All posts by Steven Schroeder

I am a poet and visual artist who has spent many years moonlighting as a philosophy professor – most often in interdisciplinary settings, most recently at the University of Chicago Graham School. I studied at the University of Chicago (where I received my Ph.D. in Ethics and Society) and Valparaiso University (where I received my B.A. in Psychology). I grew up on the High Plains in the Texas Panhandle, and that is where I first learned to take nothing seriously. Emptiness plays an important role in both my poetry and my painting: I often find myself spending as much time on what is not there as on what is. This usually means focusing on a single image and letting the whole composition spring up around it – not a narrative but an all at once that evokes a here and now that is, here, now, neither. A likely story is likely to grow out of this when readers and viewers encounter it, but I hope my art always invites more than it contains. stevenschroeder.org
poetry

Guest Poet: Song Zijiang

Song-Zijiang-Chris宋子江，1985年生於中國廣東，曾於2010和2011年兩度任澳洲本德農駐留詩人和詩譯者，也是澳門故事協會的副總編輯。他發表過兩本詩集，最近一本是《千行》（2010），詩翻譯逾15本，包括《保羅•斐捷馳：金翅雀一瞬》（2013）、《接近尋思：當代澳洲十二詩人選集》（2011）、《孔雀東南飛：漢朝詩選》（2010）等等。他活躍於在珠江三角洲，供職香港嶺南大學人文學科研究中心，住在深圳，也經常前往澳門和珠海。

Chris Song Zijiang was born in 1985 in Guangdong, China. He was poet/translator in residence at Bundanon NSW 2010-2011, and associate series-editor of the Association of Stories in Macao (ASM). Song has published two books of poems, the latest being Strolling (2010). He has also translated more than fifteen volumes of poetry, including Paul Friedrich: A Goldfinch Instant (2013), The Noise of Exchange: Twelve Australian Poets (2011), The Peacock Flies Southeast: An Anthology of the Han Dynasty Poetry (2010), etc. Now he is based at the Pearl River Delta in South China, working at the Centre for Humanities Research of Lingnan University (Hong Kong), living in Shenzhen, and travelling to Macao and Zhuhai regularly.

飄搖中的家
 
要搬走的人找不到家，要留下的
歸家無期。白天，你說太重的負擔
壓彎了支柱。夜裡，增生的腰椎
讓你難以入睡。你聽到石屎剝離
鋼筋兀兀外露。隱隱作痛的腰椎
又長出了多少根骨刺？你咬著牙
十多年來，忍過多少個睡不著的
夜晚。你不敢叫出來，怕惹來
人去樓空之禍。而如今，紛雜的
腳步，終讓你嘗到惶恐的節奏。
 
你短暫回家收拾行裝時，思慮浪蕩
在錯綜的街巷，你要留下什麽？
蹙弱的夕陽鋪過冰冷的鐵欄，
棱棱杠影保持著曖昧的間距，
紅白藍上尼龍線仍井井有條，
内裏卻盡是格格不入的淩亂，
結果也只帶上不知所從的將來，
臨走前關上不知何時再打開的窗，
當你的腳踏在實在的街道上，
想起自己留下了飄搖中的房子，
看著一扇忘了關的窗，想問自己——
什麽是家？
 
小女孩拖著媽媽的手，抱著枕頭，
壓歲錢枕了半年，還是趕不走
跨世紀的作祟。秋風肅肅，
你徘徊在對面馬路，仰看
昨夜睡房的窗台，昨夜的床
仍在那扇烏牆後，你還從簾縫間
瞧見銀亮的新月，現在它在鐮鐮
收割心底的微光，背上的竹筐
盛著太多沉重的說話，你說不出來，
你挺直的腰板被壓成一個問號——
今晚要睡在哪裡呢？你也沒有
問出口，只是抱著沉默的枕頭。
 
我們是彼此的災民
我們睡在火床上
我們只有一板之隔
說好今晚不說話
安靜地睡過今晚
為何床板軋軋作響？
說好今晚不說話
但你歎氣，你抗議了嗎？
我們都不要出聲
安靜地睡過今晚

 
shaking home
  
Some want to move, but can’t find
their homes; others want to stay, but don’t know
when they may return. During the day
you say you’re overburdened, your spine
is already a curve; at night, the swelling
keeps you from sleep. You hear cement
flaking; steel bars exposed. You wonder
how many spurs stick out from your aching spine.
You have to grit your teeth through this sleepless night.
You have gritted your teeth for fifteen years.
You dared not cry, afraid to be evacuated.
In the end it’s tumultuous footsteps
– an anxious rhythm to which you’re drawn.
 
