Late Summer Edition, 2011

 Editorial Commentary (on the state of the planet as well as this delightful summer issue)

by Bea Garth

copyright 2011

 

Welcome back to this late summer edition of Eos: The Creative Context. This has been a summer of consequence, following as it has on the heels of the March 11th earthquake, tsunami and Fukishima nuclear disaster in Japan (which is somewhat contained now, but only barely–though at least for that we are thankful!).

 

There has been much unrest amongst the world’s populace: many young people leading their elders, waking us all up into realizing our future is in our hands since otherwise most all opportunity seems to be gobbled up by the powers that be.  While most of us do not condone the violence, there is a growing wind of  change and liberation that has shown us the positive side of this commotion, as in Greece, the Middle East, Italy and even Spain and parts of the U.S.

 

I would submit all is not dark, despite whatever the pundits might say about the most recent uprising in Britain.  These are the rumblings of a new reality giving birth to itself. The earth itself cannot support business as usual much longer. A new, more nurturing gestalt is called for.

 

We have to think of new ways to approach our needs–such as actually making a commitment to use renewable energy rather than devastate ourselves by increasing the  possibility of nuclear disaster  (which many of us now realize could happen anywhere),  not to speak of  wars often fueled by the fact the availability of oil is fast dwindling.

 

In addition, given our increasingly connected planet, the importance of building social and economic networks that actually help the populace  has become paramount, rather than starve the poor to serve the rich, as it now seems to be devolving if we continue doing things as they are without  change.

 

Meanwhile, however, the earth continues to show herself in all her glory–shining appropriately near the Pacific Ocean as well as many other places  (where its not burning hot or whipping itself up in yet another hurricane or twister), reminding us that it is summer after all. A time for family and vacation, for connecting with  the abundance of nature and each other.

 

Thus this issue celebrates the summer, the oceanside  and relationships–both functional and not, as well as the in-between. Scroll down and you will find excellent poems by several newcomers here including a poet from Greece and another from  Jamaica, as well as several American poets, including our own  San Jose poet, the delightful Howard Pugh.

 

I have included two photos of mine celebrating the coast this year, as well as one of my gouache paintings depicting the entanglements and delights of love. Three of Elizabeth Parashis’s lovely expressive artwork (painting and drawing) also grace these pages. And Al Preciado’s new painting “Cat!” is a vital punctuation to the article about the new 3rd Friday poetry, drawing and music events held at Works Gallery’s new location.

 

I finally completed the issue with one of my gluten free recipes: Banana (Chocolate Chip) Cookies.

 

Scroll down to find all the particulars–and enjoy yourself therefrom!

 

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Silver Ribbons

 

by Terry D. Robertson

copyright 2009 and 2011

Editor’s Note: previously published in BROKEN WINDOWS, REFLECTIONS OF A FOOL, copyright 2009, also featured as an audio cassette book by the Library of Congress 

.

.

The night is filled with silver ribbons

Tied in bows around the shining moon

Two people seeking what they need

Gaze at the stars strung together like beads

But broke and scattered much too soon

So I found these words on

Lilac sprays and butterfly wings

And then sat and scrawled down all these

Crazy things

Then gave in to your passion beneath the silver ribbon moon

 .

Now the years pass in the dimming of the day

Love is waxing, longing to be free

Having to get married anyway

It turned out to be a necessity

Wait—was that applause I heard

From the mistress of the moon?

Or just the bumping of the logs

The breeze filled with silent silver birds

 .

Two lives grew apart like a dying flower

He turns to me and says

“You robbed me of my shining hour”

I said “You took me for your vanity

Under that silver moon now so dour”

Love is an unanswered prayer grown colder

Now I write on wilted flowers

But my words have turned cold and sour

And the moon is fifteen years older

 .

The silver ribbons hide behind the moon now

All alone—as I weave them in my hair

Yet I still want to believe

All your broken promises where we once sat

You must have had magic up your sleeve

Beneath the silver ribbons

Getting us to feel like that

_____

.

