photo by Lindsey Thäden
Click on the right hand pointing to move through the issue.
ideomotor
José Angel Araguz
Hugh Anderson
Larry D. Thomas
Gareth Writer-Davies
Irene Mitchell
Ben Rasnic
M. A. Istvan, Jr.
Bill Winter
Michael Estabrook
Lynn Mundell
Joan Prusky Glass
K Srilata
Margaret Young
Kurt Luchs
Peycho Kanev
Layla Lenhardt
Jimmy Pappas
Lindsey Thäden
The Note
by Dale Wisely
We are pleased that our friend and frequent contributor Brad Rose agreed to guest-edit this issue. Thanks to Brad for his hard work and keen eye.
It's 2017, as you have noted. I would feel celebratory about the end of the painful and surreal 2016, but for my concern that 2017 may turn out to be, as the kids say, even suckier.
I admit that I am increasingly thinking of the world in spiritual concepts, like good and evil. Why spiritual? It's too cheap and easy to say here are the good people and here are the bad people. So, I abstract it into forces of good and forces of evil and, no, I haven't seen the new Star Wars movie. This sort of dualist approach may not represent reality, but I have no idea what is real. I am a believer in the idea that we all have to have a narrative to live by, and so I'm going with this one for now.
One problem with the good/evil approach is that no one gets up in the morning and thinks, hey, I need to get some coffee in in me so I can start pursuing my evil agenda. So, that's how you can get, say, a White House full of people who are pursuing some evil agenda who aren't necessarily evil people.
All I know is that much is at stake. Evil has to be exposed and confronted. My prayer for you and yours—and for me and mine—is for righteous combat and for peace, for confrontation and reconciliation, for fear and courage.
Dale
#106
ideomotor
I want to thank Dale Wisely and Laura Kaminski, and all their colleagues at Right Hand Pointing for honoring me with the opportunity to edit this issue. I am especially indebted to all those who submitted, as well as to all those who will read this issue. I was impressed with the quality of imagination and skill of the submitted poems and fiction, and wish I could have included more than the selection contained herein.
by Brad Rose
The Guest Note
#106
ideomotor
Think knitting: one voice over itself, into itself.
You work through the air where lie and truth pass each other.
Until the thread forgets it was ever alone, believes itself a crowd.
The person who believes and the person you are becoming.
And the other, who first told. Each makes a thing, to be worn out.
Naos Explains Lying
José Angel Araguz
#106
ideomotor
Hugh Anderson
Signs of life in the stark demarcation
of light and shadow, a starfield so dense
it blankets the barren hills like snow.
Fire on the horizon, distant sun
threatening to rise. Signs of life:
whoever visited here stretched a fence
across emptiness, opened a gate
from sun to shadow, walked away.
There is not even wind. Just waiting.
Above the Tree Line
#106
ideomotor
Larry D. Thomas
What few leaves
the Chinese tallow still holds
are oxblood as the heads
of corpulent men choking.
Its rickety branches
clack with the frenzy
of doves, jays and sparrows
ravaging its waxy,
popcorn-shaped seeds.
Their BB-sized brains
are barely big enough
to tip them off
that suet’s
the last cushion
between the wind
and the nasty,
drafty hollows
of their bones.
Fat Chance
#106
ideomotor
Gareth Writer-Davies
in the market at Marrakesh
a trader
has a tray of human teeth
nobody asks
where he got the teeth from
but if you need a tooth
he will fix it
with extra strong adhesive
crowned
you can have gold
for five hundred dirham
for now
you smile
browse patiently through the tray of grey teeth
a man loses his illusions
then his molars
touch your tooth with your tongue
you shall find the ache
On Human Teeth
#106
ideomotor
Irene Mitchell
Who was I once
and why have I been corrupted?
The mind of an analyst cannot discover
who I once was,
what caused my stride to break
while on leave at the prison yard,
how I had to disappear
until someone from Amnesty came to ask,
Where?
Open the guarded doors, I beg,
to where the fronds are a frilly green in the glade,
sky a pampering reprieve.
There flies the weightless crane,
feathered still and negotiating with the winds
about how best to go the vital distance.
Prisoner's Lament
#106
ideomotor
I’ll take a tin roof anytime
during a rainstorm
else what is the reason
for these ears?
