Issue 4, June 2010

The fourth issue of Town offers meditations on beginnings and ends, pasts and futures, homes and aways, by four poets and one artist.

Follow the links below to read the contents of Town 4 online, and to download PDFs of this issue’s six broadsides.

Contents

4:1....De Santos (2000), by Holly Bynoe

4:2....Pedigree (2010), by Holly Bynoe

4:3....Requiem for Aunt May, by Ishion Hutchinson

4:4....Carp Fishpond Fable, by Agnes Lehoczky

4:5....Preface, by Valzhyna Mort

4:6....Cherry-Blossom Time, by John Whale

Notes on contributors

De Santos (2010), by Holly Bynoe



Published in Town issue 4, June 2010. Download the PDF broadside here.

See notes on contributors to this issue here.

Pedigree (2009), by Holly Bynoe



Published in Town issue 4, June 2010. Download the PDF broadside here.

See notes on contributors to this issue here.

Requiem for Aunt May

.
A calm sign in the trees of May: she’s dead,
not like this dirge staining the air, her name
recited in the camphor-house where the chalk
figurine, that haberdashery sphinx, reclines,
riddled by the TV. There no one faces the calendar,
river-stone talks go under the bridge of condolences,
and land on the old sofa’s shoulder. I, her water-child,
keep watch over her laminated Saviour, nailed
into the wall, flipping a coin whose head promises
Daedalus. Someone pries open an album, the cocoon
postcards wail on the line, pronouncing, Aunt May –

baker, builder of the yellow stone house, your children
hatched wings while your face was bent in the oven.
The mixing bowls, the wooden spoons, the plastic
bride & groom, knew before the phone alarmed
the night your passing. So you passed, in a floral dress,
a shawl softly tied to your head, the house spring-cleaned.

— Ishion Hutchinson

Published in Town issue 4, June 2010. Download the PDF broadside here.

See notes on contributors to this issue here.

Carp Fishpond Fable

.
You insist you must drag me down to the bottom of the pond of the Kyoto garden. You insist we dive. If only I could see that indifferent display of oversize carp under a motionless gloss, as if they too knew that it was, solely, they that rendered this empty pond momentous reflecting motionless looks, capsized, yours and mine. These carp alter their colours according to what the season is. This afternoon, you say, I could see yellow, auburn, orange and beige, striped. It is, in truth, an eventful pond. Incised by the cormorants’ perfect line. A dozen of them. Worshipping the late autumn sun. As if each were hiring a pole like wordless passers-by who rest briefly on stripy deck chairs for a coin while I stand and watch, as if, you say, my fate were that of the deck chair attendant’s . . . Yet you hesitate to mention the pigeon tree at length. That stands so fecund in the middle of the garden shrouded with curvaceous pigeons like apples or pomegranates as if it were the tree of life itself. A life that lasts as long as this sentence withstands.

— Agnes Lehoczky

Published in Town issue 4, June 2010. Download the PDF broadside here.

See notes on contributors to this issue here.

Preface

.
on a bare tree — a red beast,
so still it has become the tree.
now it’s the tree that prowls over the beast,
a cautious beast itself.

a stone thrown at its breast is
so fast — the stone has become the beast.
now it’s the beast that throws itself like a stone.
blood like a dog-rose tree on a windy day,
and the moon is trying on your face
for the annual masquerade of the dead.


death decides to wait to hear more.
so death mews:
first — your story, then — me.

— Valzhyna Mort

Published in Town issue 4, June 2010. Download the PDF broadside here.

See notes on contributors to this issue here.

Cherry-Blossom Time

.
Sounds travel further now.
Your laughter hovers
over the orchard grass,
crisp and luminous.
It is flower-watching time.
In one another’s arms,
the trees of the poets
open their tight parcels
of petal poems,
their branches spread
against the new space,
in a rich brocade of
red, green, and purple.
This is a parasol
planted by the shogun
and by our poets,
for all lovers to come
in their own time,
their shining springtime.
We could be in the snow
or stuck in the clouds.
There’s nowhere else to go
and no sense of home.
From booths and tea-stalls
the young carry blushes
and the memory
of their kissings
like blossoms.
On one elegant limb
a lover or an old man
(impossible now to tell
in such thin light)
has tied what looks like
a charm, or toy, or hairpin
which catches in the breeze
and makes the music,
the late evening music,
of autumn insects,
the mushi-kiki, mushi-kiki.

— John Whale

Published in Town issue 4, June 2010. Download the PDF broadside here.

See notes on contributors to this issue here.

Notes on contributors to issue 4

.
Holly Bynoe is a Vincentian visual artist and writer, based in New York City. She is a recent graduate of Bard College|International Centre of Photography, where she earned her MFA in advanced photographic studies. Her work has been shown in the Caribbean and internationally, her latest as a part of the New York Camera Club Conversations series. The works included in this issue of Town are from her Compounds series.

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. His work has appeared in LA Review, Poetry International, The Caribbean Review of Books, Southern Humanities Review, and other journals. Peepal Tree Press published his first book of poetry, Far District, in early 2010. He currently holds a Vice-Presidential Scholarship to the University of Utah. He was writer in residence at Alice Yard in January 2010.

Agnes Lehoczky is a Hungarian-born poet and translator who is currently studying for a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She has two short poetry collections, Station X (2000) and Medallion (2002), both published by Universitas in Budapest, Hungary, both written in Hungarian. Her first English collection, Budapest to Babel, was published by Egg Box Publishing in 2008. She is the recepient of this year’s Arthur Welton Award and is currently working on her next collection of poems in English.

Valzhyna Mort, born in Minsk, Belarus, made her American debut in 2008 with the poetry collection Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press). She is a 2010–2011 recipient of a Lannan Foundation Fellowship. She was writer in residence at Alice Yard in January 2010.

John Whale was born in Liverpool in 1956. He is co-editor of Stand magazine. His first full-length collection, Waterloo Teeth, will be published later this year by Carcanet.