textfiles/magazines/ATMOSPHERICS/atmospherics-1.2

Atmospherics 

Volume 1, no. 2

Fall 1994










     Welcome to issue number two of Atmospherics. I was gratified by the 
good things that were said about issue one. As you can see from the author 
biographies, Atmospherics has reached around the world. Contributions come 
from as close as Toronto and as far away as Helsinki, Finland. The styles 
are as varied as the home bases of the authors. This makes me feel very 
satisfied because I wanted this journal to appeal to a wide range of 
authors. 

     This issue is our poetry issue. I plan to have one special issue 
devoted to this genre each year. However, depending on what type of 
submissions I receive, I may have more than one special poetry issue a year.

     As always, Atmospherics welcome any submissions of short-stories, poems, 
and literary essays. Please include a short biography with your submission. 
Send them to: Susan Keeping (keeping@vax.library.utoronto.ca or 
ag351@freenet.carleton.ca.).

     If you wish to receive future Atmospherics via e-mail please send me 
your address and I will send out bulk mailings to those interested.

     Atmospherics is available on freenet.carleton.ca (the poetry and writers 
sigs), it is uploaded to some local Toronto BBS's and is also available 
through FTP at: etext.archive.umich.edu. It is also accessible through 
Gopher from the same site.

     So, enjoy this issue. I hope you find something in it that you like.

     Susan Keeping, editor






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Atmospherics     Volume 1, number 2     Autumn 1994
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Table of Contents:

     Poems by:

          Colin Morton
          Thomas Bell
          Scott Dexter
          Tuomas Kilpi
          John D. Anderson
          R.
          David Dowker
          Pearl Sheil
          Happy
          Charles P. Schultz
          Erik J. Davis
          George Belphegore Perry

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This text may be freely shared amongst individuals, but it may not be 
republished in any medium without express written consent from the authors
and advance notification of the editor. Rights to stories remain with the 
authors. Copyright 1994, the authors.


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Adrift in Post-traumatic Space
------------------------------
               
"309.89 Post-traumatic Stress Disorder
A. The person has experienced an event that is outside the 
range of usual human..."

Nameless bones spread  
           maintaining always
                      appropriate distance.
And there another 
psychotic killer 
                     slouches free and loosely 
toward Music City.

And Josie 
faces Mecca,
and Josie fastens cute buttons
on an ice-blue top, 
and Josie steels herself 
for facing the 
faceless waiting for 
Big slices.

B: The traumatic event is persistently reexperienced in at least 
one of the following ways:
     ...numbing of general responsiveness (not present before the 
trauma) as indicated by at least three of the following:...
(6) restricted range of affect, e.g., unable to have loving feelings..."

I live in your small dark rooms.
And I wait for a window of opportunity to open.
And I wait.  I wait for the shadow 
that cannot be named
to overtake us, to overtake me.

Robert 
           settled for various 
                     adjustments to that 
                              crimson paisley tie.
seeking connection he could tolerate

Clarkesville's quiet shaken by 3 killings
     Clarkesville, Tenn. -  
Annabelle Brown was washing the dishes from a
spaghetti diner she had cooked for her boyfriend
and two friends when she was shot in the forehead. 
"People are just going crazy these days."  

Do we admit this to poetry?
Tsvetayeva recoiled in panic at what didn't fit.  

In Clarkesville a country singer thinks 
he can do whatever he wants
Selling millions gives him the right
to fire his handgun after a common dispute 
with three teenagers in Wilson County
over the right to pass.

And in Bosnia
and in Russia
and in Ireland
the world of all religions and ethnicities is dying 
for lack of medical treatment.  

C. Persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the
trauma or numbing of general responsiveness (not
present before the trauma) as indicated by at least
three of the following:....

1. Silence 
     and 2. numbness
           and 3. staring vacancies 
                  overfill the 4. empty mantels
                          and 5. guttered castles.
And this is me
and this I cannot control,
                                    this I cannot fix.

Thomas Bell





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                          Preparations for a Journey


I won't be able to drive all the way

I'll reach a point too deep in mud
the road so narrow 
overhanging branches scratch the windshield

I'll have to carry on my back 
whatever I bring with me

lash together whatever will float 
to ferry me.

I'll find some island or mountainside 
overlooking all approaches

or a cave so well sheltered 
I'll hear nothing but the rush of blood 
from heart to head 

see no colours but as seen in memory.

Or a bend in the river
where currents pause and circle 
on their way to the sea

a coastline scoured by tides 
carrying with them remnants
of worn-out continents.

Or in some cave of light
among the dark streets 
silent at last after midnight 

worn out by abandoned starts 
and fits   I'll scratch at the page
for words to begin again.


