Synchronized Chaos October 2017: Charting Your Course on a Changing Sea

old-ship-in-the-fog-14789720026oEAll aboard, readers! This month we’re charting our course over literary seas.

As we see in J.K. Durick’s poetry, life’s circumstances come and go like waves. There are some natural and seasonal patterns, but some of our existence is unpredictable. We do have choices at times, some ability to plot and steer our course, but we are also tossed by wind and water, floating out wherever they take us.

Joan Beebe recounts her visit to coastal Maine, close to the ocean, with views from lighthouses and sunsets over the Atlantic. Sanjay Bheenuck, a London-based author, describes a grittier, less elegant journey through inner Malaysia.

In the poem I mentioned earlier from J.K. Durick, a speaker sails on the open sea, checking the horizon to find the scene there both familiar and unfamiliar at once. His other pieces touch on the discombobulation of travel and the calm of off-season destinations.

Richard Slota’s novel Stray Son, reviewed by writer Mike Zone, presents a journey through space and time as the protagonist picks up the ghosts of his past on a trip that’s more about understanding than pat reconciliation. He becomes able to place his life’s traumas in a broader context.

Mike Zone’s own poetry is infused with images of Romantic writers, Beatnik literary figures, and road travel, and Changming Yuan’s work crosses borders, whether between night and day or China and the English-speaking West, to reflect intercultural interaction.

As we meander our way through life, we sometimes have the chance to set our sails toward a particular direction.

In her powerful story ‘Him and Her,’ Vandini Sharma illuminates the life of a woman determined to get an education. Returning poet Mahbub, a Pakistani national and high school English teacher, reflects the tension between the excitement of learning and the harshness of social pressures, including violence. The grouping of these pieces seems to convey a dichotomy, or perhaps a choice, between thoughtful education and mindless chaos.

Some of the destinations we may choose look good at first, but turn out to be only mirages as we approach. So it can be good to recalibrate our course.

Returning Bangladeshi poet Vijay Nair mourns the grotesqueness of poets writing for fame rather than pursuing justice or carrying out an artistic vision. In a similar vein, John Grochalski mocks shallow people who seem to only exist for parties and brunches, ignorant of the rich history of the cities around them. Sheryl Bize-Boutte’s poem illustrates choices that seem delicious at first, but later, aren’t.

Love and respect seem to be constant human desires as we travel through life. We need our crewmates!

Elizabeth Hughes, in her monthly Book Periscope column, looks over three titles: Kimberly Lake-Seibert’s The Adventures of Toby the Bear, Evelyn Blohm’s poetry collection Four Seasons, and Lesley Graham’s Star Warrior. Whether it’s the comfort of the warm little puppy Toby, the gentle verses and kind words of Evelyn Blohm, or the protection of the intergalactic Star Warriors in Graham’s novel, many of us need a little support to get through the day.

J.J. Campbell’s poetry, like Richard Slota’s novel, explores the lingering effects of childhood violations, which as the poetic sequence shows, can lead to extreme isolation and loneliness, in life and perhaps even in death.

Sheryl Bize-Boutte also contributes a short story, ‘Madeline and Me,’ which brings home the power of friendship and the devastating interpersonal effects of racism.

One of the choices we can make, as we trace our course on the map, is to love and respect ourselves and others.

The third installment of Christopher Bernard’s dense, heady novel Amor I Kaos presents the conundrum of why to love in a world where we don’t know what is meaningful, and presents the choice to love as a pathway out of isolation and selfishness, a way to make existential meaning. Allison Grayhurst, returning Canadian poet, looks to birds and human relationships to illustrate the fragile grace of existence, as we decide to care for each other despite our finiteness and imperfections. Michael Robinson gives us a sequence of free verse and prose poetry where, despite the many losses in his world, he finds acceptance from his mother, who enables him to extend the same to himself.

Finally, we should remember to look up every so often and calibrate our position by the vast array of stars.

Several submissions touch on the broader journey of existence, who we are as living creatures and our connection to a vaster universe.

Doug Hawley’s short story ‘Kitten on the Keys’ explores the possibility of transcending death by scientifically reanimating dead bodies, of people, or, in this case, a kitten. Fine artist Giorgio Borroni contributes images from our history and dreamscape, including Freud and sea monster Chtulu. Dave Douglas sends in a formal pantoum reminding us to make the most of the time we have before ending up underneath a gravestone, and Ken Dronsfield’s speakers animate a world of afternoon, twilight, crabapples, autumn leaves and bones. They’re alive but thoughtful, conscious of time and the legacies they are leaving.

Janine Canan’s poems celebrate infinite divinity and spiritual transcendence, and the paradox of all of us being merely human, selfish, distracted, weak – but at the same time, so much more than that. Lauren Ainslie looks to the broader world in a more personal way, bringing us a meditation on her visceral emotions, her impressions of an isolated pond tucked away high in the mountains, and a dramatic piece where she heralds her birth and takes her rightful, meaningful place in the grand universe.

In the words of Jack London, “Sail On”!