Bio: Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Terry Robertson was published on audio cassette by “The Library of Congress”. He is the author of the novel, “Fill My Eyes”, available everywhere online and a book of verse taken from the original Library of Congress papers “Broken Windows, Reflections of a Fool.” The author lives in North Carolina and hopes to make enough money to move back home to his nativeUtah where all his novels take place.

To find Terry’s  book of poems go to: http://www.amazon.com/Broken-Windows-Reflections-Terry-Robertson/dp/1449595871/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2

To see Terry’s new novel FILL MY EYES go to:http://www.amazon.com/Fill-My-Eyes-Terry-Robertson/dp/1606720937/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1313681027&sr=8-1

3rd Fri. Words/Drawing/Music: Aug. 19th & Beyond…

local San Jose arts news

by Bea Garth

copyright 2011   

 

"Cat!" painting by Al Preciado, copyright 2011

What, When and Where:  Poetry, Open Drawing, and Music every 3rd Friday from 7 to 11 PM at the  Works/San Jose  Gallery at its new location at 365 Market St., San Jose, CA.

Open Drawing begins at 7 PM with provided materials, and proceeds through the night. Featured Readers and Musicians begin at 8 PM, with an Open Mic. following. This is a free event, although your contributions to Works Gallery are sincerely requested.

This month, on Friday, August 19th, one of the features is Howard Pugh, a poet and photographer of immense talent, humor and depth–who just happens to have a poem featured here in this issue of Eos (see “Three Preludes”).  Please scroll down to see it! Painter Al Preciado will  likely read poems about the difficult process of transforming oneself and the often elusive persuit of love and beauty. Mixed media photographer Gianfranco Paolozzi will be performing the accordion with his eclectic mix of jazz and Italia.  For a moment it seems we are all transported to a cafe in Italy!  Brandon Biggs will likely amaze us again with his fine operatic voice. And writer/musician Tommy D will get our toes tapping with his eclectic musical mix ribbing  old records to make a new snappy sound. After the features, the night is wide open to you the audience performing in the Open Mic.

The brainchild of Al Preciado (as Words/Painting/Music), the event morphed into featuring free drawing materials for the audience rather than paint due to the gallery’s new location with carpeted floor.  While the audience digs into the drawing materials, they are entertained by the writers and musicians.

Now run by the lovely Haley Goodlett, the newly morphed and named event creates a forum for featured writers (usually poets) and musicians, graciously introduced by Haley with warm Southern Hospitality. After the features are done, there is an Open Mic. And all the while, you the audience can draw  or write to your heart’s inspiration. I am certain if you decide to take part in the festivities, you will come away creatively energized and entertained, with perhaps a few good drawings or poems under your belt.

If you are interested in being a featured reader (poetry or short story), singer or musician, please contact Haley Goodlett at: 650 771-6780.  To find out more about Works Gallery, please go to their website at: http://www.workssanjose.org/wordpress/

California Gold: Small Field

 by Elizabeth Parashis

copyright, 2011

acrylic painting

 

"California Gold: Small Field," painting by Elizabeth Parashis, copyright 2011

 

Editor’s Note: Elizabeth Parashis is an accomplished expressionist figurative painter and draughtsman who also hosts open model sessions for artists at the Stone Griffin Gallery in Campbell, California on two Thursday evenings of the month.

 

She recently has been trying her hand at landscapes, and if this one is any indication, they are just as wonderfully expressive and juicy as her figurative work. When you scroll down this issue of Eos, check out some of her recent figurative drawings embellishing two poems–the drawings aren’t her paintings, however their fine raw liveliness of execution may give you an idea of what I mean.

What I Find

by Darryl Price

copyright 2011

.

is every word is a small step taken
away from you that arcs back to me like

a mamba’s mouth. I’m not going around
in place so much as running in circles.

You can see my devilry here. You are
the truth here and that makes me the lie. You’re

new morning. I’m much, much more sleep. You’re birds.
I’m bats. You awaken while I cry in

my sleepwalking state. Every single word.
No matter what I write. You’re laughter. I’m

floorboards. I want to be all of the stars
for once. You’ve already got that covered.

