Tag: prose poem

Interview with the Monument by Jessica Manack

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Clifton Hill, Niagara Falls, 2022 Image by Sobejan Srikanthan on Unsplash

“Girl, all I ever wanted to do was let go: stumble, grumbling, drunk on my own juices. Spread my thighs two nations wide. It’s funny how popular you get when your business is falling all over yourself, when your schtick is snatching rattles, wallets, cameras, whatever’s around,” Niagara Falls hisses one night, when I find myself in town. “Now, my name is known by newlyweds and bachelors alike, my sloth is franchised, recklessness advertised as entertainment. Put a penny in my mouth and I’ll grind a souvenir version out – American, Canadian, whichever currency is handy – so randy you’ll need to wear a raincoat when you come near.”  

I know a true hedonist when I hear one, but I can’t relate. Born of beings who, too, never knew embarrassment, bacchanal-bred in a house full of guns and confetti, I grew to be the cleaner-upper, morning husher of embers hot in the fireplace all night. I don’t know what nonchalance feels like, those lazylays on scenic horizons. I’m always on guard, a connoisseur of armor, at the perfect temperature in an airtight container. I wear mosquito netting to the grocery store, don’t open the door for anyone short of the police or Elvis, don’t collect the mail without wearing a barrel, don’t pummel, don’t know how it feels to be pummeled. I shy from precipices, hazards brash and shiny. You know, every fall begins with curiosity. 

Every undoing begins with intrigue: ask the boxcar jumper, the organ-grinder, the ice cream truck driver, those who’ve watched a soggy decade spring from a weekend fling. I’m comfortable on dry land, don’t need to throw my heart into a lake to know the splash it would make. I’ll never court brute force, can’t imagine managing a violence so safe that people come in droves to let lick their children’s faces, so steady it seems quaint. I will never spawn such bawdy superfluity, such abandon, enough to power a city.

Interview With the Monument was first published in Litro, November 18, 2022

Jessica Manack holds degrees from Hollins University and lives with her family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her writing has recently appeared in Maudlin House, Five South and Peregrine. She is a recipient of a 2022 Curious Creators Grant.

More about Jessica Manack on her website

Barn by Lorette C. Luzajic

I’m surrounded by apples. The buckets are heavy laden, spotting the front and sides of the barn with mounds of red rounds. David’s saws settle in behind the bounty.  He points to tomato vines weaving a fence on a heap of boards, to other cauldrons blooming his brother’s favoured seeds. The air is full of saw dust and skunk and Jonamac must and the sugar of warm raspberries. David shows me the jigsaw and what he is making. He hacked down the dying walnut tree himself, clawed it from the dirt with his hands and his tools, and here it is, transformed into chess: a raw rook, a crooked king, near perfect pawns. David built the barn we are in, figured out how to fit the pieces together and raise them with his own two ruddy hands and instructions from his Dad and his granddad. He is 20.  He has a slow grin and a sharp twinkle behind his glasses. When he was two, he padded over to me with an orange extension cord wound expertly around one arm, pressed the other end to my neck and made animated noises. Started digging holes and mixing cement that same summer, in his floppy yellow boots. He never cried, not until two decades had fallen away and he and I were standing together at the foot of a hospice bed, saying goodbye to my father. Dad, I said, the barn. If you could only see this kid’s barn! He never would.  He never walked again. We buried him. But in the midsummer sunset, the rooster weathervane raised to that roof brands the night in his blood.

Source: The author.  This prose poem first appeared in Verse and Voice (Hong Kong)

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Lorette in North Africa with her camel friend.

Lorette C. Luzajic was born in Niagara Falls and lives in Toronto. She has a degree in journalism from Ryerson University, but has been a lifelong student of art history and poetry. She is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal devoted to literature inspired by visual art. She writes prose poems and small fictions that merge personal experiences and observations and the contemplation of visual art. Her works were selected as Best Small Fictions 2023 and 2024, and have also been nominated several times each for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and Best Microfictions, as well as seven times for Best American Food Writing for her column on food and art in Good Food Revolution. Lorette is also an award-winning mixed-media artist who has collectors in over forty countries so far. Visit her at www.mixedupmedia.ca

This poem was referenced in Mikayla Barney’s Rising Leviathans: How Barn Poetry Can Uncover Canadian History on the Ontario Barn Preservation website.

Memories of a Niagara Falls Morning, 1856 by Emily Tee

Niagara, 1857 by Frederic Edwin Church
Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art

White. Cold. My first noticing was the dense mist.  Not tendrils curling around like fingers but thick like a blanket, moisture-rich, like being inside a cloud.  It would burn off later as the sun climbed in the sky.  I needed there to be good visibility for the crowd. Next, as always, I noticed the noise.  A pleasant natural cacophony at a distance, it became a pounding, rushing freight train as I walked towards The Spot.  We’d scouted it weeks before, using word-of-mouth and triangulating with newspaper reports from a few years back.  The crushing sound, the energy of the spray – it really made me feel alive.

