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Pushcart 2022



 

Richard Foerster, volume 3 number 1

Hole In The Head Review


At Uluru


Off-season, before any tour bus would arrive, the desert

seemed a theater all my own, its house lights dimmed. I waited


on a bench with the Southern Cross and Coalsack overhead.

Around me, spinifex bristled beneath the wind. I could tell you


Aboriginal lore about that great rock, how a serpent dreams

of an everywhen atop the dome, but in real time, on the stage


of this poem, the sun as expected lit its flare; molten ferric reds

descended to the desert floor. I sat in awe, a speck on the brightening plain


and thought I’d gotten all I’d come for, until I spotted a dot beelining

toward me out of that vastness—a mere sparrow, no threat, coal-black above,


snowy below, it settled on the tip of my shoe, then cocked its head and flashed

a white eyebrow, questioning, questioning. When its tail began to joggle


side to side arrhythmically, I bobbed my foot. It would not go. A half hour

I pondered that flicking semaphore, its flares and twitches, and registered


nothing but a tourist’s amusement. A local elder when I told him

said, “Tjintir-tjintirpa, Willie wagtail. He brought you a message


from the otherworld.” I sobbed right there. Why am I writing this,

twenty years on? Oh, envoy of bewilderment, what is it you have to say?

 

Anny Jones, volume 3 number 2

Hole In The Head Review


en plein air


for many years I fucked en plein air : not to transgress : felt neither fear nor frisson at being caught : seen in the open


it was a stinging desire for the places: within Lake Trasimene as the washerwomen on the shore sent carbolic bubbles across the water : crisp

autumn leaves in a ditch in Yorkshire : on haycocks : archaic : in a field

under moon & owls in Kenilworth : on golden cowslips under apple trees

in Normandy


I don’t remember the men : I remember the owls : the smell & caress

of the hay : blossom : dome of sky over lake : flesh under water


it was the only way I knew to enter the privilege of being unhumaned

dishumaned : unhoused from my history : our history


mouse : owl


owl : mouse


to enter a state of being that was reckless : not according to human mores

reckless because doomed


because returning to the human world is what breaks the heart


to know the heart must re-enter mere language


 

Linda Aldrich, volume 3 number 2

Hole In The Head Review


Utopia

I

Who I was started to disappear along the edges of myself at first until I was a meld of common good, and after some years, unrecognizable to my past, I took walks alone in the foothills, but not really alone because I could still hear them calling me back to the work there was so much of, the gardens, the kitchen, the many loaves, the voices well-intentioned, filled with purpose and multi-headed benevolence, all of them having settled into me and built nests, beautiful intricacies of feeling flying in and out and landing there, and I couldn’t close off (I mean, who would want to?) or form a word that wasn’t (I realized later) realized by them and made into so much eloquent flesh. Not a word of my own because who was I unless gathered into them with them in the name of one hundred fifty or more and to think of what emanated from us, most especially from us, our mission of radiance into the troubled world sadly ignorant of how things were? And who knew if the love we felt was love or just the tight weather of togetherness, the commitments we made to each other to keep from wanting too much or making something of ourselves or going out and finding a job somewhere when the job we were doing right where we were was so much greater we told ourselves and sang to ourselves and fell into bed dead tired at night dreaming to ourselves?


But if I walked far enough into the hills, the tethered tenor of their voices barely sifted through the ponderosa fragrant with summer’s heat, showering yellow pollen on me and the path in front of me, and I found my two hands again, found wild calypso orchids, rubbed dirt from arrowheads pointing north away or south doing the same with my thumbs.


II

A wide, sun-filled stream, lower Montana or maybe

the northern corner of Wyoming, not sure where


I stopped and saw how smooth flowing and slow it was,

how quiet and clear, no one around, no one on the road