Colin Morton




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                This picture of you I carry
                (Hell, its not even Kodak paper)
                fills me with exploding Green and
                Red and White confetti
                -heals my wart covered,diseased body
                cleansed me
                        (dormant no longer)

                I am breathing again
                allofasuddentheairiscrystalinesunshine
                clear again
                I'm learning again
                teach me the parts of me I've
                   killed for    far    to     long

                I'm going to color your picture
                don't ask me to stay in the lines, though
                because they're your colors anyway
                and they should bleed into
                Everything you touch.


               sgd 5/23/94
               Scott Dexter



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 Wet Flesh 

 1. why on earth books, magazines or television programmes never talk about
the true mysteries of life, such as why do twins always wear the same kind 
of clothes, or why do blind blues singers wear sun glasses and why in 
coaches there are these tiny hammers in front of emergency exits and you 
are supposed to break the windows with them, come on you can hardly scratch 
a champagne glass with them, none of it makes any sense, do they think it 
is fun to bang a window for hours after a crash on the side of a road among
all the blood and gas, there should be a serious tool so you could smash 
the glass with one blow, but no, the news is always full of some stupid 
congress and real questions are never answered

2. headless sumo wrestlers are being lifted into a truck in heavy snowfall, 
dancing figures in the church yard, too much sake or plain gravity, arctic 
duel, plastic carcasses sliding against each other, hands groping a feel 
from oiled bodies, the engine kicks in, the man strikes a board with chalk, 
free your mind but not like this, not into these words, fractals made by
computers, the second letter of the alphabet is running around screaming 
its head off and a huge m falls from the sky, a final solution to small 
problems and frozen japanese escape to the highway hugging one another 
warmly

3. why don't we have restaurants for cannibals just like vegetarians, 
everybody could sell his or her body in advance to be used as food, kind 
of like organ donations, and after your death you are not taken to the 
cemetery but to the kitchen where they will prepare steaks, kidney pie and 
bone soup, human flesh might have an interesting taste and why is all this 
protein being buried while others are starving, besides it would be 
ethically more pleasing to be eaten by your fellow people than to end up 
as food for the worms

4. i saw a woman who looked just like you in the underground, and all the 
way from central i melted as wet flesh onto the rails, a three minute 
orgasm on a red plastic seat, legs twitching, hands holding a steel rail, 
a senseless grin on my face, an old man facing me glued his eyes to the 
ceiling where they were stuck and left tangling among ads, city 
announcements and blurred tags, a pair of blind eyes hanging in mid-air

5. maybe evolution starts to work so that we end up as more simple species, 
arms getting longer, backs arching, hanging around in trees, hair growing 
all over our bodies, soon the cities will be populated by reptiles with 
peanut brains, trees vanish and we wade into water, becoming even smaller, 
until there are just a few cells left, tossing around in the ocean, and
then not even them, just a plain and empty planet that has time to think 
what went wrong and why.

Tuomas Kilpi



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If I could name every colour in this sky

The eighteen shades of gray
The pinks, purples, magentas
The bruised blues, the white blues
The so-dark-they're-black blues

If only I could name them all before they're gone

@ Happy, 1994


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                         Remember the future?  

The Star Weekly features
effortless households of 2001
their model cities, skyways always clear
and the colour of a pack of Players?

We believed it!  

Though we'd looked down the bomb-sights 
of The Twentieth Century
had lain on our backs in the schoolyard
watching far off vapour trails 
of B-52s heading north

we grew up expert in self-deception
able to leap contradictions 
in a single bound.  

We cycled home from school
in the mad adventure of air-raid drill 
supposing two minutes would save us
and we'd rise from the wreckage of our homes
to a life fit for heroes.

Summer nights in the schoolyard
far from city lights
we stared up at Cassiopeia
the North Star  the Pleiades  and talked 
of the eons their light took to reach us
how we'd reverse that distance some day
and what we would find beyond.

Colin Morton

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 Fingers of a Man's Hand

Daniel 5:5

Attached and breeding bold arabesques
Of Mystery, this untenable abbotry shifts and settles,
Clasps its fingers, casts a glance to the Lord:
Animates this yellowed hillside with silent neophants
In silent occupations, vessels of a fractious light.

Detached and brooding on sinuous testaments
Of piety, these obsolescent heirophants return in the night,
Sated by simonious days, auctioning
Seraglios of seraphim: the cheek pat or nose turned -- 
Shook, foiled intentions; these keepers of God.

Matching the braided rhythm of the fading
Potency of day, this one transcendent telling  --
A lamp at the feet, a light on the path --
Rings the robes in to tranced sup:
Stance and station penned, with no reverse.


   Meaning and meaning recked on fingers
   Taken in canvas
   Parsed 'neath the knife.


Take what was left on the altar; the offer:
The giving and the handing down, the raining down --
Down in the valley where the heathen chant like believers,
Where thieves wear robes and proselytize:
Decanters emptied, incantations cast like spider webs.