You go back to pack your stuff
thoughts drifting through a web of intersections.
What should you leave behind?
The weak sun through the indifferent rails;
the bars keep obscure distance from one another;
threads of the nylon bag look to keep their outside
in check; in it are all out of tune. In the end,
you can only bring an uncertain future. Before leaving,
you shut the windows, not knowing when
they can be re-opened. You come down
to the solid street, realizing you’ve left behind
a shaking home. Looking at a window
that you’ve forgotten to close, you wanted to ask yourself –
what is home? –
 
A little girl is holding her mother’s hand
other hand holding a pillow. Your red pockets
under it haven’t brought enough luck
for you to sleep over this trans-century
time bomb. A rustle of dry autumnal winds.
You walk over to the other side of the street
and look at the window sill. Your bed
is just behind the dark dingy wall. Last night
you peeked through the sliver between curtains
at the silver crescent. This sickle is now harvesting
the remnant in your heart. The light
dims into tenebrous doubts you carry
on your back. You can’t let it out.
Your straight back bone is curved
to a question mark – Where am I to sleep tonight? –
You haven’t asked. You’re just holding the silent pillow.
 
We’re all taking refuge here;
We’re all sleeping on beds of fire;
We’re separated by one plank.
We’ve agreed not to speak,
so that we can sleep through the night.
Why do the planks creak?
We’ve agreed not to speak,
but you sighed. Are you
thinking otherwise?
Let’s not make a sound.
Let’s sleep through the night.

孤獨的國際歌

我遺傳了他的眉毛
他遺傳了他爺爺的眉毛
他生在一個遙遠的北方小鎮
我從未到過那個那裏

他是那麼好的一個人
我七歲的時候
暴雨後的清晨
他便摸黑起床

挑著棕色的扁擔
用乾泥把路上的水潭填好
一輛疲勞的貨車
讓他倒在血池上

那時我只有三歲半
幾粒米飯掉落桃木桌上
他勃然大怒，翻掉整張桌子
然後他把我帶到五十里外的湖邊

用戰場上撕殺的故事來逗我開心
戰時，他槍口對外
戰後，家人變成敵人
他深信著拾金不昧的未來

他為此而活在過去，今天變成了他的敵人
每年在山上拜祭他的時候
都讓我想起國旗
但紅色已從鮮血變成工業染料

沒有臉的人影拿著扁擔
常常在馬克思雕像前唱國際歌
偶爾深夜讓我失眠的
卻是他最浪漫的回歸

lonely singing – ‘The Internationale’

I inherited his thick eyebrows
he, his grandpa’s
he was born in a northern town faraway
I’ve never been there

he was such a good man
when I was seven
on a dim dawn after a deep-night storm
he rose into the twilight

picked up a brown carrying pole
and used dry dirt to fill up the water hazards
a tired truck threw him to a blood pool
and when I was three and a half

a few grains of rice fell
furious, he dropped the table
brought me to the lake fifty miles away
and cheered me up with his war stories

at that time, his gun pointed towards another gun
after the war, it turned towards the family
he truly believed in a future when people
would single-mindedly throw away road-picked gold

he lived in the past and fought against
the present, every time I go to the little hill
where he was buried, I think of the national flag
although the redness comes from industrial dye

instead of blood, and an image often comes to mind –
a faceless man shouldering the brown carrying pole
standing alone in front of Marx’s statue
sings ‘The Internationale’ out loud in breezes

