via Scott Thomas Outlar is Alien Buddha Press’ Featured Artist for April 2020
Monthly Archives: May 2020
Please help get supplies for fighting the pandemic to Navajo Country.
My friend Carl Allen Begay is gathering essential supplies, face masks, gloves, face shields, hospital gowns, fabric, food and cleaning supplies to take to the Navajo and Hopi Reservation for COVID19 relief. They are especially seeking fabric and face mask donations and as many as possible. Please contact him for more information.
He has plenty of room for bulk donations: Carl Allen Begay 2225 E Lockett Rd Flagstaff Arizona 86004 for masks and other donations. Checks can be made out to Karen Begay 2225 E Lockett Rd Flagstaff Az 86004.
They’re using any collected funds for gas money. Mr Begay takes supplies and PPE to the Navajo and Hopi Reservations.
His daughter is collecting gas money thru her pay pal. This was set up for their tour business but they wont be doing tours for a long time. Any donations will be specifically used to address the pandemic which is rampaging through Navajo Country. She is on PayPal as KBegayToursAZ.
If you cannot donate please keep spreading the word.
Mr. Begay is on Facebook at 
Carl Begay on Facebook
How I Spent my Pandemic Vacation by Donna Snyder
via How I Spent my Pandemic Vacation
A recent post at El Paso News
“Even in the Absence of Proximity”-my review of Christina Quinn’s Up the Down Spout published in Red Fez
My review of Up the Down Spout by Christina Quinn
Looking Up the Down Spout by Christina Quinn
Poetic Justice Books & Art (Port Saint Lucie, FL)
Christina Quinn is a visual artist and poet, born and reared in England, who has lived many years in the Coachella Valley of California. As a girl, she was the kind of person to travel extensively in Germany and ride a motorcycle around the U.K., Belgium, France, Australia, and New Zealand. As a woman, she designs houses and furniture out of next to nothing, walks her dog in the high desert, and has had solo and group art exhibits in California, Florida, and elsewhere. She is tall, bone thin, and wears her very short hair a natural platinum. I have followed her work on line for several years, admiring her large abstract paintings and distilled, minimalist poetry. A life-long visual artist, Quinn began writing poetry much later in age. She has five published collections of poetry, some of which are not available in the United States.
Looking up the Down Spout, the title of which reflects Quinn’s lifelong curiosity and willingness to take risks, both large and small, is a fine collection of brief poems, most under a page long. The untitled poems lay spare lines on a page, reminding of the delicate bones of a bird that somehow still lifts its own weight off the earth and through the sky. As one would expect of a visual artist, Quinn’s poems are filled with colors and vivid images. One reality is often altered by the play of light and shadow to reveal an alternate reality. Here is a poem in its entirety.
under the pier
sun fingers
hold tight to
green algae
softening the split
of treated wood
pink crustaceans
kiss randomly
the junctions
of dark & light
& the sea makes
entanglement
of underworld weeds
slumber eyes
catch shaded
dappled skin
swaying in time
to the tide
he smiles
in that lazy way
& the sea tilts
close enough
to taste salty skin
your eyes are green
he said
Her dreamy imagery here implies more than mere visual description, suggesting a reference to one of many definitions of quantum entanglement, that something exists only in a dream-like state of unreality unless measured, that is, quantified in some way other than mere observation, as described by Scott Glancy of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in his article, “Local Realism, Bell’s Inequality, and T-Shirts: An Entangled Tale,” found in the NIST blog. According to Glancy, based on extensive experiments throughout the world, quantum particles do not have fixed properties in all circumstances. Quantum entanglement is the concept that stuff, like particles, can affect other things even when separated by even substantial distances. Quinn’s poem quoted above, in a few brief lines, conjures the impact of dark, light, color, the tide, on human observation and consequent relationships. Likewise, her dramatic changes of media and approach to her art reflect the diverse realities in which she has found herself throughout her life. Here is another poem that hints of objects being described in reference to each other, controlling effects even in the absence of proximity.
