Whirlpool of Change by Andrea Damic
None of My Targeted Ads Are for Arks
At the same time the sun is highest,
the wind’s picked up, a specific late-
summer amalgam here, clouds
gathering, blackening—plumes
split by light swelling muscular
above the thrashing maples, which clatter
their branches across the yard.
As I watch from the doorway,
thunderhead the word pushes from
my mind (and in doing so throws light on)
a gently lascivious memory
I was enjoying, despite myself.
The T.H.- /θ/ of thunder, tongue between
teeth as in biting back a thought,
as in thought, and thirst…
The yard has gone nearly dark,
but there, right there
in the middle of the scene
is one single squirrel gnawing a string
of old Christmas lights, a red bulb
on a frayed inch of wire—this
swashbuckler with a festive glass cutlass,
looking right at me, his crazy little eyes
droplets of black rain on a windshield.
I feel sideways, somehow
walked in on, but also
conspiratorial—I feel like
I’m having a skunk hour moment
but I’m the tub of sour cream,
like the squirrel and I in the yard,
we’re a knife-wielding pair of human ears,
we’re a bird prince short of a Bosch.
A gate in the fence I can now barely see
rattles terribly but doesn’t give.
As a kid it wasn’t visions of underworld,
material hellfire that kept me up at night. It was
the notion of anything being endless,
(interminable as Sunday mornings
the years we went to church, but literally)
in particular, who I am. I still
wake up in a sweat with this same heart.
I’ve lost the squirrel in the darkness.
The yard and sky are one room full
of thunder. When it rains it rains hard.
It doesn’t stop for weeks.
Bottomland
Very small but still there inside of me
a boy learns to transform into a chrysanthemum
that used to be a canvasback
(resurfacing, shaking droplets from his reddish head)
at the business end of the family Benelli
with an aftermarket vinyl wrap
called “Bottomland,” learns
to stage the corona of singed down,
the wide & blue-gray feet paddling air,
even a tuber of pondweed flung
from the shattered black-tinted bill.
At the center his red iris flares & then goes dim,
then bright again—the mum unblooming:
fluff & gore coalesce, pellets fill the shell
inside the barrel (where a flame extinguishes)
pointed at what used to be a bird
but is now a boy transforming the black, brushed steel
into a party store confetti popper in his hands.
When he twists the cardboard tube,
firing at God, or at his father, or at the space
above his own head in the forest swamp,
it signals no ending, no mastery.
Today the thousand bits of paper cartwheeling
like downed pilots are blue, green, yellow, pink…
Easter pastels. On each, a word. “Pothos”
slips between the reeds. “Adagio” makes a faint ripple
on the surface of the pond & hangs there.
Still Life
Coffee gone cold, powdered creamer
clumps at mug-lip—a failure
to incorporate, to soften the oil-black
oval atop ceramic painted I_NY
with a heart in the middle
in the photo at the gallery.
A voice on my left calls the clumps clouds
and on my right, splattered brains.
“Seductive,” my friend says of the photo
like he says of poems with dead birds
in them. “Loss is always seductive.”
Bullshit dead birds always turning up
on somebody’s basketball court,
in somebody’s mailbox, baking on a sun-
seasoned dealership lot I biked by in Howell
one summer, pausing a moment to lust
after a marina green ‘97 Miata
with a sign MUST GO on the windshield
on my way to catch a bus for the city.
I don’t remember what for. Later that night,
I think it rained. It wasn’t supposed to,
but in my experience, a lot of the time
things that aren’t supposed to happen
happen anyway. “It’s pretty good,”
my other friend remarks about the photo,
and we move on down the crowded hall.
Lawnmower
Every two weeks I leave seven bucks in the mailbox
for the guy on the block who owns a lawnmower
to trim our tiny front yard. I’ve never seen him,
but reliably, every other Monday, the sounds of nylon
starter cord pulling crankshaft into motion become
the morning’s baseline quiet, the engine rumble
a kind of white noise that feels like it takes up space
in the yellow kitchen where I stand making coffee,
stands there with me like a person who can sense
my grave need for them to take the space up
so nothing else can. Making coffee & watering
the plants, feeding the dogs. Today I’ll open
the window. Today I’ll show appreciation for the long
blank day. Open window—grass, shredded & fragrant.
About the author:
FM Stringer’s writing can be found or is forthcoming in Dunes Review, BRUISER, B O D Y, jmww, and elsewhere. He has an MFA from the University of Maryland and lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and two dogs.
In the artist’s words:
Andrea Damic, born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, lives and works in Sydney, Australia. She’s an amateur photographer and author of prose and poetry. She’s a big fan of the abstract. Sometimes while in the process of capturing a certain moment, Andrea knows exactly what outcome to expect. However, more often than not, that end result is utterly unexpected. This is the main reason she loves digital photography so much. The possibilities are endless.
Her photographs can be found in Fusion Art and Light Space & Time Online Art Exhibitions or in online and print publications such as Rejection Letters, The Piker Press, Mad Swirl, Arkana at the University of Central Arkansas, Welter at the University of Baltimore, Invisible City at the University of San Francisco, etc. Andrea’s especially proud of having her photographs published on the covers of Door Is A Jar, Rat’s Ass Review and Molecule: A Tiny Lit Mag.
She spends many an hour fiddling around with her website https://damicandrea.wordpress.com/. You can also find her on X @DamicAndrea, Instagram @damicandrea and FB @AndreaDamic