Leave what was cleft on the table; the body:
The sympathizing of your tents and 'tentions,
Your rooms of coming and going (of meaning and meaning parsed),
Ascending the babbling heights on a fractured stair
Step up, each cloven fractured step.

Cleave what was taken to your breast; the graal:
The controlling and the telling of, the trolling and the song
Chanced upon -- the minstrel beggar's only coin.
 Down in the valley, I quested and questioned,
Tra  la la  la, tra  la  la la  la.

Erik J. Davis


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I remember you said you had seen that wicked bird again
"The Devil will pick your nose for a nickel" he said
Can't smell anything other than coming events now
I can see through your nipple
Red, white and blue Jalapeno pepper
Throw from the mound to the catcher
Imperial police force, the corporate cops
Squeeze the pepper on an open sore
Lots and Lots of lotion--Jalapeno lotion
Nose Lotion

George Belphegore Perry


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from "Machine Language"

Crickets stitch the silence.

Sleigh bells phase
                           surf pulse
conduit.
         Syntactic insect architecture
as cosmic background noise or alien radio
constellations.

(There is no silence.)

                       Sound
reasons.
         Registers
interference patterns,
                       imponderable
density of information.
                        Meanwhile
matter
mutters.
         Incessant hydrogen whisper
through summer filters even
the soles of our feet
communicate.


*


Complete possible thought reconciled
with damage visors. Sky flakes
like mica. Window resin yellow over
the blue tiles of evening. Eventual
rose and gold consensus sunset.
Cultural isotrope. Clouds
in votive envelopes. Distant
apartment mesas. Sentinel vistas
of vast acquisition. Collateral
absence of emotion, feeling
rather abstract. I and I
maintain a shape consistent with
the furniture, monitor
the weather.


*


Having to do with.

Liquid transition. Living system wisdom. Tectonic erotica.

The body exults. Lustrous unfolding of limbs.
                                              lithe
commotion .
            lineaments of affection
and arousal

*

Dream logic dictates the absolute Necessity of
the paleness of her shoulder finding moonlight
and the cool smoothness moving beneath
fluent fingers.

                sprawl of stars overhead

*

The jasmine overwhelmingly in bloom. Histamine
effusion. Narcotic olfactory saturation. Body suddenly
volatile. Ero-lunar perfume-induced trance.
The fragrant path to knowledge.

*

If, as and when defined.

*

Resource of wind and sun and rain. The "temporary autonomous zone"
of the garden on the balcony. Carnal anarchy of the vegetal, polysexual
dispersal of information.
                          culture-active, pan-species agency

Wild life calls us.

David Dowker

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Dream of a Past Place

I remember the door was unlocked.
I must have walked inside.
Half-lowered green shades.
The smell of last week's crysathenums.
It must be summer.

I think I hear the chimes
Of the cloakroom's wire triangles.
Blinds pretend their holes are bright facets.
I listen and emerald light dances on white walls
Splashing copper freckles on wooden pews.

This morning's pollen impregnates floating dust.
From the antechamber
Raspy leather soled footsteps
Slip their notes under the door.

Voices trickle across the floor upstairs.
Done their potluck they rise,
The female tide clearing, washing dishes.
Plashing to one side, men dribble around the bumps
On the wooden steps to go outside.
Thumps, mixed with giggles, reach my mind;
Children's bottoms seated
For a second on each stair slide
Down to the grassy parking yard.

Outside some carry their own child.
One holds her young man's hand. Proudly.
Familiar friends greet me and ask me where I've been.
I jot a message to my mind to remember.
Another 'child' with familiar eyes hovers by,
Waiting to have a word with me.

He revs the life into his new-model car
And smiles. Closing my eyes I lean back
Into the Barbie-doll-smelling seat covers.
I slam the door
And he starts to drive me home.


Pearl Sheil


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The Party

BLAST!
Let others in the assault party know
Where you are and what you are doing.
A room has been cleared,
The assault party yells.
The meaning agonized,
The militia slashed;
The blood it elicits.
Independent incision
The communicator's intent.

Charles P. Schultz

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SEAFRAGMENT 
dragons plunge      
on paper wings their claws are fishhooks     
their muscles coils cardboard flanks    
and metal tails wide starlight eyes
wired to their heads rotating and ancient    
with awake wisdom swoop swing dive turn 
over misty deep swinging waves underneath, flutterings      
of finny seaumbrellas and bearded crabs crawl          
through mud and fossils a huge seabeast with prehistoric    
scratchings on its back sleeps deeply beneath weeds,   
sleeps deeply in wet black people search the beach          
for washed jewels and shells springs and wheels,       
weeds and cogs to carve, polish, dream,      
and build into dragons  

