The Cenacle | 102 | December 2017 *Just Released*

[Cenacle]

The Cenacle | 102 | December 2017
Reading link: http://www.scriptorpress.com/cenacle/102.html
Download link: http://www.scriptorpress.com/cenacle/10 ... r_2017.pdf
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Hello everyone,

Here comes the just-released Cenacle  | 102 | December 2017. Samples of the issue’s contents are below to entice you. The Cenacle is, of course, like always, free to read online or to download, via the links above.

From Soulard’s Notebooks: 
I miss you like hell. I probably judge people, myself certainly, by how decently & generously you lived your life. Your devotion to your Art never for a moment negated your devotion to loved ones, or to Nature, to the world. Your music bespoke your love of all, your wish to quarrel with no man. Your wish for this for all

Feedback on Cenacle 101:
[Colin James] 
Joe Ciccone’s poems: I could sit between the lines, look up and let the words just wash over me, if I wasn’t intent upon catching each one.

Classic Cenacle Poetry by Mark Shorette:
and all are shrouded
in the blinding hidden
you will know
what the hill
has come to say

Notes from New England by Raymond Soulard, Jr.:
For this piece, I’m going to read each poem again, beginning tonight, past tonight, if need be, & react to it, fresh; from years of knowing where it led; from this moment in time. R.E.M.’s wonderful compilation Part Lies Part Heart Part Truth Part Garbage 1982-2011 on my headphones, streaming on my beloved MacBook Pro, Eurydice. Herself named after my long ago 1998 poetry sequence Orpheus & Eurydice: Making the Lyre. Written over a short sequence of days (also published originally in Cenacle 31) that eventually inspired my one-a-day poem approach to the Tangled Gate poems.

Poetry by Joe Ciccone:
For a moment we’re the whole of our
split halves as in our last life

as if love were something more
than an endless goodbye

Same Moon Shining [Memoir Excerpts] by Tamara Miles:
It is not the business of this writing to defend or excuse Alma, only to seek understanding for women—for people in general—who run away from their responsible, decent, ordinary lives. At any rate, there is more to the story—for, you see, Alma came back home. The wild dance that she did with Albert did not go exactly as planned.

Poetry by Tamara Miles:
Always, in a family,
too many pronouns
to know for sure
what really happened.

Many Musics [Poetry] by Raymond Soulard, Jr.:
But to see you one more time again,
my Deirdre, I weaken, acquiesce.
You lay with me in my bed, one you
never saw. Atwist in my grasp, like old,
fingers playing my graying beard like
your own secret, amusing instrument.

Poetry by Ace Boggess:
It’s rare nights when she takes a lover, feels things
she could never speak in daylight—private,
too silent for a language without proper words.

She breathes only in sighs as if she wears
genitalia in her lungs, exacting eruptions of wind
over long, desperate dryness—timid, benign.

Snake-head Soup [Travel Journal] by Nathan D. Horowitz:
Dave’s alarm rang at 2:55 a.m. He, Mark, Ryder, and I picked ourselves up from the sleeping platform, pissed in the forest behind the provisional hut and, quiet and sleepy, assembled a row of low stools in front of the hut. The brew we’d made with the leaves of the vine—the heads of the yagé serpent, Joaquín had said—was still warm. We dipped gourds into it and began to swig it down. It was much more watery than ordinary yagé, not unpleasant at all.

Poetry by Nathan D. Horowitz:
In a flash of intuition, I saw that, through an act of will, one could rise up among the shelves,
weightless, and peruse the titles of the lowest library of Heaven, books which humans are ordinarily not allowed to read, but which Evelyn was permitted to browse any time she wished, as long as she agreed to keep the matter a secret.

Poetry by Colin James:
Never ending rumors implied sanctuary
could still be achieved yet
similar to a comfortable utopia,
treeless and somehow video simulated.

A Good Man is Hard to Find [Classic Fiction] by Flannery O’Connor:
The Grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal. “Now look here, Bailey,” she said, “see here, read this,” and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did.”