I have been dying
I feel no pain I dream in color
I hear sharps & flats
& speak chameleon
listen I won’t lie
I have been a polite spectral guest
mostly
though not in person
see here
I know the secrets of
deathly impermanence
I don’t lie
In March of 2015, as a poetry editor for the magazine Return to Mago, I published one of Quinn’s poems. “konigsberg summer” reveals a denser play with language, but also demonstrates a consistent use of color-saturated memories.
the baltic glistens with gold
tears spilled
from the eye of a goddess
calcified in beauteous resin
lovers who stroll the sand
search for amber teardrops
a pledge to those they love
war came
& when it was time she
walked the thousand miles to freedom
took her boy
a sheaf of love letters bound in blue
& a strand of amber tears
the memory of
konigsberg summers
caught fast in yellow sun
At the time, Quinn said in Return to Mago, “Always a painter, sometimes a poet, I was taught to appreciate language and words by my father…a lover of all things English. I learned to read from the magic found in the complete works of Oscar Wilde, bound in leather by my father’s hand.” Quinn credits her father, who died when she was 12, for instilling a great love and respect for visual and literary arts. He particularly exposed her to the great English artists and writers such as Shelley, Byron, and Blake. He encouraged her painting as a toddler, and inspired her adventures in various media and different parts of the world. As a young bride in New Zealand she diverged from painting and developed a body of work in textile arts, using a neighbor farmer’s sheep as a source of fleece that she then washed, dyed, and wove, developing a reputation for her fine textile artwork. After moving to the United States, she returned to painting, exploring the landscape and human body to create stunning abstractions. Quinn has been quoted as saying, “I like to start with a more realistic approach but quickly move onto an abstract field. I am a colorist so that is a huge part of making art for me. Intuitive color and marks please me to no end….” The Press-Enterprise June 27, 2019.
More painterly details from the natural world, and a subtle mysticism, hint of Blake in the following poem from Looking Up the Down Spout.
from the last step sometimes
I sit & feed the pigeons
they understand this perpetual motion
the four cents in my pocket
& the shoe shocked horses
bolting down cobbled streets
there’s a whirling field of energy
an obsessive compulsion to capture
something tantalizing & out of reach
i feel my dreams have been stolen
others have made silk from my visions
even so
i was born at the stroke of midnight
the cusp of yesterday tomorrrow & today
i can tie three knots in an eyelash
i can make sparks fly
i feed my friends the crumbs of my thoughts
i jangle the cents in my pocket
i watch the horses bolt
& from my frozen finger tips
i touch the stolen dreams & execute the lie
Many of the poems in this book are implicitly about a relationship, perhaps failed, perhaps merely complicated. Here’s one of my favorites.
the smell of insanity
& track of quick eyes
silver bells of madness
disturb the air
this autopsy must end
stop seeing the body
focus on the question
are you mad she asked
with a clay heart
he replied
yes
I am reviewing the chapbook edition, which was recently re-released as a perfect bound soft back book in combination with Quinn’s Ricocheted Memories, also published by Poetic Justice Books & Art out of Port St. Lucie, Florida. See more of Christina Quinn’s work at Christina Quinn words and art on Facebook or Christina Quinn on Instagram.
Fallen Lilies, by PD Lyons Poetry
A contagious peace from our friend in Ireland…
Fallen Lilies
We will surround you with silence
Like the voices of our children never to be heard again
We will surround you with fallen lilies
Like each of one our children cut mid bloom
We won’t ever know what to do
With a hypocrite’s thoughts and prayers
We won’t ever find anything
In a hypocrite’s concern for grief
But we’ll not match the hardness of such hearts
By hardening our own
We will not meet such hearts with violence
We know too well that path of sorrow
So, we will meet you in silence
Like the voices of our children never to be heard again
We will meet you in fallen lilies
Like each one of our children cut mid bloom
Unlike you
We will do what must be done
Unlike you
We will remember and continue to find days to be thankful for
Mothers rocking babies rocking mothers
View original post 5 more words
a shining steady chorus of Ah! by PD Lyons Poetry
From my friend pd lyons to bring down your stress levels
sometimes
i just let the day go
awareness, not of the passing
but of the being.
