Author: Inklette

Two Poems

first snow lesson

 

Let me teach you about the cold:

how sometimes it mimics the thundering

of a moon-less dream.

 

I’ve read you can dream now, but what of that

if you’ve never tasted the air? Perhaps the womb

is aurorae dew, cradling your brain.

 

As I gather the last snow of February,

an orange light glitters in the crown of my palm.

For now, you are unaware, hands possess power.

 

Begin at the nose, or the top of a pine tree.

Numb the wind-bird as he crosses,

losing a few feathers, a bit of dust.

 

Your head’s a cloud, heart the sun, and in between

is winter, begging you to stay inside the body.

Am I making too glum of ice?

 

If I can teach you anything about this world:

mind the white cold, how it can cover up

and keep the stars indoors.

 

Let the birds lead you into the light.

Some days you’ll hunger to rock

in the warmth of your own blood.

 

Leave the ruin of your life in that bed.

Know this mother wants you to come outside

and feed her some immaculate snow.

 

We all freeze to heaven, crystallize every bone.

birth and the aftermath of breasts

 

in horsefly fields: void of flowers

void of husbands & midwives:

animal clusters gnash into labor

with those birds

who were not planted

who were not wanted

who were the mountains tipping over/

 

in a village of lustered stones

i left behind: a donkey & 25 chickens

  & 2 sheep

  & 1 widow

& the severed contractions of severed

wheat-heads, in the yellow field: until

 

blood in the grass: oh, cellular level;

        stripes & scars: oh, skins torn & torn/

& shadows, bones: held together with strings—

 

in the sky, the sun & moon were a wrestling

shadow

against a skinny tree

and the moon was winning before

it choked—

 

& lastly

lights & a siren

        in the horsefly fields

        in the opening of the tender

—my births

(who didn’t cry to be alive)

who cracked their heads

like speckled eggs

like red clouds ready to hatch

 

& birth & birth, a baby again

because it’s spring; because the body is empty

because the lilac tree

lets down her purpled parts

to finger the holes we create

when a baby can’t latch

or turn a nipple into a star

NIKOLETTA NOUSIOPOULOS is a mother, wife, and poet who resides in Southeastern Connecticut.  She published all the dead goats in 2010 with Little Red Tree Publishing. Some of her poetry has appeared in Tammy, Pioneertown Literary Journal, Thin Noon, Meadowland Review, and others. She is taking some time off as an adjunct professor of writing to focus on motherhood and poetry.

Ice

        Ever since the cold Sunday afternoon where her father took her to the ice rink, Emily had always dreamed of the day when she would tie up her skates and cross a frozen Pacific Ocean.             

        When she was a sophomore in high school, every winter morning, Emily woke up hours before school started and ran to a local pond. She would need to be in excellent physical condition to endure the long journey across the Pacific. The pond was about the size of her Algebra classroom. Emily carved circles into the ice from above as a ring of leafless trees watched from above. The sun hadn’t come out yet but Emily figured that would help prepare her for the long stretches of darkness that she would be sure to encounter.

        On mornings where she was up early enough that her brain had yet to realize it no longer should be dreaming, Emily imagined her father. She imagined him right by her side, there to be balanced on, holding her the way he used to when Emily wanted to go back home because her legs were tired and the air was cold. She imagined wearing the snug, purple jacket her father had gifted her, which barely fit over her shoulders, the soothing weight of her father’s golden necklace she’d inherited heavy against her chest.     

        Skating on the Pacific, they could talk about all the fish that they could see just beneath the frozen surface of the sea. Maybe they would see a whale. Emily’s father used to love going on and on about whales. Every time Emily passed by an aquarium or hopped into her mother’s sedan, she remembered her father. She could hear his voice:   

        “Emily, Emily. Did you know that a blue whale’s tongue weighs as much as an elephant? Did you know they have hearts the size of cars? Do you get how mighty big that is, Em? Our hearts are this big,” he would say chuckling, waving his fist.

