NC 'ZINES: CAVE WALL

(Cover Art: David R. Winston: Let's Just Be Friends)


CAVE WALL is a new poetry magazine in our state, and it's been garnering great reviews from readers and in the media. Its Editor Rhett Iseman Trull and Assistant Editor Jeff Trull describe their magazine this way on their website, www.cavewallpress.com.

Cave Wall, published twice a year, is a national literary magazine
dedicated to publishing the best in contemporary poetry. We are
interested in poems of any length and style from both established
and emerging poets. Each issue includes black & white art, as well.



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Among the North Carolina poets who have been published in Cave Wall are Bill Blackley and Diana Pinckney. Anyone who keeps up with NC poetry knows who Bill is and what he has contributed to NC letters through his involvement in the NC Poetry Society, among others. Bill is also a a ferocious harmonica player. And an M.D., besides that. Oh yes, don't let me forget, he's a poet. Maybe being a medical doctor has led him to some secret discovery for harnessing human energy. Some special formula he has tucked away?



(BILL BLACKLEY)

Here is his poem from Issue #3/ --Winter/Spring 2008

A TIME PIECE

Two-finger blow a kiss
goodbye to dad’s graduation
watch left for easy
pickings on a beach blanket. So long,
to the self-winding Seiko rolled
in gray sweat pants outside
the handball court where
a thief slips my treasured piece
into his pocket and beats it
while his lookout grins. Bon voyage,
to the green-rimmed Swatch a kid sticky
fingers from a pool locker while
I struggle to hold
my water-polo position. C’est la guerre
to the radium-dotted Bulova I peel
off a National Guard soldier not
in Vietnam long before I bag
and airmail his scorched effects
to Altoona. Adios,
to a fourteen dollar Timex I toss
to a co-worker when presented a Rolex
at my retirement gala. Gods chuckle
at us mortals caching batteries, winding stems
and punching in our measly hours.

****************


(DIANA PINCKNEY)

Diana Pinckney has been featured earlier on our ncarts.org site and I encourage you to go to our archives and seek her out. She is a member of what I call "the Charlotte group," including Dannye Romine Powell, Dede Wilson, Lou Green, to name only three of this remarkable gathering of poets who are also friends.


Diana has published poetry and prose in such journals and magazines as Cream City Review, Tar River Poetry, The Deep South Writers Chapbook, Gulf Stream, The Comstock Review and others. Her chapbook, Fishing With Tall Women, won North Carolina’s Persephone Press Book Award and South Carolina’s Kinloch Rivers Memorial Chapbook Contest. Nightshade Press published her second collection, White Linen. Two of her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Pinckney was selected for North Carolina Writers Network’s Blumenthal Writers and Readers series in 1994 and 1999. Her writing has won awards from numerous journals and from the North Carolina Poetry Society, the Poetry Council of North Carolina and the Charlotte Writers Club.

Here are two poems selected from the four in Cave Wall # 4, part of her new Mermaid series.

THE MERMAID WONDERS
WHERE HER DAUGHTER GOES


Tall on this rock, she gives
me a See ya and dives

for longer and longer swims,
leaving me to wonder whose sails

spread before or under her
on those hard slick boats she loves.

Whose sand oozes
between her toes, sticks to her legs

after a throw-down with beach bums.

Total party hounds, she sneers

when I ask. Gives me an O.K. sure
or worse, a None’ ya biz when I warn.

Besides me, who waits for those white
arms rolling in the foam of midnight,

those bright streamers of hair tangled
with moonlight, lifted by a tide

that measures my days, that returns
each night, refusing to give up my daughter.



THE MERMAID’S DAUGHTER WONDERS
WHO HER MOTHER IS


I floated by in a basket?
Like wood storks bring babies out
of the marsh. Oh, please.
So she sang and played her flute,
combed my hair with coral and, whoa,
gave me manatee’s milk meant
for those fat pups
under mangrove roots, wrapped me
in greasy sealskins, yuck,
fed me fish roe – no way this was caviar –
tern eggs. Whatever.

Like how
did I end up with her?
Maybe some beach beauty
does a total meltdown at two a.m.,
can’t take the crying.
Who knows. Hello? No one
drops her baby in a grass basket –
wouldn’t that leak -- then shoves it out to sea.
Mothers don’t do that.
Do they?