Download free PDFs of all issues of the online Caliban at the link above.
Janet Kauffman, Nathaniel Tarn, Ray Gonzalez, Elizabeth Robinson, Timothy Liu, Brian Swann, and my old acquaintance from the 80s San Francisco poetry scene Ed Mycue are just some of the writers in Caliban Online #20, while #21 boasts such writers as Gerald Vizenor, George Kalamaras, Karen Garthe, and Anna Halberstadt.
This online mag includes the most striking work from a range of visual artists that I've seen in any magazine anywhere not totally dedicated to visual art. Worth looking at!
Here's one of the three poems of mine in Caliban Online #20, from a series identified there as "Persephone Post-War" but whose name I just changed to "Kore: After the Battle." (Thanks to poets D.A. Powell and Brent Sunderland for helping me figure out that change, which is nearly a restoration to the sequence's original name of years past.)
The
fleshy plums
firm
and black-purple
falling,
shriveling,
in
days
rotting
on the ground.
The
relief
of
just looking.
Just
stepping past them,
bits
of plum skin
sticking
to my slippers.
The
space in my throat
where
a bite of sweet plum
could
slide past.
From
that hollow,
my
voice
echoing
on gray
wood,
apples
mottled,
a
woman’s
sweet
singing in the lanes
of
trees.
A
faint
gleam
is hidden
in
the crack of a mossy
rockface.
I reach in
my
thumb
—it
stings. Pull it out
dripping
blood.
I
suck it,
weeping.
So,
I can
still feel pain
even
gone from the world
which
sliced into me
when
I saw through it.
Here
a simple line
of
blood from my own flesh.
Sucking
my
juice.
See
the water pooling
in a
hollow of
grassy
dirt, sap
in
circles in
the
bark. And transparent beads
of
liquid welling from the sliced
pumice-white
fruit
which
he places for me
on
the tops of tree-stumps
at
points along my
unplanned
path.
He
must see
where
I walk and
when
I want,
the
sharpness of light
and
liquid blurring
into
hunger.
After
each bite
a
space of air.
I am
inside
and
outside
the
orchard, a lady
in a
gray dress,
myself
treading
the leaves.
A
matted scent
like
singing warms my throat,
and
then
silence,
warm
as the orchard air,
where
I can breathe.copyright 2015 Lisa Bernstein