not moments, minutes, hours
but seeing, hearing, feeling
tasting, smelling, thinking.
free of linear, lists, concept, naming,
ever thing, any thing.
a true knowing
a shining quiet steady chorus of Ah…
poems published in Setu Western Voices issue 2020
I’m thankful to Setu and to Scott Thomas Outlar, it’s guest editor for the Western Voices issue, for publishing two poems written in collaboration with Lee Ballentine as well as a poem each from us both.
My poems in Setu Western Voices issue 2020
Poems by Lee Ballentine in Setu Western Voices issue 2020
Here is one of the collaborative poems:
but silence is never silent
Collaboration with Lee Ballentine
Like an ultimatum of birds gone to their winter nests,
I refuse to speak in the shadowed echoes of your applause.
Like things you will never hear again, sounds tremble as they fall,
leaving nothing but your voice telling me what I cannot be.
As my honest self fades to gray, I hear its damp echo.
A machine preaches tolerance, but I see only scowls.
The eruption of unbidden tears. Imperfect duplicates.
A divided spirit—sonorous voice, gregarious smile—
belies the familiar fist. The slammed door and bruised spirit.
Heartache demands shame’s silence.
But silence is never silent. Car doors slam. Jets
roar through dirty sky. Distant dogs complain.
Choppers enforce imaginary lines between Us and Them.
Or maybe bear torn flesh, twisted bodies, the comma of death.
Train tracks thunder a despot’s rage that stops for nothing.
A teacup knocked to the floor, a tympani of windows and roof,
a glorious vibration, the sound of fragile metal, a car
dropped to the concrete floor of a garage in the next block.
Pigeons trill sweetly, then scold anyone without seed.
Water flows through pipes like the presence of god.
Breath rattles through tubes of flesh and dying lungs.
Snub nosed dogs snort and snore in irregular rhythms,
like the voice of ghosts from beyond a non-existent wall.
They cannot stop telling stories of all that’s long forgot.
Footfalls from wooden floors where no feet walk.
I breathe poisoned hills and smell toxic water. My life
demolished like a listing shed in the rail yards.
Lost as the travelers who never returned home
bathed in the midwinter scent of a sea’s perfume.
The migratory odor of abandonment lingers,
and I have nothing to say to you.
The waves you would not see
shimmer like a mirror of clouded ice
gone frozen over the falls.
Repost from a few years back: person Donna Snyder, three poems
via person Donna Snyder, three poems
Here is one of the three found at the link above:
Rabbit in the moon
Rabbit looks down
sees barren land, water infrequent.
The sun’s biting caress a death blow.
A cold too vicious to survive without cariño.
Ixchel sent me a lover
but chastity had already claimed me,
denied tactile pleasure and serendipity,
tongue pierced with cactus spine.
Mariposa sent me a lover,
but I wasn’t free to flit from ocotillo
to nopal on wings of pumpkin sun and indigo,
trapped in a box of death the color of plums and sky.
Colibri sent me a lover
who couldn’t shimmer in the air drinking sweet.
He plummeted from the sky like a fallen god,
his lungs became rock and his muscles stone.
Jaguar sent me a lover, too,
one kept from me by knives and chains.
He ran into the mountains and lives there still.
You can hear him scream in the starless night.
Eagle sent me a lover
with a tattooed arm that ends in fury,
dead lovers dancing to an unheard drum,
sugar skulls meant to celebrate life reek of death instead.
Rabbit looks down
into this indigo desert, sees my heart twitching
on a plate of lapis and jade, sees blood on the land,
but no succor. No solace. No water to wet my dying tongue.