Then I’ll take the white wafting flowers that
blow down by the lake like summer’s curtains.

No, you’ll have every petal, every drop
of lake, even the differing winds. Well

then I place this poem high on branches
of pine among a hundred branches of

pine. But no. Clouds are your closed eyelashes.
I know that when you open them again

I’ll fall away into a nothingness.
Your skin’s what I’ll breathe if I breathe at all.

———-

Bio: Darryl Price was educated at Thomas More College. A founding member of Jack Roth’s Yellow Pages Poets, he’s published dozens of chapbooks, poems have appeared in many journals,including Pudding,The Bitter Oleander,Cornfield Review,Allegany Poetry,Out of Sight,Fireweed,Paper Radio,The West Conscious Review, Four Paper Letters,LITSNACK,Ramshackle Review,Metazen,Prick of the Spindle,Blue Five Notebook,Istanbul Literary Review,THIS,and Camel Saloon.He is a member of Fictionaut writers community blog(http://www.fictionaut.com/users/darryl-price).

Symphony in Blue

"Symphony in Blue," photo by Bea Garth, copyright 2011

Note by Bea Garth: I took this photo on my birthday recently. I was amazed at just how delicious the water, sky, sand and cliffs looked. Ah, summer on a beautiful day! Our financial and political world may be rocking (as it definitely was and is), and even  the earth may have its difficult spots (as it too  has this summer), but there are still those places and moments when the  shore, sea,  and sky all sing with the loveliness of pristine Nature! 

MY MOTHER’S SALT

by Nicholas Damion Alexander

copyright 2011
.

1.
My mother cooked with salt,
flavoring our lives
with the spice of her choice . . .
A white grain from the sea
that added new worlds of taste
to children made of mixed spices.
2.
My father loved his pepper
heating up her pot
with its red flames,
that little masculine bulb
men use to show bravado
about nothing.
3.
We ate of Mother’s salt
all of our lives till we grew
old enough to insist
she travel to the sea
of her spice, away
from the red heat
of our father’s pepper.
4.
Today, fifteen years on
my mother has stopped
cooking with that spice
as white as my father’s skin.
And we have grown accustomed
to his hot spice,
hardly remembering
her love for little white grains
drawn from the sea.

 

—————

 

Bio: Nicholas Damion Alexander is a teacher at Wolmen’s Boys’ School in Jamaica. He has been published in The Gleaner, The Observer, Carribean Voice, So Much Things To Say, Poets Against War, Auckland Poetry, Angel Fire, Mr. Africa Poetry Lounge, and the Black Collegian.

You can find his blog at: http://nicholasdamionalexander.blogspot.com/

Ocean Tabla

by Bea Garth

copyright 2011

photo

 

 

Three Preludes

by Howard Pugh

copyright 2011

.

I: Rumination on women who live in the sea.

As though filled with her own amniotic fluid she calls the sea home.
Never far from a jump back in, never
commitments to ways of the land,
she resists language with it’s wind-burns,  it’s chisel of old age.
.
The sea acts like the hand to a yo-yo,
always sending her away and calling her back.
.
The sea is statuesque,
makes marble out of sinew and bone,
makes solid the naked innocence of warm-milk and
protective caresses. Goddess mother of
day-long basking, going skinny in the summer, jumping
out of trees
into the sultry, deep, slow creek that shouldn’t be there,
but unexpectedly is.
.

