Cloudbank 3

Cloudbank 3 includes poetry and flash fiction by Lawson Fusao Inada, Dennis Schmitz, Paulann Petersen, Timothy Geiger, Trina Gaynon, Steve Dieffenbacher and others. Rolling the Bones by Christopher Buckley, Fault Lines by Tim Hunt, and Moist Meridian by Henry Hughes are reviewed.

Issue introduction by Michael Malan

From Idea to Image

In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

According to David Barber, the power of this poem “has nothing to do with the radical compression of thought but rather with the radical transfiguration of perception, the mind’s quicksilver leap out of idea and into an image that speaks for itself.”

As is often the case, less is more, particularly when the poet is able to create an impression more with a paintbrush than a pen. Words are used to create an image and, in the long run, we remember the image rather than the words. The image speaks for itself.

PRIZE WINNING POEM

Emptiness
by Steve Dieffenbacher

We loved each other
to fill the emptiness,
conjugated the patterns of clouds,
danced to the voices of children.
At night we looked through windows
at stars and imagined them hot with being,
and this gave us some comfort
when we held our babies close and sang to them.
We tried to grasp this emptiness
in both hands and mold it to our hearts.
We saw it ripen with possibility,
the full pulp of the peach,
even as its outline was all we remembered.
Year by year we watched the fibers lengthen
around echoes of a seedless core.
And so the days rolled over us
toward the blackest colors we’d known,
the plants bursting with buds,
turning to creases in a cobbled road.
We lived in our uncertainty then,
an earth relieved of mounds,
the crystal black and white of winter,
the small sound of the bell.

Poets and writers in Cloudbank 3

Jhoanna S. Aberia
Daniel Damiano
Steve Dieffenbacher
Trina Gaynon
Timothy Geiger
Lauren Henley
M.E. Hope
Tim Hunt
Lawson Fusao Inada
Tim Jones
Elizabeth Kerlikowske
Bruce Lader
Mary Leonard
Yvette Luevano
Al Maginnes
Michael Malan
Erik Muller
Bill Neumire
Sue Parman
Robert Peake
Curtis Perdue
Paulann Petersen
Robbie Pock
Martha Ragland
Edward J. Rielly
David Romtvedt
Lex Runciman
Vern Rutsala
Penelope Scambly Schott
Cameron Scott
Michael Selker
Marian Kaplun Shapiro
Dennis Schmitz
Lianne Spidel
David Spiering
David Starkey
Doug Stone
Ron Talney
Jie Tian
Allison Tobey
James Valvis
Laura D. Weeks
Donald Wolff
Jessica Wood