PRATIK's CURRENT ISSUE HIGHLIGHT : AMERICAN POET SEAN THOMAS DOUGHERTY'S NEW POEM, "Man Fishing"

 SEAN THOMAS DOUGHERTY

Man Fishing

 

Ink black shoreline, a cloud scribbled on blue slate,

and far out on Lake Erie I spy a boat, a shadow 

casts a line so far out from shore

I didn’t even notice when I took the picture.

It reminds me of those Chinese scrolls,

the one with the four mountains over eighteen feet long,

and then you read the title, so you squint

and in the foreground you find a hut and a man fishing.

Why should we care about this small figure?

When we are given the sky with its glorious sentences

of clouds, the mountain’s black lines sketched serene.

I want to ask Wu Zhen; does the man have a wife?

Are there other anglers asleep inside the hut?

I look down at the digital photograph I hold,

the slim stranger casting his line, the gulls swoop

and dive above the Cambodian men who smoke

and fish on the public pier, filling their white buckets

with perch and crappie. I bait my hook, ponder

how would Wu Zhen paint us if he were here to bear witness?

A few quick whisks from his wrist, and we would appear: 

 

a pier

of matchstick-

thin

old men—

 

 

Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author or editor of twenty books including Death Prefers the Minor Keys (forthcoming BOA Editions) and The Dead Are Everywhere Telling Us Things, winner of the 2021 Jacar Press book contest. 

 

 

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PRATIK LA SPECIAL ISSUE HIGHLIGHT: MAURYA SIMON'S POEM, "The Strand"

 

MAURYA SIMON

The Strand   

                      

Photo courtesy of Robert Falk

      

She’s flying. Surf-song beats its tambourine in her ears as she whips her bicycle down the long esplanade. Only the cold sun follows her this wintry evening. Fleetingly, Mélusina glimpses the elegant shadows draping themselves in banners from Dewey’s sea-staring windows. A brown pelican hovers above her, a chaperone. A tall boy waits for her on the pier, his lips red as pomegranates. There’s a rush of blood in her groin, a tautness in her breasts. The air sizzles and her heart practices a strange catechism as her calves pump furiously, the iodine wind drying her slick skin. When she spots him—his black hair and alarming smile—she whispers, Ravish me.

 

Maurya Simon’s ten volumes of poetry include The Wilderness : New and Selected Poems, recipient of the 2019 Gold Medal in Poetry from the Benjamin Franklin Independent Booksellers. Her poems have been translated into Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Farsi. Simon’s a Professor of the Graduate Division and Emerita Professor at the University of California, Riverside. She lives in the Angeles National Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains.

 

 

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PRATIK'S UPCOMING WINTER ISSUE HIGHLIGHT : FORMER CZECH PRESIDENT VACLAV HAVEL'S POEM

 

VACLAV HAVEL

September Sunday,

 A Poem in Prose

 

It was a day of vermillion and everything blue

when a friend and I stumbled upon a man

in the park, alone, face down to the ground,

his soul trembling as if to ward off death.

We harnessed him between our shoulders

to the nearest physician, a stern gray

contemplative type, who treated the man

for hours with numerous injections, soup,

and the last brew of coffee in the house.

We grew wary as to the charge he would exact

and how and where to hustle up the money.

When later in his referral letter to a clinic,

we found a hundred crown note for taxi fare—

he mumbled words into blushing.

A half-year later we read that the physician

was sentenced to death for high treason

and activity with subversive intent. It was then

I thought to myself, what vagaries of capital

punishment, there were to comprehend.

 

Translated from the Czech by James Ragan

 

Vaclav Havel, playwright, poet, essayist and dissident, served as 1st democratically elected President of Czechoslovakia (1993-2003). His poetry appeared in samizdat editions in the 1960’s. His collection, Antikody, consisting of calligram word designs, is some of his most renowned work. The poem “It is I Who Must Begin,“ published in Kosmos, is anthologized widely, and appears in Teaching with Fire. Over 20 plays, including The Garden Party and Audience, have been staged world-wide.

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Pratik's Upcoming Winter Issue : Highlights

 

Wings Of His Heart

                                                                  MARIÁN PAUER 

on Luka Brase’s Art

 

Contemporary Basque Poetry

Koldo Izagirre  Felipe Juaristi  Jose Luis Otamendi  Karlos Linazasoro  Iñigo Aranbarri  Harkaitz Cano  Itxaro Borda  Tere Irastortza  Miren Agur Meabe  Castillo Suarez  Leire Bilbao

 

Celebration of Pure Thought :

James Ragan featuring a Selection of  Seven Czech & Seven Slovak Poets

 

Seven Czech Poets

Petr Borkovec  Milan Dezinsky  Sylva  Fischerova

Vaclav Havel  Martin Palous  Tereza Riedlbauchova  Olga Stehlikova

 

Seven  Slovak Poets

Radovan Brenkus Eleni Cay   Dana Podracka  Tera Vale Ragan

Milan Richter  Katerina Rudcenkova Ladislav Volko 

 

Novels in the Year of Covid

YEAR - END REVIEW OF BOOKS BY ROBERT SCOTTO

 

Eleven Erie Poets

Mabel Howard  Sean Thomas Dougherty  Thasia Anne Lunger   Todd Paropacic  Patric Nuttall  Matt Borczon Berwyn Moore   Cee Williams  Chuck Joy  Kim Noyes Luke Kuzmish

Eight Nepalese Poets

Anuja Ghimire Bhuwan Thapaliya Rajan Maharjan  Parbat Lawati

Luna Ranjit  Rupsingh Bhandari Rozesh Gautam  Sushant Thapa

 