sometimes his singing steals my sleep
his most romantic return

孟郊在澳門

冬夜下起細雨
只好閉門苦思——
怎樣在淅瀝的雨聲中
拾起清愁的詩句？

再絕的絕句也沒有報紙好賣
新聞記者寫盡民間疾苦
每年派糖都沒有我的份
要我唐代落魄詩人作甚？

怎樣用雨滴敲打青竹的聲音
來描寫我這綑轆轆饑腸？
懷才不遇的遊子滿街都是
身上的衣裳卻是工廠貨色
再沒有不識字的異鄉人
來找我代寫書信寄鄉情

再怎麼寫也無法
改變這座充滿情欲的城市
詩詞無法把賭場的籌碼
變成花花碌碌銀紙

我不想看見站街的庸姿俗粉
怎樣用長袖遮瘦臉？
怎樣才能寫出幾首沒有韻律的詞
寄去報章雜誌？

我是穿著綠衣
能屈能伸的青蛙
我是四處覓食
自命清高的狸貓

獨坐四面寒墻的日子裏
讀盡詩書萬卷
來年終得戴上展腳襆頭
一夜看盡濠江花

奈何宏圖難大展
看不透螃蟹著紅袍
看不慣老鼠偷皇糧
只好脫下朱服烏紗
退回小棧高樓
舞筆弄墨

冬夜下起細雨
只好閉門苦思——
怎樣在淅瀝的雨聲中
拾起清愁的詩句？

Meng Jiao in Macao

rain falls through this wintry night
I have to stay home –
picking up sad lines
from the pitter-pat

even briefest lines can’t beat newspapers
everyday journalists write down people’s sufferings
I’ve never received the annual sweeteners
does Macao need a poor Tang poet?

my hungering stomach rumbles
but how to describe it
with the sound of
rain knocking through bamboos?

the street is full of buried talents
but their clothes are made in factories
no homesick stranger hires me
to write down their illness
for them to send home

no matter how much I write
I can’t change this
hormone-driven city
my poem can’t change
casino chips into patacas

I don’t want to see those girls on the street
but how to dodge behind my long sleeves?
and how to write rhymeless poems
to submit to The Macao Daily?

I’m a frog in green clothes
stretching in and out
I’m a cat hunting everywhere
putting on airs
in the days of facing the four bleak walls
I read all the scrolls of the classics
finally I got to put on
an official’s black hat
with two thin flaps
nothing is better than
seeing all the flowers in Hou Kong
just in one night

but I fail to fulfill my political ideal –
I don’t know why crabs wear red garments
I can’t put up with a mouse stealing from the emperor’s table
so I quit
and retreat to a little flat in a high-rise
playing with ink and with brushes

rain falls through this wintry night
I have to stay home –
picking up sad lines
from the pitter-patter

冬綠

殘舊的小學語文課本——
一面扭曲的鏡子
虛構白色的冬天
這裡從來未降下一片片的白

我們的冬天是高貴的冷美人
肌膚和血肉都是綠色的翡翠
她彷彿在傲視北方的白
傲視課本裡無能的文字

時間的魔術是一隻烏鴉
把她唱成一群北飛的大雁
五月的花蕾在炎熱中發呆
渴望一個綠色的冬天

wintry green

a worn-out primary school Chinese textbook
a twisted mirror reflecting white winter
not even one flake of white
has fallen here

our winter is an arrogant cold beauty
blood and skin are jade-green
as if despising the north’s white
and the incompetent words in the book

the magic of time is a crow
sings winter as north-flying swallows
May’s buds dull in the heat
expecting wintry green

古怪的釘子

要搬家了
那枚釘子
還古怪地楔在牆上

剛搬進來那天
你說這個露台西斜
剛好可以晾床單

於是你拿來錘子和釘子
釘住牆上釘子的影子
你說你要釘住陽光

要搬家了
床單已在箱子裡
那枚釘子
還古怪地楔在牆上

an old nail

about to move
that odd nail
still wedged in the wall

the first day we moved in here
you said this balcony had afternoon sun –
a perfect place to hang our bed sheet

so you fetched a hammer
and nailed down its shadow
you said sunlight was the target too

now about to move
the bed sheet has been packed
that odd nail
still wedged in the wall

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poetry

slowly

Macao/Hong Kong/Shenzhen

1

on a road
you think you know

sidewalks go
nowhere.

sudden absences leave us
walking in traffic.

to take our minds
off the narrow margin

between the curb
and every passing car

we imagine ourselves
one of them.

we pass two dogs
lounging near an open gate.

when they rise behind us
in the corner of our eyes

we see one smiling
at the thought of making us

jump before he
barks once on our heels.

dogs grow larger
margins grow smaller

and, unsure of their intentions
as they are of ours,

unwilling now
to struggle for turf,

we turn back at last
before we arrive

at the beach you were sure is
somewhere on this road

later, still walking on earth, you
realize you lost your butterfly

earrings somewhere
on the way.

2

In Central, where people
walk every day without once
putting their feet on the ground, I
wonder if they imagine us walking, lost.

3

On the same day in another city
altogether, we wander slowly through
a long talk on cracks in neo-

liberal cities where artists live.
A friend of friends says
strong German beer
has made her dizzy and I look

like Marx. I imagine
to change the world is a matter
simpler than interpreting it, hope

you are home dreaming butterflies
who do it without thinking
every time they move a wing.

