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