SKYFRAGMENT  
there are tallmasted ships    
stranded in trees of the fir forest     
faraway, and landed on mountains        
misty green mountains the ships sway in wind 
stand silent in rain experienced metalwork   
masterful woodcarving masts are treetrunks   
swans are the figureheads, still intact sails          
sewn with heraldric patterns sails fluttering     
flags whispering magic among the leaves 
majestic in the sky, once navigated          
by nameless sailors through the clouds from palace     
to pavilion, when midsummer fire flies  
flew alongside, in the fir forest  
faraway  

THE FLOODED TRUTH OF MAPLINES  
a friend called me today "fish travelling west, eightynine hertz," she 
said, so i dont read to her any more. i passed the man with the windup 
key in his back who sells pale pieces of felt every day as i gravitated 
to the centre of the universe the buildings were covered with seaweed 
crabs crawled about the government office maze salty ocean lapped the 
statues and in the mist huge enigmatic things swayed. i got what i came 
for and returned home and went to sleep, and the maids folded up the day, 
and locked it away in a secret drawer.  

ANESTY  
she walks in her own way among the white tables, looking for the right 
umbrella the one with the silver frills and shade and the cool drinks. 
when she finds it, she will sit down and enjoy the friendly and sunny 
and welcome quiet and those already there will not say to her: anesty, 
take off that silly hat.  

FOAMING CORAL ORANGE  
the felty lineaments of the singer's face milky reflections of eternity 
in the jungle ocean the selky eye in the moon over the mountain gracing 
our view, glowing the landscape dome and watering the rapid rocks that 
cajole the broken eggshells bursting with rainbowy flags across this clear
window a silky window jilted with billowing midnight fires fallen clouds 
flown fish voices freed while the singing skin and dying lips melt. 

John D. Anderson

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     The spirit of your ancestors
     lives on in you, 
     speaks through your eyes,
     when commanding respect,
     they turn your gaze, to search
     through the haze
     it finds the light,
     sees through the lies.
     
     You truly are cosmic.
     Deep, powerfull yet calm,
     like the ocean when the thunder
     strikes, stirring but the surface,
     throughout the night.
     
     You feel what's right,
     hearing through their souls,
     understanding their plight,
     your assuring gaze, 
     overfilling them with might.

     And you too learn, as you
     float through this life,
     that it fills you with relief,
     the unending peace, which
     lifts you outwith those
     reefs to break free of
     this wheel, and dream and heal
     in a place, yet so real.
                    
                    R.



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                           Birches

Look!
     Fingers in the wind
grasp at the sky.
     Leaves
           one 
by one
     getting away
joining the birds.

               Sir?

My students can't believe
     it's true.
I'm the teacher.
I'm not supposed to be the one
caught gazing out the window.


- Colin Morton


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Appearing in this issue:

Thomas Bell

"I am a former librarian and editor who is now a psychologist in private 
practice in Nashville, TN.  I am married and have two adopted children.  
Poetry is what I do when I want to enjoy myself.  I have been published 
in print (most recently in_Mediphors) and on the net."

Charles P. Schultz

"I have been a software engineer at Motorola in Plantation, Florida for 
the last 6 years. I have a number of technical publications to my credit, 
and I am the technical editor for one of Motorola's software engineering 
newsletters. This will be my first published poem.My hobbies include 
drumming and managing an expanding collection of over 30,000 baseball 
cards."        

Colin Morton

Colin Morton has published four books of poetry, including _The Merzbook: 
Kurt SchwittersPoems_ and _How to Be Born Again_ from Quarry Press, which 
will also bring out his first novel, _Oceans Apart_, in 1995.

David Dowker

"'Doldrums' published in Poetry Canada Review (Summer/85) and 'The Critical 
Path' in the Instant Anthology (1987). Since then I have been primarily 
occupied with the (long) poem 'Machine Language'. I work for a stockbroker 
in Toronto."


Erik Davis

"Erik Davis has conluded by an inductive process that the most efficient 
manner of securing the duration and prolongation of our terrene felicity 
is by the impletion of the abdominal and thoracic cavities, together with 
a sufficient modicum of alimentary matter."

 Tuomas Kilpi

"I'm a 27-year old student/author/editor from Helsinki, Finland.So far I 
have written five published small press books (prose and poetry).  I earn 
my living by editing a small journal that deals with literature, music, 
art, politics - everything from Bach to Barks and beyond. I'm also studying 
philosphy at the University of Helsinki - and wish to graduate by next
spring."  

Pearl Sheil

She has had 2 poems published this summer, one of which was an earlier 
version of "Dream of a Past Place". She is a 4th year Applied Linguistics 
student at Carleton University, Ottawa.

Scott Dexter

"I'm working on my undergrad degree in Computer Science; I'm 22, I've had 
nothing published, my work comes from personal experience and from listening 
to my subconscious."

John D. Anderson

rrs

Happy

George Belphegore Perry



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