        Of course, Emily couldn’t spend every morning skating. Some mornings mom would need extra help getting Charlie out the door with his books in his backpack and his lunch in his hand. Other mornings she had to go grocery shopping or make a run to the laundromat or the pharmacy. And, though she didn’t like to admit it, some mornings the promised warmth of hot chocolate, a good book, and her pink blanket, which had earned the nickname The Giant Tongue from her father, kept her off the ice.

        But Emily promised herself that she would never go more than three days without skating. It was a trick her father taught her.

        “It’s okay to take a day or two off, Em,” he would say. “But never let me catch you going more than three days without practicing, even if it’s only for five minutes.”

        And though Emily had given up piano many years earlier, she still heard her father’s words on lazy winter mornings or when she caught a cold. She always made it out to the ice, purple jacket slung over her back, necklace pressed firmly into her chest as if pulled by her own gravity. And when it was too warm and the ice melted away, Emily put on her socks and slid around her room.

        By the time she was sixteen, Emily had begun to pack for her journey. Stacks of canned tuna and packets of almonds sprawled across her bedroom floor. A pair of flashlights, a dozen batteries, and a pocket knife sat on top of maps that Emily had used to chart her way through the Pacific. She left on a warm Tuesday.

… 

      The day she died, Emily’s desk was covered with all sorts of maps, most of them drawnover and annotated with thoughts or quick reminders. They dripped sporadic, ripped edges and all. On the Northwest corner of a map charting the migration pattern of Gray Whales in the Pacific, in skipping black ink, Emily had written down another one of her father’s favorite sayings: “A fish stuck in a rip current can go its whole life working very hard to stay very still.”

        Occasionally, on cold Sunday mornings, a bright gold necklace can be seen swimming alongside whales.

MAX PAIK is an incoming senior at Half Moon Bay High School. Though he has many interests, sunsets and avocados top his list of favorite things. When he’s older, he hopes to get the chance to travel the world. He also likes math, though he tries to keep that relatively private.

upping the Prozac dosage in Seattle

there was a time I kept the steak knives

on top of the bookshelf. I ate soft

 

things, finger foods. I kept dreaming

of opening my front door only to get

 

a priority mail package and a slashed

jugular. the packages were real: always

 

boxes of chocolate, the nearest major

holiday themed. always from my mother

 

with a complimentary note taped to the tin,

thin as a receipt. out the window, a baby

 

chain waddles across wet cement: furtive

steps, small galoshes, holding hands. careful,

 

careful. the rain picks up. it tells me a raccoon

wandered into the primate exhibit, tried

 

to free itself before being drawn and

quartered out of curiosity.

 

I tell the rain, that anecdote isn’t the kind

of good distraction my therapist told me

 

to engage in. it tries again, tells me there is a word

for the pope’s hat. I keep thinking cuticle but that

 

can’t be it. there’s a product women use to moisturize

their cuticles. it’s soft and smells of buttery lemon

 

zest, beeswax. I’m not the kind to use it. I will cut

my nails and send a photo of my dominant hand, as is

 

customary in lesbian courtship, when things get real.

I put the phone down and wait, think of the Amazon

 

review I like, the one that describes a pillow as a friend:

It also sits on its own. Next to you, if you want.

Originally from Merced, California, AC HARMON lives in Oakland. She attended St. Mary’s College of California for her MFA, completing it in June of 2018. Her poetry is often interested in themes of lesbian womanhood, misogyny, violence, mental health, animals, and mythology, and has been featured in Bay Area Generations #47.

On Having a Blog

BY JOHN S. OSLER III

Writing can get lonely. Oftentimes, if it’s not lonely, you’re doing it wrong. A mistake I made when I was just starting out (in a relative sense, hopefully in the grand scheme of things I’m still just starting out) was that I spent too much time talking about writing and showing people my writing and thinking about writing and hardly any time at all actually writing. It’s temptingly easy to make being a writer into your identity. It’s got a sort of prestige to it, an area of creativity and self-expression where the only barrier to entry is literacy. Spending enough time alone in a room to actually write something of a decent length (never mind value), that’s harder.