My good friend Itzak was already waiting, well wrapped up in his long greatcoat with the collar turned up, thick padded leather gloves, his long mutton chop sideburns slick with the water vapour and his dark curls were straggling from under his peaked cap.  Itzak’s lips curled into a smile at my approach and he had that devilish twinkle in his eye confirming why he was the only person I could have trusted to help me with this caper.

If – no, when – I made it to the bottom of the Falls I’d be famous.  No-one else had ever managed the journey and survived, and certainly no woman, though truth be told very few had tried, and even then not voluntarily.  The last poor fellows had fallen, one almost rescued then pulled under by the cruel currents.  My journey would be sensational in a different way.  The reporter would be here soon, as would the usual troupes of tourists, as soon as the dense fog lifted to unveil the splendour of the Falls.

“Who’s that? Is he the man from The Gazette?” I asked Itzak, pointing to a tall stranger.  He looked old, probably as much as thirty. The man nodded in our direction but seemed preoccupied as he turned to look at the water cascading over the edge.

“Him?  That’s Frederic.  I spoke with him yesterday afternoon.  He’s some sort of artist, sketching the Falls.  You know how popular it is for postcards and pasting onto tourist tat.”

“He’s not drawing us, is he?” I was suspicious of the detached, aloof stranger.

“No, no worries there.” Itzak flashed me another smile.  “He told me he’s only interested in the Romantic Ideal of nature.  He won’t even paint what he sees, but only the best version of it, he said.”

“Hah! Perhaps he’ll have a new romantic ideal in mind later!”

Itzak smiled again and stepped to the side to reveal the barrel.  It was large, dark, heavy – befitting the seriousness of its purpose.  Painted on the side in large white letters was “Bella D’Angelo, Niagara Falls, 1856”.  Inside, it was packed with soft, cream, newly spun wool.  My playful mind suggested that it would be just like climbing into the clouds themselves, although thankfully drier.

“Are you sure you’ll have enough room in there?”

“We’ve tested it out, Itzak.  There’s enough room for me to snuggle down, for you to add the last soft pillow of wool on top and bolt on the lid.  As long as Bertrand is ready with the boat at the bottom all will be well.”

“Ah, here’s the reporter now. Let me help you in and you can talk to him from there before you nestle down.  That will make it more dramatic.”

And that’s where it all went awry.  It was a combination of the slippery rock under Itzak’s foot as he helped me, the proximity of the barrel to the edge – after all The Spot was the perfect launch place for a reason, that reason being ease of falling – and the power of gravity sucking at the weight of the barrel with me half in it.

I’ll give The Gazette reporter his due. As obituaries go, it was nicely written.  I’d get the fame I wanted but not quite in the way I desired.

This prose-poem / flash fiction, inspired by Frederic Edwin Church’s 1857 painting Niagara, was first published in The Ekphrastic Review, October 20, 2023 in their Ekphrastic Challenges series. Read about ekphrastic poetry in Niagara.

 

Emily Tee writes poetry and flash fiction, often based on ekphrastic topics.  She is the editor and judge of a series of monthly ekphrastic contests for The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press.  She’s had two nominations for Best Small Fictions Anthology from The Ekphrastic Review, who have published a number of her pieces in recent years.  Other ekphrastic work has appeared in Visual Verse.  Emily lives in the UK.

Platt by James Penha

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Joseph Avery Stranded on Rocks in the Niagara River. Daguerrotype by Platt D. Babbitt, 1853. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

All night long they heard in the houses beside the shore,
Heard, or seemed to hear, through the multitudinous roar,
Out of the hell of the rapids as ’twere a lost soul’s cries,–
Heard and could not believe; and the morning mocked their eyes,
Showing, where wildest and fiercest the waters leaped up and ran
Raving round him and past, the visage of a man
Clinging, or seeming to cling, to the trunk of a tree that, caught
Fast in the rocks below, scarce out of the surges raught.
Was it a life, could it be, to yon slender hope that clung?
Shrill, above all the tumult the answering terror rung.
–William Dean Howells, “Avery”

