From Pratik's Current Issue: American poet, David Axelrod's new poem, "The Guru gives me advice"

 DAVID AXELROD

The Guru gives me advice

(For Dr. Bob Schenck, aka Swami AnandVeetkam)

 

Your laugh tickles my telephone

as you tell me, “There is no evil.

It’s all the same. Just how things

are.” I’m infuriated when some

bureaucrat says, “I understand,

but there’s nothing I can do.”

You cackle, “Perfect! Of course

there’s nothing anyone has to do.”

Someone stymies my plan. You

ask, “Why do you complain?

You picked this.” But I’m like

the man at the zoo who is told

that hyenas mate infrequently.”

Imagine that sad fact. You say,

“Broken plans just teach us that

our desires are just our vanity.”

I wonder why the hyena is laughing.

 

 

David Axelrod, Ph.D., is an alumnus of the University of Iowa Writing Workshop (MFA/Poetry) and a self-proclaimed “populist” poet whose mission is to promote the appreciation and writing of poetry. He is a three-time Fulbright grantee, and was the first “Fulbright Poet-in-Residence” in the China. He has shared the stage with such notables as Robert Bly and Allen Ginsberg, and has performed at the United Nations.

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From Pratik's Archives: Irish Poet Steven O’Brien's new poem, "Nimue"

STEVEN O’BRIEN

Nimue

 

Dark is the loom tide of the lake.

I have flickered through blind fathoms

To the clear still shallows

Of the water-fasten that holds

My country apart from yours.

 

I bring a wish blade made itself all of water

To the upper world

Hammered from deep cold stone water

In the springs of midnightwater

And the higher I reach the more it becomes.

 

I have nursed it for a moon time;

A silver fin etched on both sides

In a hoar frost tongue of blue verglas -

‘Take Me Up’ it says and ‘Cast Me Away.’

 

Skim-ice along its edges clave

The pitch of the currents  as I rose.

Now it shears the surface of the pool

That was unbroken by rain.

 

This man approaching  

Has walked a holloway of alder and willow.

His face eddies like a lily,

Wary eyed, as if he is questioning his journey,

This proffered treasure.

 

Well might he hesitate,

As I hang among the trout glades

With the washed steel singing above me,

Its point biting my palm.

 

For all his life will be a racing torrent

Like a mountain beck in the spring thaw.

 

When first he draws this sword

It will shriek like an eagle

And dazzle his enemies.

It will also bind him and he will forever 

Be a man wading the marches

Between waking and dreaming.

This is the gift.

 

Yet now

It is enough

To see how the hairs on his arm move

As he reaches to take the hilt.

And then I sink.

 

Steven O’Brien is a poet, novelist and mythographer. He has been editor of The London Magazine since 2009. He leads the MA and PhD programmes in Creative Writing at the University of Portsmouth. He is also a Trustee of the Vatican Patrons of the Arts.

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HIGHLIGHT from Pratik's Current Issue:American Poet Charles Bernstein's Two New Poems

  

CHARLES BERNSTEIN

Two Poems

 

1.

because they

see my scraggly

beard, my crooked

hat, and the dark

shine from my

glasses, they say

I am a poet

 

 

after Leon de Greiff

(Medellin subway)

 

 

2.

After Stephen Ratcliffe

 

Horizon line shimmers

At edge of light

Umbra calls echo

 

            Branch’s horizontal intrusion

            Or is it claw?

 

            Not even quite white or blue

            Turquoise smudge winks

 

Fading pink fingers of mist

Evanescent liquid dissolving

Moment of change

 

Recipient of the Bollingen Prize from Yale University,  Charles Bernstein is an American poet, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. He  is the Donald T. Regan Professor, Emeritus, Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the most prominent members of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=Eor Language poets. His selected poems, All the Whiskey in Heaven, was published in 2010 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 

 

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Submissions Open for New Writing from South Asia

 

Submissions open for New Writing from South Asia

Pratik Magazine invites submission of New Writing from South Asia, especially Poetry and short fiction/non-fiction of the subcontinent. The work will be published in the 2021 issues of the magazine.

The very next issue of Pratik will have special focus on the Nepalese writers writing in English.

The submissions are free, please send your poems (Not more than five poems) and a short story written in English or translated into English only.

Please send  your work as one Word Document to:

pratikmagsubmissions@gmail.com

The deadline for general submission is 15 December, 2020.

The deadline for Nepalese writers based in Nepal or elsewhere is 7 October, 2020.

Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing

Edited by Yuyutsu Sharma

White Lotus Book Shop,

Hanumansthan, Kupondole,

Kathmandu Nepal

Phone:5520248, 9803171925

whitelotusbookshop@gmail.com

 

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Pratik Current Issue HIGHLIGHT: American poet, SYDNEY LEA's new poem, "Tricky Road at Night"

 

SYDNEY LEA

Tricky Road at Night

My radio’s crackle sounds

like judgment on me for driving

mud roads in this stiff rain. 

As your own life changes, so

must your life insurance change,

some huckster’s voice insists.

I thump the tuner and hear

–from who knows where?– the gravel

rant of a Gospel zealot:

Tell me, brothers and sisters,

ain’t you a long ways from home?

Amens resound. I’m moved,

a bit strangely.

                             My prospect’s blurred

by  mist and steamed-up glass.

My life could be snipped like a thread.

Young spring, ice still in the ditches

on the old McHenry Turnpike,

once a thoroughfare

as busy as any here.

I drop into Cummings Hollow.

In mind, the word protracts

itself into echo. Hollow. 

How sinners must feel when they change

their road! I imagine the tears.

As a college kid, I camped

nearby.

                             Oh, aroma of liquor!

Oh, love and promise: the girl,

the flagon of rotgut wine!

She was sweet, the young woman, the drink

seemed endless, and late at night,

our minuscule tent gone calm,

I projected a vibrant future:

placidity and excitement

in welcome alternation.                       

Like elixir, those youthful thoughts.

Now I’m here in an actual future.

My headlights sweep an old dump,

where a gutted, antique Victrola

looks ready

                             to offer up song;

a spavined Buick juts

over the shoulder, as if

it might suddenly take to the highway;

rain-slicked bottles wink

at my creeping pickup’s headlights;

dead shovels lie next to dead barrels;

a rat scats hole to hole.

I can even make out some shears,

gleaming, open-jawed.

They seem to me metaphors–

for something. I’ve driven through

a thousand thousand lives,

                             not one of them insured.

 

 

Sydney Lea is a former poet laureate of Vermont. Founder and longtime editor of New England Review, Lea has published thirteen volumes of poetry (most recently Here, Four Way Books, 2019), a novel, five collections of personal essays, and three critical books. He lately collaborated on a book of essays with former poet laureate Fleda Brown, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives, and will soon present The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy, a graphic narrative poem with  James Kochalka, Vermont’s first cartoonist laureate. He and his successor as state poet, Chard de Niord, co-edited the authoritative anthology of Vermont poets, Roads Taken.

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PRATIK HIGHLIGHT: Vermont’s poet laureate, Chard deNiord's new poem, "Tenkwatawa" in the Current issue

 

Chard DeNiord

Tenkwatawa

I sit all day on the lawn in front of the mountains

remembering one thing after the other

in no particular order, so that when I’m asked

to recall something in particular, like the name

of Tecumseh’s brother, I am at a loss, staring at the haze

on the ridge for clues, giving the impression

that I’m ignoring my inquisitors and have lost my mind.

I am waiting for a burning wheel to descend

from the sky to cure my memory with fire.

I’m waiting for names to fly down in the form

of birds I thought were extinct but live

in my hair without my knowing it, nesting

              there like the hat I wear with long dark wings.

 

 

 

Vermont’s poet laureate, Chard deNiord is author of six books of poetry, including In My Unknowing, Interstate, The Double Truth  and Night Mowing (All from University of Pittsburgh Press). He is also the author of two books of interviews with eminent American poets, I Would Lie To You If I Could and Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Song. A professor of English and Creative Writing at Providence College and a trustee of the Ruth Stone Trust, deNiord lives in Westminster West, Vermont with his wife Liz. 

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Pratik's Fall 2020 Issue Highlight: American poet, Major Jackson's "You, Reader"

 MAJOR JACKSON

You, Reader

 

So often I dream of the secrets of satellites

and so often I want the moose to step

from the shadows and reveal his transgressions,

and so often I come to her body

as though she were Lookout Mountain,

but give me a farmer’s market to park my martyred masks

and I will name all the dirt roads that dead-end

at the cubist sculpture called My Infinity,

for I no longer light bonfires in the city of adulterers

and no longer smudge the cheeks of debutantes

hurriedly floating across the high fruit of night,

and yes, I know there is only one notable death in any small town

and that is the pig-farmer, but listen, at all times

the proud rivers mourn my absence, especially

when, like a full moon, you, reader, hidden behind a spray

of night-blooming, drift in and out of scattered clouds

above lighthouses producing their artificial calm,

just to sweep a chalk of light over distant waters.

 

Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, including the forthcoming volume The Absurd Man (Norton: 2020). A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is the poetry editor of Best American Poetry 2019. He serves as poetry editor of The Harvard Review.

 

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