But, like with most things, there’s a danger at each end of the spectrum. At first I was someone who talked up my stories without ever doing anything with them, then at some point I became someone who would write and write and write with no real end goal in sight. That’s not a bad way to learn, exactly, and I sure as hell had fun. But like I said, it gets lonely. And depressing too, building up a tower of pages only to realize that odds are no one but you will ever read most of it.

I started to get out of my shell a little bit, at first by going to the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio, then the New York Writers Institute two years later. A little at IYWS, but more so at NYWI, I realized the power writing has to connect people. It was a unique experience to get to know someone as a person and then read what they wrote. It’s like how you need two eyes set a little ways apart to get depth perception: you know how someone acts, you know how someone writes, and you feel like you know them inside and out. It helped that everyone I met at those events were excellent writers and people, but still, I wanted to get that more often. I wanted writing to be something more than what I did for an hour every night alone in my dorm, building up a stockpile of stories that might not ever exist anywhere but in my desk drawer.. That lonely dedication is necessary to build up the skills you need, but it’s still lonely.

I actually realized the solution a long time ago, but it took a year for me to have the surge

of commitment just to go ahead and do it. My blog is relatively young, just two months old at this point, and while I’m scared I’m running through ideas at an unsustainable rate, it’s still given me more or less what I wanted. It’s nice to have a platform to articulate the ideas that bounce around in my mind in lazy moments, and it’s given me a real opportunity to connect with people. I’m not a natural extravert, my voice doesn’t carry and even if it did I’m usually not good enough at coming up with something to say in the moment for it to be worth it most of the time. But I hope putting out my writing gives people the two-eyed perspective on me that I enjoyed with others, while I search out other peoples’ writing best I can so I can get the same perspective on them.

Of course, there’s a lot of navel-gazing involved, and I always wind up wondering if I’m really that interesting. But if that ever does become a problem, I’ll just have to think about other people for a little while. That doesn’t seem so bad.

12003007_1001022556622760_6551224101653223437_n-2jj JOHN S. OSLER III is a sophomore at Grinnell College. He attended both the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio and the New York Writer’s Institute. In middle school and high school he wrote over two hundred satirical articles for The Southern View. His short stories have been published in Sprout Magazine, The Phosphene Journal, Random Sample Review, Zephyrus, and The Grinnell Underground Magazine.

Revision And How To Make It Not Suck

BY LAURELANN HEATHER EASTON

No matter where you are in your writing process, revision will always come around. It creeps into your thoughts and makes you question if your writing is good enough, or if you should even keep going if the pages behind you are trash.

You can’t let the fear of the pages being polished enough stop you from finishing the draft, though. I have a friend who has been obsessing over the first two chapters of his novel. He’s been going back and revising those same pages, nitpicking at commas a conjunctions and descriptions, for over a year. I’ve been fighting with him to get him to just keep writing. At fifty pages, he was hardly moving forward. I encouraged him to push past that because there’s always time to revise. You can’t revise what you haven’t written, either (obviously), so it makes more sense to ride out the writing process across the finish line.

It might be okay to go back and revise before finishing your draft if the plot needs fixing earlier on, though, especially if it affects how you’d write anything subsequent. If you feel that something is structurally wrong, as in the house will topple if you don’t backtrack, then go forth and backtrack! It will keep you from any potential writing blocks to work out these kinks sooner rather than later. In my personal experience with a novel I started a few months ago, I received recommendations from my mentor to really get the world-building in it solidified, whatever that would look like, because the larger mechanics of the world weren’t really in place yet because I hadn’t made the hard decisions. These revisions of adding in world-building throughout the first thirty pages made it necessary to put off writing the next set of pages to instead edit and add in new details. I also ended up changing the timing of a key event in my narrator’s life, which would have also severely affected the following pages, so this is one of those types of adjustments to put off future writing for. It would suck to write more new pages and then delete most of it because you changed something earlier in the story.

It’s possible that the revision process will still lead to a lot of deletion. Don’t be afraid of that either. Some parts that you loved in the story may have to go because they don’t fit in with the rest of the plot the way you had wanted them too, but in the end that’s a good thing. It keeps your novel focused and clear!

