper was gone. And the woman was still hungry, and left alive.

___________________________________
Christopher Wells lives in central Ohio and has had work published or forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Shampoo, Word Riot, Five Trope and elsewhere.

2005-10-19T08:11:00.000-07:00

Michael Zbigley

Creatio
This rock-smooth and rough land pours
from every point outward as I— cautiously,
lightly— as I, yes, tender myself
along its skin and over the soft rise
out of the coulee. There, away from the river cleft
a sheen as of fabric: sheer and green
shoots of wheat slip between us.
Even there, among those even rows, the smell
is not man-planted, it is a rising taste
of sagebrush. What do I expect to know?
touching here your hip with my hand
slid underneath to draw you closer,
breathe in and kiss . . a handful of dust?
Fear? in this land of basalt? this vast
table of spreading fire I stand on,
remembering your skin? But upstream
— a half day in a hot car— a great lake
once lay there; yes, our home broke open
serially, a pooling of books across the floor,
down from the shelf and through the ice-dam
west to sea, cutting rock, carving the coulees,
raising up and pushing down into me
close and hard against my cheekbones,
against my shin and hip and
grinding me down into the dusty floorboards. . .
to know all that rushing freedom. . . I wanted
to come down here among the far-flung
shards of our life but now only stand
peering back through the thin shower of loess
swept behind the creation, trying to touch
a tenderness in the waves of sand.

___________________________________
Michael Zbigley is an MFA candidate at the University of Montana and has previously published in Red River Review, Stirring, and Slow Trains, with work forthcoming in Gin Bender.

2005-10-17T07:25:00.000-07:00

Mary Zoo

Postcards of Flashcards

We will take the single postage stamps
and forget the hills
that appear in little gasps.

We Sell Victorian Crafts And Fix
Chainsaws And Other Small Engines,
a woman’s hand says cursively.

The Russian River is mighty lazy.
A hawk circles the sunroof.
Summer’s hand leaves trails.

In the silent Petrified Forest,
the trees really did turn to crystal,
cell by cell, drinking the water.

Songs pour from a bird's throat
a sky of crisscrossed octaves.
Silver ribbons in live concrete.

Where the men in orange pants go,
the freeway will follow.
They plant their seeds.

The frozen canopies, tiny people
in the blood and water. Household Toxics
Roundup Saturday, waves Main Street, Goodbye.

____________________________________
Mary Zoo's poems have appeared recently in Court Green, Columbia Journal, and Mantis. She is currently the Book Review Editor for Electronic Poetry Review (www.epoetry.org). She holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Iowa and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

2005-10-16T15:48:00.000-07:00

Call for Submissions:

Eucalyptus seeks poems embracing narrative in inventive and provocative ways, poems that walk the middle ground between the prosaically confessional and the dogmatically disjunctive, poems that valorize Experience without fetishizing it, poems that aren’t afraid to make meaning through their own artifice. There are no length restrictions. Send whatever poems you believe may fit the above guidelines. Eucalyptus is especially interested in long and/or serial poems.

How to Submit:

Send up to five poems in the body of an email to:

Josh Hanson at

bottomweavers@gmail.com

If formatting issues make attachments necessary, please query beforehand.

The Journal:

Eucalyptus will not operate on any monthly, quarterly, or annual schedule. The vision is for Eucalyptus to become a kind of anthology of the broken narrative, with work remaining available indefinitely and new poems appearing at whatever rate they are accepted.

The Editor:

Josh Hanson is a graduate of the University of Montana Writing Program. He currently lives with his wife and children in Missoula, Montana where he is working toward a Masters of Education degree. His work has appeared or is forthcoming is Softblow, 42Opus, Diagram, Stirring, H_ngm_n, the Strange Fruit, and others.