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poetry

in a dream

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two days ago, my father,
lost in Chicago he
said, called to ask if
Highway 60 would get you
to Interstate 94. I heard him repeat
the question twice, but I woke up
uneasy before I could answer.

Among the living, Dad was
rarely lost, and I found
it hard to believe he was
lost in my dreaming that night.

I remember trips when he drove and I was
the navigator and the point was
to use the map to choose
the least paved road

we thought the car could handle (and
we thought the car could handle
anything with time
and a patient driver).

My head has been full of maps
as long as I can remember, but I
couldn’t map a dream of my father lost
asking after two big roads that never cross
in the grid settlers etched on the surface of this island.

I have lived a stone’s throw from both roads
where one is named for Woody Guthrie
and the other (between Port Huron
and Montana) for Bishop Ford.

There must be some barely passable gravel road
between them, and I suppose the dream was
some kind of wake up call. They say

Highway 60 ended in Springfield
in 1926, where it met Route 66 (named
by some for Will Rogers) winding as the song says
from Chicago to LA. We used to meet there,
ten hours driving each, halfway between
Amarillo and Chicago.

Anyone who knows maps knows a map
will get you good and lost if it is
nothing but a grid settlers
wear settling on some surface.
It has to be personal. It has to be
about who is here, who is there, what we
mean by we when, whose mind is wandering

where. You can’t let it lie
flat. A statement of fact: We are
people of this generation, bred in at least
modest comfort, looking uncomfortably to the world

we think we
inherited,

the late Bishop of the Church of God
in Christ remembered between the place
the statement was made and the place a woman
who had the good sense to say no twice
long before I was born was
at home.

I remember her now, remember my father
never met a man he didn’t like, Will,
remember the place

I lived on the wild windy plains —
the end of the world, Granny said.

Then we’d sing a song and sing it
again, sit for an hour and not
say a word, imagine

another possible. No,
not unattainable (and — in
the next dream — I say
yes, in a way, yes.)

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keep the red in

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Funny how one childhood memory
can bring another childhood
to mind. I

remember a precipice we
called Red Shell

and imagine in retrospect
a mishearing of shale somewhere
along the line — though

the evidence of a long ago ocean
in this dry place was never
hard to find. So it was

easy to hear shell for shale,
and there was no doubt about red.

It was on the other side of a barbed wire fence
that marked the edge of the next ranch
over, close to Romero Cemetery,
where Frenchy McCormick lay,

untended then, so always more interesting
than Boot Hill. There were stories
about the rancher next door,
a shotgun, and rock salt
that made climbing through that fence
feel like slipping over the edge of the world
every time. Remembering walking
sideways down the sharp slope
alongside the sheer face of the precipice is
the only way I’ve ever understood
crossing the stream by feeling the stones.

You had to find your feet or slide down
the side of what you’d swear was a mountain
of shattered shale made more red with the blood
that sharp gravel could draw if you lost them. Red

makes me think of the possum
a friend killed there once, the red blood on
red shale, broken, the sadness when
we saw it wasn’t playing
possum. Still

finding my feet,
and it feels like falling
sideways, slow, to keep the red in,
one childhood leading to another between friends.

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a public thing

Three hours of Plato and you
can bet your bottom dollar I
found a way to Zappa before we
got to the end of the second book.

Mind wide open, missed the bus at Wacker
and ended up in Sweetwater
asking why in God’s name Shiner
Bock is listed with stouts and porters.

Didn’t miss it exactly — driver
just didn’t want to risk
letting the little bit of cold
traveling with me on board. So

he pulled away without opening the door.
I tell the waitress I’m a native Texan
and I know shinerbock is no…

she says I know I know I’m from New Mexico.

Thinking neutral territory, I pass over
everything from Antwerp to Kalamazoo
and settle on a Colorado milk stout —

come to find out when she comes back and I say I
forgot to ask the most important question
that she is from Alamogordo.

I talk White Sands, Mescalero, tell her I grew up on
the edge in Oldham County and lived in Santa Fe.
Turns out she got married there and doesn’t
have anything against Texans. She says

I see you’re a writer, and conversation
waltzes across Texas to Amarillo, then on
through Sweetwater south to Austin. Weird

how mind goes. I sat down to think
flowers in crannied walls, universes
in grains of sand, flocks of pigeons rising
to see Shanghai whole, cranes leaving
lonely towers empty when they fly

and stumbled on Amarillo cold Chicago
streets so much closer to home because
the driver kept the door closed and I stopped
for a beer while I chose not to kill time stuttering

with me waiting for a train.