Poetry by Judih Haggai:
reason unknown
syllables and syntax
whoosh me away

Bags End Book #8: “It’s OK to be Happy!” [fiction] by Algernon Beagle:
So many times I have said, Dear Readers, that your old pal Algernon’s native land called Bags End just isn’t like other famous fantasy lands. Good places like Oz & Narnia & the Hundred Acre Wood. They are all 4or one & like a team when the bad guys like the Winged Monkeys or witches or rival religions or age come around. Not this place. No sir. Here the troubles are usually smaller but it seems like it’s our own folks that brings them. It’s like I’ve always said, when it comes right down to it, it’s the little guys against the big guys in this world. Of course that’s not always true but more more than less less.

Notes on Death and the Cosmic Memory [Prose] by Jimmy Heffernan:
It is constructive to note that atoms and molecules don’t age. They don’t die. They’re supposed to have existed at least since the Big Bang, and perhaps an infinitely longer time. What does it mean for us mortal beings—that we’re made of an immortal essence?

Poetry by Tom Sheehan:
This strange star
courses night
near-fable tree
in front of house;
this leaf-crawling
star, this odd light
about in the
lusterless
darkness, this
crawling spot in a
slow whirl taking
over the whole of
imagery, a
presence foreign
among red leaves
and sapless limbs
aching to crack
selves aloud in
such dread silence
the star leaves
about in its wake.

Sapphire Sins [Travel Journal] by Charlie Beyer:
I drop in on Shrewd Annie, proprietor of Sapphire Adventures on Main Street, a sapphire shop where she sells bags of dirt salted with a few crummy sapphires in them. You can screen for your treasure right there in the back yard, as you can at half a dozen storefronts in town. My object is to sell Annie some of my cut sapphires. With much interruption by looky-loo tourists, she finally selects a brilliant pink. 0.71 carats. This she pays $350 a carat for, resulting in a check for $250. Hot damn! Finally I get some money out of her after she charged me about that much last year for India gem cutting. With the new ruby cash in my pocket, I feel kinda smart, kinda rich. I’m a hundredaire.

Poetry by Martina Newberry:
Follow this blinking poem.
It’s only a muted reflection of some child’s game
preserved on paper gone stiff with the years.

I am home now, and considering this:
Was I followed?
Can the songs of my heart be re-rendered?
The sun makes promises but doesn’t console.

We’re all on our own.

The Acid Makers of Denver (Essay) by Chris Walker:
Tim Scully first dropped acid—LSD in capsule form—on April 15, 1965, in his living room in Berkeley, California. He was twenty years old, and wasn’t quite sure what he was in for. After about an hour, he felt a tingling, euphoric sensation wash over him. Suddenly, patterns
in the carpet came to life. A clock and other objects on the mantle moved before his eyes, swaying with a cosmic current he’d never known surrounded him. When Scully closed his eyes, paisley patterns were projected onto the back of his eyelids, in bright, intense colors that he didn’t recognize. It was as if a valve had opened in his brain, allowing him to perceive raw, sensory information from the outside world that a person normally misses. He turned to his friend Don Douglas, wondering if he was experiencing this, too?

Labyrinthine [a new fixtion] by Raymond Soulard, Jr.:
And in my plaid green jacket front pocket is my dear friend Pirth, glowing & purple furred & ribboned & bowed as ever. I bend my head down, he reaches up paw to pat my nose. At one point, we end up on a hill above the city & I’m just trying to figure it out. What does all this mean to that me, who’s lying a little bit sore on the Woodsy floor, there, over there? I can see you, over there, lying on that Woodsy floor. You can see me. Can you see me? Yes, I can see you, with those familiar people on that hill looking down on a city. How did we? I don’t know. Am I the past & you’re the future, or vice versa? Did I go from city to Woods or Woods to city? I’m not sure. Are we happening together at the same time, on parallel tracks? Which one of me is lying alone, deep in the White Woods, & which one of me is on this hill, sitting among these dear people
whose faces I can’t quite see, looking down on the city, thinking almost everything is in sight?

Email comments simply hitting “reply” to this thread—or reply to me directly & off-list at editor@scriptorpress.com. Enjoy!

Peace, 
Raymond