Nothing else I could do. It’s my profession after all. Photographing Niagara Falls. Its views. Its visitors. And selling the resulting daguerreotypes. Quite successfully. Because I’m a damn good daguerreotypist. Ask anyone around here. And I’m on duty every day, 365 days a year. This day, July 16, 1853, I was waiting for tourists along the American Channel rapids when I saw three men struggling to maneuver their row boat to shore. They had been working on the big dredging scow anchored in the river. Their oars were broken. Or lost. I turned my lens toward them just as the boat capsized and I saw two bodies cartwheeling over the edge of the American Falls too fast for me to capture them in my camera. There was no sign of the third man — turned out to be a local fellow named Samuel Avery — until he leapt up like a fucking phoenix and sat astride a log cantilevered in a rocky shoal in the middle of the river. The rapids were way too loud for him to hear my hallo, so I waved at him with both arms, but he was likely too afraid to let go of the log to answer. He was riding the river like a scared girl on a runaway stallion, but luckily he kept still enough for me to create an historic photograph. Took an even longer time till someone thought to hitch a lifeboat to the Bath Island Bridge and send the boat down toward the man. Avery caught and climbed into the boat, but before I could re-focus, the rapids turned the lifeboat upside down, and Avery, thrown back into the river, met his fate just as his friends had hours before. Nothing else I could do. I returned to my hotel where I processed the plate and encased a dozen of the images for sale at my Point View stand. They sold well. They still do.

Source: The author, 2021

Listen to James Penha read the prose poem Platt with a short commentary.

 

The prose poem Platt by James Penha was first published in The Ekphrastic Review, March 17, 2016

View the poem Avery, 1853  by William Dean Howells

Sources:
“Getting around.” Luminous-Lint. Web. 15 Oct. 2015.
“Niagara River – Life & Death on the River: Accidents & Rescues.” 20 Feb. 2012. Web. 15 Oct. 2015. .
“Platt D. Babbitt (Getty Museum).” The J. Paul Getty in Los Angeles. Web. 15 Oct. 2015. .
Weld, Charles Richard. A Vacation Tour in the United States and Canada. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855. Print.

An expat New Yorker, James Penha has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. His essays have appeared in The New York Daily News and The New York Times. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry. Bluesky: @jamespenha.bsky.social

Falling with the Falls: Niagara Prose-Poem by Boris Glikman

FALLING WITH THE FALLS
 

I first came face to face with Him when I was five and skinny to the bone. Mum took me to meet Him as soon as we arrived at the seaport town, even though it was already night. From a distance I could hear His voice, the steady rhythm of His basso. Perhaps it was just as well that I could not see Him on our first meeting, for all my other senses were saturated with His presence. I stood there, absorbing His being through my body’s pores, yearning to sacrifice my child’s body to His power so that in swallowing me up I would become one with Him – He part of me and I part of Him. Mum was calling me to go back to the hotel, but I just stood there, not willing, indeed, not able to move a fibre of my body, a muscle of my limbs.

That was the day water, in its most magnificent and astonishing incarnation, came into my existence and a Love was born.

And now here at the Falls this love affair, after years of tiffs and misunderstandings, is being rekindled.

The flow of the river leading up to the Falls looks menacing and brooding. There is a belligerent arrogance in its bearing, like a bully gearing up for a fight, totally unlike other rivers which flow with sweet serenity and smiles on their faces.

There is water cascading all around me in a form I’ve never witnessed before – air-like and rising as clouds of smoke. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see earth turning into fire or air turning into earth here, fulfilling every alchemist’s deepest dream. Perhaps an error of alchemists was in believing that a philosopher’s stone is a thing rather than a location, for at this place all metamorphoses are possible: the four elements transmute into one another at will; incorrigibly jaded senses, which once saw only disappointment and disillusionment in the world, acquire child-like wonder and see anew the beauty of life.
 
Incongruously and paradoxically the only thing that has any stability, that survives unchanged and unscathed in this torrential maelstrom of air and water is that most insubstantial element of all—light. There are myriads of rainbows festooning the waterfall, blithely making their home in the very midst of the plunging hurricane. They shine forth gloriously, oblivious to the cataclysm that surrounds them.
 
For a moment, my rapture is tainted by doubt. Sure, this is spectacular and all, but what significance does it have to my life, to human existence as a whole? What is the meaning of this downpour, the meaning of me standing here, watching it at this particular point in time?

Is this Nature’s allegorical portrayal of the original Fall from Grace? Or is it a liquid metaphor for the final tumble we all eventually must take? For there is no way the fallen water can ever return to its previous plane of being, except as a misty ghost of its former self.

An inexorable flow of a solid wall of water.

How easy, how tempting it is to join the plunge, to become one with the deluge! The avalanche is calling out to me with all its might; it is so persuasive in its roar. The whole world is falling around me and I am the odd one out, stubbornly holding my ground and remaining ludicrously stationary. 

Perhaps only this colossal torrent is capable of wiping away all of my sins, cleansing my being from the layers of inner grime accumulated over the decades. I must position myself so I am standing directly under the deluge, right where the waterfall hits the ground.

And I emerge from beneath the Falls reborn – all shiny and pure again, like that five-year-old child.

Source: The Author, April 13, 2016

About Boris Glikman

Poet Mellow Curmudgeon wrote a haiku in response to Falling With the Falls. View Sunny Day at Niagara Falls