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unthinkable

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Two bridges rise from the Hudson today,
calm after the wind and snow of the day
before. Knowing the way water remembers
they go on when the river ends — over
soil rich with memory’s leavings. They
settle above the line of a hundred year
flood. The one intended to survive an
unthinkable war has turned to consider
the rust red other imagining a train
it will not stop believing the last word
long after crowds have learned to begin
every journey without putting a foot down,
to cross rivers wider than this without once
touching the ground. No track. No sound. No trace.

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Position Title: Philosophy Instructor

essential physical demands

read. analyze. interpret. apply.
respond to common inquiries.

read. write. speak. hear.
add. subtract. divide. multiply.

perform. define.
collect. establish

facts. draw conclusions.
interpret. speculate. design

future outcomes from known
and unknown. deal. address

situations. face problems.
meet challenges. formulate solutions.

the employee is frequently required to stand,
to walk, to use fingers and hands

the employee is occasionally required to sit,
to reach with hands and arms

the employee must occasionally lift and/or
move. the employee must occasionally lift and/

or move with both hands, arms open.

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Guest poet, Larry D. Thomas

Larry D. Thomas lives in Alpine, Texas, with his wife, Lisa, and two Long-haired Chihuahuas, Pecos and Pinyon. He spends his days listening to the winds of the Great Chihuahuan Desert, and writing poetry. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters and the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate, he has published eighteen collections of poetry, most recently A Murder of Crows (Virtual Artists Collective 2011) and The Red, Candle-lit Darkness (El Grito del Lobo Press 2011).

His Hard Art
in memory of Hart Crane

chose him and made him so facile
in the musical juggling of words
he could only speak in verse.

With his scalpel of perception,
in dissecting evil,
he stumbled upon the bones

of Lucifer, the Angel of Light.
It drowned him like a thrashing kitten
in the black well of consciousness,

leaving him the claw of his pen
to climb his way out, opening
his eyes wide and crazing them

with glimmer. But the sheen of oil
spilled on the sea in the sun
was enough to kill him.

Voices

Late at night, in the candle-lit
stillness of the sanctuary,
far beneath the steep,
slated pitch of a roof
so high a sky looms blue
beneath it, she genuflects.

She and she alone
knows they’re all still there,
each and every one,
penetrating her crystalline heart
like lasers ricocheting
ad infinitum

off stained glass, stone and oak,
each prayer prayed
and each hymn sung
for hundreds of years,
whooshing through her soul
like swallows.

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Guest poet, Jim Spurr

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Jim Spurr: Distinguished 82nd Airborne Veteran ~ Poet Laureate of Shawnee, Oklahoma ~ Moderator of the very popular monthly Open Mic ~ Happily married to Aline ~ Award-winning author of Open Mike/Thursday Night and Hail Mary, On Two

The Medics Are At The Door and The Band Is Playing Loud

“ They were a long way from home
in a crowded hall where everyone
who could join in joined in.
They could hear the music.
They could feel it. It would be a part
of the healing process. “
Statement by: “The Hospital Administrator”

A steady cadence
pounded the sheet vinyl floor
accompanied by
an early day rock drummer
smilin’ and catchin’ his sticks
in mid air.
Patients moving in and out
in smooth quick step
while
chanting a Blue Cross Be-Bop beat
complimented by an array
of musical arrangements
screaming that they were
… a part of the cure.
Doctors and nurses not so sure
but willing to listen
to the shrill opera of last year’s hip hop
along with
Mister Boots Randolph’s
Yakkety-Yak Sax alone and loud
in an old country corner store
with tables out back on the patio
and everything depending on
the rhythm section to do
what the rhythm section was supposed
to do in the first place.
Furnish a healthy heartbeat.

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weather

the ragged edge of a storm
undeniable as the ocean

between us every way
i turn paints the sky

this morning
unsettling settling

on a great wind always
brooding on the face of some deep,

on a great bird, mind flying
when the seas are heaving, on

the laughter of a cicada dreaming
the voice of the turtle, rising

ninety thousand miles on
the spiral of a ram’s horn,

where do you think you are
going? a hop and a skip

unsettles the ocean
and that is as high

as anyone can fly,
from one breath to another

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