II: The motors of consumption were made when we were young

Overfilling is what defines us:
we are always the beast charging past the barricades,
blood and nerve falling out our overhanging wounds, like vines.
We clamp on hard to diminishing pleasures, doggedly, like
an umbilical cord still pressed into service, long past birth and
obsolescence.
.
What a great burden it becomes: these continuing expectations,
that from out of the jumble  and fathomless circuitry,
from out of every corner of town and country, there must persist a
constant offering –long past infancy and the instincts for nursing–
an obligation, a provisioning: still those warm, nurturing, lactating breasts
staying in play: these were more than mere prototypes.
.
And when you grew older, you noticed mommy getting stretched,
pulled like taffy across the taut rim of the universe,
Mommy’s held-out bosoms, still on-call,
still waiting to be chafed by your ready-to-clamp-down mouth,
but now in different places,  new places,
their likenesses now appearing in coffee shops, in alleyways,
their reputation for constant generosity holding true:
.
even mice partake in the hoopla, approach their mother’s belly on
all cylinders of suckling, milk at full throttle in the frantic prayer of life,
closed eyes, religiosity: the close quarters of nipples in sacrament
and holy communion … their mouths are the future. Our mouths, the great
tabernacle for receiving gifts –each day another Christmas– so that we
may grow, develop strong teeth, bite down and tear, become competitive.
.
—–One can never tell how outdated their car is, if all they do is drive.
And yet who can go too long without rebelling against the excesses
of travel, start to bow inward with rust and disregard?
.
Why are we not revered, tall and possessing the savvy of smiling gods?
Why can I not dine with friends, one short afternoon in utopia, discuss
what warbles down the streets of paradise, the dancers, naked, in perfect
balance?
.
The answer is not afraid of us. It approaches us in the marshes, trusting,
brushes up against us at the beach, rests its head in our laps, even
slides its fingers under our garments as it becomes our latest meal.
We hide truth by taking it into our body, our body becomes it, we are
truth digested, we are the children of wisdom, and have learned nothing.
.
Only the dullest routines herniate, finally, out into scrutiny,
turn around, visible, like steamy entrails ripped fresh from our flank,
stare up at us groggy from their long dark swim of slumber,
the anesthetic hums of our appetites cranking, plowing through,
prowling: all the switches still stuck to the on-position.
.
The pate of the planet harvested down to nubs
like the head of a newly recruited soldier:
it was thought, simply, if everyone were bribed,
things could return to normal, return, opaque,
to those meaty days of our youth.
.
The beast always crashes through the guardrails and
free-falls towards the sea, like the guy who’s always not
James Dean.
It ends with a click like a gas-nozzle shutoff, full.
It ends with flames that overtake the last crease of
finger-licking and euphoria.
.

Prelude III: The history of trying to cheat nature
.
Heidegger says that to salute the gods of Being
pour handmade wine from a vessel of earthenware,
drink in the sky and sun and labors of men, whence
come the ever-scrolling testimonial of the divine.
.
It isn’t my taking leave of paradise, it’s this confounded
shell game, it’s the ground of perfection that shifts away,
like quick-moving tectonics under the stillness of days:
the man at the science fair asked:
“can you count how many beans are in the jar?”
.
I find love moving like defiant children; trying to dodge cloud-
shadows as they drift across the plains, find the capacity for happiness
ever-more ephemeral, the growing spool of opinion only tangles
joy in its uncharted circumference. Gathering twine for the return
journey home, the means to innocence: O Theseus, betrayer,
the rebellious unknown was your friend; now slain by your shortcuts,
your gimmicks.
.
Like a census-taker we test each stone, question if this one
is a suitable outcrop for hanging on, then the next.
.
Always looking for the same waterfall and lingering pool
pocked by the cloven hoof-marks of summer,
or the childhood memories of the circus coming to town -
the salad days, nesting like Georgian dolls downward
into my tiniest likeness, curling like plant bulbs buried
where the earth first grew wet and sweet in
maternal stillness.
.

———-bio: Howard Pugh is a San Jose poet and photographer of considerable talent, depth and experience. He is currently working on a new book of poems called PSALMS FOR THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY.

That Moment

by Bea Garth

copyright 2011

gouache painting

 

 Bio: Bea Garth is a veteran poet, sculptor, painter and photographer as well as editor for Eos: The Creative Context. She has often acted as an arts activist, which she now still does, though in a more toned down, supporting role–having decided that her own creative work as well as  editing is enough, especially since she has to make time for her new hypnotherapy practice with Chris Arcus (see more in the Links and About sections). 

 

Love After…

by Lisa Griswold

copyright 2011

.

"1 Small," drawing by Elizabeth Parashis, copyright 2011

.