Said a Very Wise Man
Ben Rasnic
#106
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M. A. Istvan, Jr.
Two palsied underbites in diapers,
said to have minds of infants, flirt
on a first date through a facilitator.
Bracing their wrists, she guides
their hands, like Ouija planchettes,
to letters on the table before them.
Ideomotor
#106
ideomotor
Bill Winter
It's red, of course. Heavy, rather than solid, with a very fifties look. The alarm is loud and shrill and rather tinny. You can't shut it off sometimes.
The face features cheery Chairman Mao, who beams beneficence upon all. He sits in a yellow sky twixt 10 and 11. (AM, one presumes. It's always morning in the New China.) Across the bottom, some earnest Red Guards raise books—the book, Mao's book—and wave them like Red Sox fans cheering on Big Papi.
The clock runs slow, to give the Five Year Plan an extra year to work.
Communist Clock
#106
ideomotor
Michael Estabrook
LOL
Whenever I find a spider in the house I leave it
alone but sometimes one shows up in the bedroom
and my wife says “either that spider goes or I do”
and at times I confess I’m tempted
to leave the damn thing right where she found it.
But I never do, and neither would you.
#106
ideomotor
Lynn Mundell
She wants to write about her aunt’s facial hair, but she’s barely finished the first sentence—“My aunt’s sideburns rested on her face like brown sleeping mice”—when the phone rings and it’s her father begging her not to disturb the dead. Next, she decides to write about her brother’s hoarding. She’s typed only “My brother owns 4,000 wire hangers, easily” when his head pops up on her computer screen. “You’re embarrassing me,” he says, before eating all of her words, spitting them out in a paper wad on her Persian rug, and disappearing. Searching far, far back, she remembers hearing of her great-grandfather’s draft dodging, but the story idea is barely formed when the doorbell rings. Outside is a man in a blue suit carrying a briefcase, who says, “I’m sorry, but ‘Great-Grandpa Willard’ is a registered trademark and you can’t use it.” Returning to her desk, she begins to write about a man killed by his brother in a knife fight over their beautiful lover, a first cousin who’s pregnant with their father’s baby. Relieved, her relatives return to their day-to-day, while the made-up family hides out in a motel, hoping she’ll never find the rest of them.
Censorship
#106
ideomotor
Joan Prusky Glass
After 65 years of marriage,
she holds his ashes in a tin box
on her lap, while the coffeemaker
sputters and drips in the kitchen.
He wanted to be tossed
into Lake Michigan,
but too bad, she says.
He’ll have to settle
for the pond down the road.
Then she snickers
and wails at the same time:
the strange sound a sea lion
makes while clapping
her flippers, during a show
gone on entirely too long.
What Remains
#106
ideomotor
K Srilata
All evening, I have been considering boxes.
Hand-crafted ones, compelling and impractical,
the sort that jam easily.
I drop my earrings into one of them,
its blue-bird shimmer
gone before you know it.
I have lived in them all my life,
boxes in which I have become,
with a dangerous degree of precision,
this, that, or the other.
I have noted their contents,
Not bad boxes to be in and yet,
I have clawed at their lids
like a death-row prisoner.
Boxes Have That Effect
#106
ideomotor
Margaret Young
Envelope, please. The needle, too.
Steamed open, counting clouds. Jumped off
cliffs like mothers warned us
not to. Don’t look back at
any dark horse, dead wife, don’t think
about an elephant in your mouth.
This year’s winner for best mask, most
convincing smile in an adapted history.
Acceptance Speech
#106
ideomotor
Margaret Young
so much too-muchness, like magenta bracts
the berries dangle from, pink as the T-Mobile
lady’s dress and motorcycle. Fruit black
as patent leather in long clusters, stems
Fibonacci-twisting up into enormous stalks,
sapling-thick by August, whatever
bitter medicine the shoots have
if you boil them twice is ripened then
to poison.
Pokeweed
#106
ideomotor
The heart goes out,
the heart returns
undone by doubt.
And then unlearns.
The Heart Goes Out
Kurt Luchs
#106
ideomotor
Peycho Kanev
I am hammering this rusty nail
to the shaking tool shed
and I am hoping to make it
stronger
and I thought I was a fool
for doing that
but I kept on with the hammer
anyway.