Featuring

Carlos Ramos  Maria Mistrioti  Laura Johanna Braverman  Heather Dubrow Sherri Felt Dratfield Gueorgui Konstantinov  Yesim Agaoglu, Marian Clarke, Ratika Bhardwaj Swati Sharma Amar Aakash  Declan Collins  Sam Lott

 

BOOK TALK

“The ultimate close-up magic trick”

Shireen Quadri on editing

The Punch Magazine’s

inaugural anthology of short stories by Women Writers

 

BOOK REVIEWS

“Marco Polo’s Dilemma”  

JOSÉ GARCÍA OBRERO reviews inverse [2016-1979]

By Cuban American poet Víctor Rodríguez Núñez

 

“An embellished, crafted book”

RATNA RAMAN reviews

Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation

by Sudeep Sen

 

TRIBUTE

“Final Destination of Otis Kidwell Burger”

: KATHERINE BURGER pays tribute

to recently departed American Poet

  

Plus all regular Columns

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PRATIK LA SPECIAL : MICHELLE BITTING's "An Hour North of Lee Vining, California"

 

MICHELLE BITTING

 

An Hour North of Lee Vining, California

Photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher.)

Who remembers where we stopped

for jars of orange neon cheese and the tangled black

knots of faux flies my father taught me to thread,

hooks that pierced the lips of bright trout

skimming lagoons in the craggy High Sierras?

I remember ghost lines cast to blue nothingness

we watched dissolve in the lake’s dark bottom.

What did we say to each other, side by side,

swaying in the wooden dish? Or was it

just the music of the wind in trees parting

ash white branches, the Aspen banter?

Why don’t I remember reeling with the rush

of my glittering first catch, the zagging colors cinched?

I think it’s come to the moment

he showed me how to haul a fat fish up,

how to grasp it tight in my girlish hand,

the wriggling slickness releasing life

into my nervous palm as I raised it high above me

and in one grand swoop, brought the stunned head

down against our boat’s iron edge, a gavel felled,

a verdict delivered, stunning those wide round eyes

to stillness. I can be as cruel as you,

I wanted to say, with pride, but didn’t

and still don’t. It’s enough

to think of it now. Enough to toss it back,

to let that ugly beauty go.

 

 

 

Michelle Bitting won the 2018 Fischer Poetry Prize, Quarter After Eight’s 2018 Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest, and a fourth collection of poetry, Broken Kingdom won the 2018 Catamaran Prize and was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2018. She has poems published in The American Poetry Review, Narrative, The Los Angeles Review, Vinyl Poetry, The Paris-American, Love’s Executive Order, The Raleigh Review, Green Mountains Review, Plume, Tupelo Quarterly, and others. Michelle is a Lecturer in Poetry and Creative Writing at Loyola Marymount University and Film Studies at Ashford U. 

 

 

 

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PRATIK'S UPCOMING WINTER ISSUE HIGHLIGHT : BASQUE POET LEIRE BILBAO's Two Poems

 LEIRE BILBAO

Two Basque Poems

 

Terra Nova

Very early in my life, it got too late

                                          Marguerite Duras

 

You were a late arrival

my mother would say to me.

 

I was two weeks over my time

for fear of the world.

I was a red fish in my mother’s womb

two extra weeks in the spawning.

 

Three point six kilos

she reported by radiophone to my father.

 

A birth-slap and

I bawled for my father.

 

My daughter!

My daughter!

echoed at the bow.

Fishing is fine

over and out.

 

Drinks for the crew that night

were all on my father.

My father slept well that night.

 

Six months passed before he could meet the shrimp

hanging from my mother’s hook.

 

When he took me in his arms

I swam for the first time in the sea.

 

Now I realise that it was not only my tears

in all that briny ocean.

 

Translated from the Basque by Paddy Bushe

 

 

I don’t want that

I don’t want a mother country that will bury me,

that will put what we yearned to be in my mouth.

 

I don’t want a love that will exhaust me,

that will rise to my neck, only to take revenge.

 

I don’t want a mother to protect me

if I’m not going to have her at my side when time passes.

 

If I have no mother country, no love, no mother,

whither shall I return?

 

Translated from the Basque by Sarah J. Turtle & Iñaki Mendiguren

 

Winner of the Euskadi  and Kirico Prize, Leire Bilbao is a celebrated Basque language poet. After a successful career in the world of oral improvisation, she made a leap to literature with her poetry collection, Ezkatak.  Several of his poems have been sung by different Basque artists. And she has translated the work of Nijole Miliauskaite into Basque, as well as other poems by contemporary poets. She has published about 20 children's literature books.

PRATIK LA SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE HIGHLIGHT: American poet GAIL WRONSKY's poem, "Conspiratorial We"

 

GAIL WRONSKY

Conspiratorial We

 

Hammers and fingernails withheld

Even in the midst of frenzied days and envies

Insolent sun which moves behind mountains

to caution the edges of our eyes

Mouths which nothing can out-die

Under the disordered dusk, through mysterious windows

We meet and conspire, bathe our daydreams in gin

 

So much said already in the twilight

We are alive, but do not demand much of it

 

We don’t believe in anything but ghosts

We don’t question people badly dressed in mourning

Under the heavy heel, we are alive and weightless

Under the capsized boat we fly

 

Gail Wronsky is the author, coauthor, or translator of thirteen books of poetry and prose, among them Dying for Beauty (Copper Canyon), Poems for Infidels (Red Hen), and Imperfect Pastorals (What Books). Her translation of Alicia Partnoy’s book, Fuegos Florales (Flowering Fires) recently won the American Book Prize from Settlement House Press.

 

 

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