In the whispers of the wind I can hear him.
His warm sweet hand gently moving the hair from my face
Comforting and soothing the pain like lace.

.

In the roar of the wind I can feel him

Rumbling through my soul like a deep echo.
Stealth movements in quiet like the Gecko

.

In the still of the night I can smell him
Sweetness and musk ..lilacs and roses
His sweet breath kissing parts of my nose

.

I open my eyes and I see him
His love his eyes his incredible power
It is after this I need a cigarette and shower.

 

———-

 

Bio: Lisa Griswold is a poet and freelance writer from Anderson, California.

Ruling Day

by Eftichia Kapardeli

copyright 2011

 

ΑΡΧΟΥΣΑ
ΜΕΡΑ

Χρώματα από του Ήλιου
τα κρόσσια ,διάχυτα
στης ελπιδοφόρας αυγής το φίλημα
χείλη κατακόκκινα, κερασένια

.

Έργο νέο γεννιέται
νέα ακούραστη σκέψη
στην συνωμοσία της σιωπής
στις ακύμαντες επιφάνειες
των νερών, στα φυλλώματα
ταξιδεύει

.

Με τα ακροδάχτυλα πλεγμένα
στην πλευρά του ουρανού
ολοκληρώνεται η αγάπη
Αχώριστη, Αξόδευτη, Αδιαίρετη , Άρχουσα

"3 Small," drawing by Elizabeth Parashis, copyright 2011

RULING

DAY

Colors of the Sun
the fringes, diffuse
Joined hopeful dawn kissing
red lips like cherries

.

New project is born
tireless new paragraph
the conspiracy of silence
akymantes on surfaces
the water, the leaves
travel

.

With fingertips bonded
side of heaven
completes the love
Inseparable, endless

indivisible, ruling

—–

.

Note: Eftichia Kapardeli was born in Athens and lives in Patras, Greece. She writes poetry, stories, topics, Xai-kou, essays, novels.   She has received awards in Pan-Hellenics competitions (poetry, topics, stories, novels, fables, xai kou). She received recognition for her novel *SECRET MARCH * from D.E.E.L and *Sikeliana 2006* (salamina) at UNESCO. She has her work published in various literary magazines such as The First Poetics Collections: *CONFINDINGS OF SECRETS * and *LIGHT*. She is member in World Poets Society{w.p.s}:  http://world-poets.blogspot.com/and a member of the International Writers Association.

http://worldpeaceacademy.blogspot.com/2010/10/poets-for-world-peace.html

GF BANANA (CHOCOLATE CHIP) COOKIES

Another gluten free recipe

by Bea Garth

copyright 2011

.

 Blend the following ingredients in a blender:

2 ripe bananas

1 large peeled, sliced white potato or equivalent peeled, sliced  yam (½ of a small sized yam)

½ cup water

½ cup maple syrup

1 cup oil (safflower or sunflower are best)

 

Put blended ingredients into a large mixing bowl and then whisk in the following ingredients one at a time until smoothly mixed:

 2 eggs

1 ½ tsp. xanthan gum

2 tbsp. arrowroot powder (or ½ cup tapioca powder)

1 tsp. salt

1 ½ tsp baking soda

1 ½ cup cane sugar

Meanwhile start pre-heating  oven: 350 degrees F.

Then add in the dry flours a cup at a time, mixing well with a large spoon:

2 cups sorghum flour

1 cup garbanzo flour

3 cups  brown rice flour

Then add in the gluten free chocolate chips (one10 oz. bag), using a large spoon until well distributed–Or alternatively don’t add the chocolate chips, maybe add nothing extra, or put in some sunflower seeds or chopped almonds or walnuts?

Drop dough using a heaped tablespoon onto a pre-oiled pan and then bake  at 350 degrees F. for roughly 12 minutes for each round of cookies.

Note: This makes lots of cookies! You  might want to halve the recipe. The reason I didn’t is that I wanted to use up the package of gluten free chocolate chips all at once, rather than have my bf nibble away at them. You can keep the unused dough in a covered container in the fridge for almost a week until ready to bake–just let it set out a while to warm up a little.

Enjoy!