Art: Eclipse by Nancy Shuler
MILLENNIAL DERELICTION
after Edmond Chibeau’s Chiliad disuse
from Performance Scripts: Prime Numbers
II.
- there’s a stockyard in the furrow in your brow
churning on the flat bone landmark
between your eyes
- your scent is gamey
venison perhaps
though I still see your face radiating
This is how it is. The bough . . . the bough . . . Use your head, can’t you?
- centuries of people dispel into centuries of people
standing there doing nothing troubled
- fervently naked
scrounging around Araby asking for handouts
III.
- sounds like there could be trouble
how utilitarian how hard-boiled
- skin and bones skin and bones
superior to nasion
- 10 centuries’
waste
- your tender heart
your cow eyes
V.
- the shade takes your hand attempts to help you to your feet
you refuse
- I made a model of you,/A man in black with a Meinkampf look/And a love of the rack and the screw,…
I will never do that again
- the military intelligence of the jumbo shrimp was seriously funny
Now I know my ABCs.
Next time won’t you sing with me?
- there’s a slaughterhouse in the channel churning
on the flat bone landmark of your brow
right between the eyes
yes the singular is utterly worth forgetting
Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there’s a heap,
a little heap, the impossible heap.
I can’t be punished any more…
even if one is removed from there and put back here
then? then! Voila! No?
a cautious bouncer
About the author:
John L. Stanizzi is author of the full-length collections – Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, and Chants. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, The Cortland Review, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, Rust & Moth, Connecticut River Review, Hawk & Handsaw, and many others. Stanizzi has been translated into Italian and appeared in El Ghibli, in the Journal of Italian Translations Bonafinni, and Poetarium Silva. His translator is Angela D’Ambra. He has read and venues all over New England, including the Mystic Arts Café, the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, Hartford Stage, and many others. He Stanizzi is the coordinator of the Fresh Voices Poetry Competition for Young Poets at Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT, and a teaching artist for the national recitation contest, Poetry Out Loud. A former New England Poet of the Year, named by the New England Association of Teachers of English, Stanizzi teaches literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, CT and he lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry.
Art: Eclipse by Nancy Shuler
In the artist’s words:
I enjoy turning my photographs into virtual paintings by adding various filters and techniques to my original shots. I have developed this method of “Photographic Art” over the many years in which I have been a photographer. Each photograph undergoes an unique and creative process to bring out its own specific beauty by emphasizing its distinctive composition and lighting. Each photo is printed on canvas to further increase its depth and intensity. Each canvas photo is sprayed with an acid free acrylic coating to protect its surface and insurer its longevity.
