Author Archives: Qu Literary Magazine

by Valentina Cano

I imagine my hair in a different era.

Coal-strewn and tobacco scented.

I picture it sailing through snapping sea air,

unfurled like a sail.

Threads of it let loose

to search out fresh territory.

by Valentina Cano

Bottles full of exhales

landed drunk on their sides.

Darkening patches of grass

with their humming plastic torsos,

leaving a yellow cross stitch

where they slept off the fumes.

Marking their spots like dogs.

by Tim Suermondt

I’ll take, always, a gander

at the beautiful: this time

at the long black hair,

the short black skirt,

the razor thin pantyhose

and the black high heels.

She’s easing my way through

the monotonous landscape

of upper New York, leavened

only by the Subway shop

with it’s reasonably priced

array of foot long sandwiches.

I notice “The First Circle”

on the cover—Solzhenitsyn, that

grouch, would have loved this

and wished he’d been exiled

to the Indian Continent instead

of to the Winter snows, the Summer

mosquitoes of  a lonely Vermont.

At the Buffalo Airport stop

she grabs all her belongings, hawk-like,

and dashes off the blue bus.

I watch her wobble a bit,

but continue on at a spirited pace.

I unwrap the rest of my sandwich,

being as careful as if opening a great

book, eating slowly to make it last.

by Hilde Weisert

Why doesn’t everyone think of this? His daughter

is a minister herself, perhaps that gives her license;

perhaps it’s the art he loved, or just the indelible

imprint of a person on the people who love him.

Perhaps it’s love. At first, we are taken aback,

seeing what she’s laid out – not a body, out here in the park,

and not the standard photographs or video montage,

but his actual clothes – the giant jacket hung

from a branch on a tree, and on the ground

his shoes, huge now without the tall man to stand

in them. Ellie stands on the grassy rise, and instead of

talking about him, remembering this and that,

she gives us Dan’s arms, hands splayed out

in his wide gesture of amazement, voice lifting

from a charged hush to an onrush of words

for the latest earth-shaking idea, invention – his, yours,

some genius across the world. Isn’t there a rule

that says you don’t mimic the dead? Don’t bring

a dead man’s shoes to his funeral? But a daughter

can make her own rules. Ellie is all he used to

bend our ear about, and this is the best

funeral ever. We don’t learn anything, we just see

what we didn’t even know we’d noticed.

For an hour, we grow big, amazed; like Dan.

by Hilde Weisert

My friend went back to reading Yeats the year

she went back to the farm, claiming the land

as land, leaving a smart, well-dressed career

for dirt. This was her home. She’d planned

how what had grown tobacco now would bear

(a mile below where grinding, snorting bands

of bulldozers pawed the earth and air grew thick)

the fruit suburbanites would pay to pick.

Her father planned it too – their dream. The pair

puttered the rainy fields in a rusty Jeep

and saw green waves of grass turn blue, the air

clear, bushes bloom, and vines run deep.

But they were only up to planting, bushes bare

and squat, when he died – buried on the steep

ancestral hill. She went on, day labor like a prayer

and every midnight climbing on the winding stair

to Yeats – Yeats all she read, night in, night out.

Is reading only Yeats the same as being mad? Abstract,

we feared she’d come to grief, wandering about

like Jane or Aengus, Gaelic fire in her head. We ransacked

our shelves – First Frost, then Wilbur as the antidote,

as beautiful, as deep, but calm. With patient Southern tact,

she’d smile, wait a week, and hand him back; devote

herself anew to Willie B, taking half of what he wrote

by heart, Brown Penny to Cold Heaven. Always finding more.

We thought she’d left us, abandoned for some acres and a book…

But I’ve re-read that year, now see what Yeats’s spell was for:

Working the same hard ground and finding more was what it took.

Stitching intellect to intellect, and soul to soul, ancestral form

would rise and bloom from rows worked, and worked again. Look:

Children in the fields, berry baskets in their arms.

Yeats saved my friend that year, and my friend saved the farm.

by Sam O’Hana

As a quavering leaf is struck down

slabs of iron in miniature, hewn to exactitude

do a double take.

For all their obscure origins, layers of dried ink,

these seriffed chessmen lace their jammy fingers

and support peremptory feet,

a portcullis or cabbage patch of glyphs and breaks.

The expanses of blanched fiber and pits among

the knitted mesh, these blocks learn the details,

and immediately forget. A roller, or sloping hand curates the

rendezvous between sheet and lipsticked hull.

This kiss, this branding is for life, as vivid

and public as when a young man guns his moped

through the streets of a mediterranean village.

It stays with you, because the clarity with which

its presence is sheared into the world.

Moulded metals boast of outliving the trees, the stone

of Roman steps. And the text, just a

record of the keen blood, pressing over

raked horizons, many impressions

left to be made.