Poetry from John Grochalski

the brunch people


the brunch people

are lining saint marks place

on an early sunday afternoon

the brunch people women wear cute little dresses

and the men wear polo shirts with the collars up

they are named becca and staci

todd and blake and kyle

and they are as boring as a parade on the fourth of july

the brunch people play on cell phones

or talk about banal things like taylor swift music

and the national football league

their voices sound like honking cars in traffic

and they never worry about hunger or war

the brunch people giggle

because they are drinking mimosas with champagne

before one o’clock in the afternoon

a few of them will be asleep by four p.m.

at least one becca or staci

will vomit on the pavement or have to fight off

the advances of one of the kyles

the brunch people love bacon and eggs

and specialty coffees that taste like mint

they love starbucks and 7-11 and dunkin

and watching from their rooftop pool parties

as people who’ve lived here for years

get their asses thrown out on the street

the brunch people take the word gentrification as a complement

they’ve started phrases “i’m not racist but…”

they were put on this earth to eat french toast

and destroy us as quickly as they can

the brunch people have college degrees

but they don’t have college debt

most of them are heading toward thirty

and their parents still pay their rent

mommy had to call blake off from his job last friday

because he was hungover from

too much partying with todd

the brunch people laugh about the mundane

throw their trash on the ground

and never really pay the cost for anything in this country

if you stopped one and asked them if they were human

i’m willing to bet you twenty dollars

most of them wouldn’t know what

in the hell to say.

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Short story from Doug Hawley

Kitten on the Keys


I suppose that I should introduce myself first.  I’m the famous cat Jaws, the first reanimated non-human animal.  The non-human distinction is important.  The Hanley family, starting with patriarch Duke who reanimated a basketball player once and his wife twice, and his son David who reanimated his girlfriend Wendy twice, used the procedure with humans first, before striking gold with me.


I say striking gold, because he makes a lot of money bringing rich people’s deceased pets back to life.  I don’t want to disparage my original person Wendy too much, because we always got along, but David’s munificent animal reanimation practice has brought her much closer to him.

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Christopher Bernard’s novel Amor I Kaos: Installment 3

Christopher Bernard’s Amor i Kaos (part 3)


It was almost too demeaning, she thought. To be hampered in that way despite all the options at the time. The seeming options, anyway. Because once you’ve done something, it seems as though it had always been meant to be, and so maybe the options were illusory after all. Amor fati…

—If only!

—No, really. Plus the beauty of matter, in Joubert’s lovely phrase. Because he was right, that Frenchman with the shy ambition and the small, beautiful notebook. So beautiful in its humble bravado, its bold modesty. All that clean, beautiful white space surrounding the few lovely words. No overwrought romantic windbaggery for him. But I’m drifting from the subject. Though what indeed was the subject? She looked at him with her usual skepticism. Did she love him? Maybe she did, in her peculiar way.

—My life is my hell, he told her one day. Matter-of-factly. I wish I could say I love it. I wish I could say I love you.

—Me too.

Then they parted for three days. Three weeks. Three months. Years. Decades. But not forever.  They were adults. You would have thought they had learned never to be entirely sincere, that was what got young people always into so much trouble, the infatuation with “honesty,” no relationship will last five minutes of complete that.

—Apparently not.

—And so they tormented one another with their precious truth. You are my hell. A Sartrean proverb! And no one can leave hell. You see the problem.

But that meant nothing. Never even turned a hair. Minimally extant as it was. The withers unwrung, the moist appeal in the gathered vats, the wayward affront. The absolute right to one’s own life—to one’s own will. The boy who lived on the hill came to that conclusion one afternoon in the fall, as he was walking through the tall, yellowed hay at the edge of the field that bordered his family’s property. It was startlingly true. Nobody, but nobody, had a right to deprive him of his will. Nobody had a right to force him to sacrifice his will to anyone else, to a group, country, class, religion. They might have the power, the legal right, but they had no moral right. In that discovery lay his strength. His right to his will was absolute; this would become his moral compass.

—It should have turned him into a monster, acknowledged the portly man.

But no: just as no one had the right to deprive him of his will, so he had no right to deprive any other person of theirs. In his will lay his meaning, his joy.  That seemed logical, right. Furthermore, the joy of other people increased his joy as long as it did not clash with it, and as long as he was happy in his will; if he wasn’t, nothing was surer to enrage him. The biggest threat to his will was, in fact, other people’s suffering, their pain, and their envy (ditto, in reversion, above). And this, which struck him like a hammer blow: the greatest source of the will’s joy, even at the core of its often deep and savage pain, was the perpetually deferred desire that is love, and not only for one but for all. The will is launched in pursuit.  Life begins as desire and continues as love.

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Poetry from Changming Yuan

Out of Night


in a world always half in darkness

your body may long have been soaked  

in a nightmare, rotting


but your heart can roam

like a synchronous satellite

in the outer space, leaving

the long night far behind

as long as your heart flies fast


and high enough, you will live

forever in light

Northern Skyline


At the same height of

Every rocky mountain

Above all seasonal change

A snowline is widely and cursively cut


As if to bite a whole patch of

Sky from heaven

With rows of rows of

Whale-like teeth

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Poetry from J.K. Durick

At Sea

Literally, not figuratively this time, like my always

Trying to keep my head above water, then treading it

As best I can, while I watch for sharks and shoals,


but not this time, I’m literally in it, on it, as far as I can

see is sea, ripples, waves to the horizon, a dark slate,

always coming from somewhere, always going away,


repetitious, it rocks us, hums to us, to itself always,

a chop, a roll, a swell, we stretch language to catch it,

it traps our step as we walk the deck, like drunks full


of time we search the horizon, it seems familiar and

unfamiliar, a friendly stranger, a strange friend, a place

we have never been, a place we will always be, this is


it, the loneliness we share, a precise measure of our days.

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