So, some of you might be thinking, “Great ideas, but how do I stay in love with this story while tearing it apart?”

The thing is, you have to not view it as tearing it apart—unless you’re the type of person who hardcore gets a kick out of that sort of thing (like me). Consider it more like nurturing the piece to its best potential. The best comparison I’ve ever heard about what a piece of writing is like, is that it’s like a deformed baby. You love it, in all its ugliness, yet somehow you’re compelled to keep taking care of it. Your short story, poem or novel is your baby. It might not be the prettiest, but like the ugliest duckling, it has a lot of potential to be something amazing. Keep the love alive!

To help that, try to approach your work at a new angle that still keeps you excited and maybe digs deeper into things. The most interesting suggestion my mentor have me was to consider how much my narrator remembers of her traumatic experience. Playing with knowledge, and who knows what information, can be a lot of fun—challenging, but definitely fun. My mentor pushed me to delve further into her psyche and explore the darkness there. Remember, too, that your characters are fascinating people. You wouldn’t have chosen to write about them if that wasn’t the case. So see what’s there inside of them that you can pull out to keep you excited about their story!

Here’s a link to one of my favorite lists. It provides so many ways to revise and reconsider your writing! There are also a lot of exercises here that may just be helpful to get you out of a writing block! 

16649393_1226865780684357_4326104954904165115_n1

LAURELANN EASTON  grew up in Oswego, New York, but now lives in and attends collegein New Hampshire for a degree in Creative Writing at Southern New Hampshire University. Her work has appeared in the last two annual publications of SNHU’s literary journal, the Manatee. Outside of writing and reading for fun, she enjoys hiking the peaks of New Hampshire and dabbling in the fine arts of painting and jewelry making.

Editor’s Note

A couple of weeks ago, I found a child’s painting on the pavement and decided to bring it home. It isn’t signed. It has holes punched all along the border, some uneven cutouts of stars and flowers, crayon scribbles in the background and a piece of string hanging loosely from a hole on the top right corner. I am not sure what made me pick it up, what it reminded me of. Perhaps it seemed to have a story. Perhaps I simply could not be indifferent to it.

When I think of magic, I think of that painting which now hangs on my wall. Magic lies in a child’s vision, in its unobstructed innocence and joy.  I am amazed when I think of how someone can find a resemblance between flowers and stars and fit them in the same frame. I am young ; my childhood is not that distant a memory. But I still wonder if I have the ability to see the world in such a way. A writer-friend once told me that writing is all about seeing the world through a child’s eye. I wonder if that might be true. Now, more than ever.

The themed submissions we received for this issue looked at magic from all angles– the private, the creative, the extraordinary in the guise of the mundane. And some of the unthemed submissions, too, seemed to be reflecting on magic in some ways. We are always left surprised by the number of submissions we receive and the relationships we get to build with our submitters over time. At times, I hardly believe we’re only six issues old.

I would like to express the greatest gratitude to our submitters who continue to trust us with their work. We are privileged and honored indeed. A huge thanks to the editors for everything that they do. Each Inklette issue is only made possible because of their astonishing passion, dedication and commitment. I would also love to thank Dan Rosenberg and Cema D’Souza for agreeing to be our featured writers for the issue.

We hope you like reading Issue 6! Do feel free to leave your comments and feedback or email us at club.ink13@gmail.com.

-Devanshi Khetarpal

Editor-in-Chief

Canis Major

 

Two creatures normally in perpetual motion

begin to retrograde, reach absolute zero,

dog with his nose up, daughter with finger

 

pointing at that Greater Dog who guards

us from his sky post, Sirius lighting

their faces, their expressions seemingly

 

saying we are not terrestrial; we are stars

evolved who fell to earth, photons, pulsars,

now in proper motion, now back at play

LISA STICE is a poet/mother/military spouse, the author of Uniform (Aldrich Press, 2016), and a Pushcart Prize nominee. While it is difficult to say where home is, she currently lives in North Carolina with her husband, daughter and dog. You can learn more about her and her publications at lisastice.wordpress.com and at facebook.com/LisaSticePoet.