Favourite Snake-Oiler Gaëtan Vanparijs brings us more Belgian surrealism, with “Le Blob”.

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A native of Brussels, Gaëtan Vanparijs is a young independnt illustrator. He frequently exhibits and enters competitions to help share his universe. Through “l’étrange vie des autres” (“The strange life of Others”), he inserts a touch of the absurd into scenes of everyday life, leaving each reader to his own interpretation. He has just finished working on a book about illustrated Monsters’ Biographies,”Monstrueusement  vôtre”. He is influenced by movies and the Belgian surrealism that surrounds him. More of his work can be seen at Flickr.

Of silence of a new day to buzz the brain

Why don’t we dump the birdbath with its mosquito larvae
remember that music of summer
of Mother and me on front porch summers
with imposters pretending to be alone,

To hear themes inside the walls
of neighborhood families trying not to be lonely,
how cordially they create exclusion.

He plays the radio but why should that be
radio for dinner and mumbling platitude conversation
of concluding we’re all dumb as bricks,
so why  carry- on over trivia
as if  we’re all not  isolated or involved in a test
as you are carrying-on texting
with no one to stop  it
haunted by the Empire’s decaying orbit;
take out the trash, or, or go to sleep–
time shuts down the viewing process.

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Joan Payne Kincaid has published a collection of work entitled Greatest Hits with Pudding House Publications. She has also published a book with Wayne Hogan entitled The Umbrella Poems in which we both contributed drawings of some of our poems.  She has also published a collection of haiku entitled Snapshoots on the web at <TMPoetry.com>. Her work has been published in Hawaii Review, Limestone Poetry Review, Licking River Review, Iodine, Hampden,Sydney Poetry Review, Main Street Rag, Santa Clara Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, South Central Review, The South Carolina Review,  Cross Currents, Georgetown Review, Edgz, 88,  Oyez, Modern Haiku, Iconoclast, Lynx Eye, Yalobusha Review, Mother Earth Journal, Tule Review, The Quarterly, Cairn, among others.

Love work, and despise official positions, and do not become too acquainted with the governing power

Photographer Conrado Sarid-Maletah shares this brilliant series of photos, which he describes as an attempt to translate passages from Pirkei Avot (The Master’s Sentences) into visual poetry. He admires the sense of balance, justice and self-control embodied in the 1800 year old text.

When East meet West the sea, the blue sea start to sing  silent songs

In this project, Sarid-Maletah attempts to interpret literally the sentences from the text while being critical of them.

One who uses the crown will pass away

Sarid-Maletah says:

Portraiture is a very special way to “speak”  because you need to play with the other, you need to communicate with the model first and if the results are ok, the model will be a great way to speak to the public. In these images my model was an Armenian man living in Haifa, North Israel. A very special experience for both of us.

The main thing is not to study but to do

Stay tuned for more of Conrado’s images.

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Conrado Sarid-Maleta’ is a Cuban photographer and painter. He left his home country six years ago, and has not returned. Most recently, he has lived and worked in Europe, and is now in Tel Aviv, Israel. He learned photography with the help of a great Cuban artist, later continuing alone and working very hard to increase day by day what he knew. Mainly, his works use the visual experience as a means to connect with ideas rather than with techniques or methodological processes. He prefers to be a storyteller rather than a perfectionist.

You didn’t put this house here

Your current life is a convergence of circumstances
from the street you live on
to the miserable weather
to the last commercial on the tv.

You’d prefer to lie down in the snow.
You’d rather be naked in the dairy aisle of the supermarket.
Please swans, you say to the birds in the park pond,
let me paddle with you a while.

But the walls of the house won’t hear of it.
The bones that hold up the people
hold you up as well.
Time, your age, say nothing doing.
The Street allows no such thing.
The weather didn’t blow up this way
just so you could ignore it.
And what about that commercial,
for white brighter teeth.
You have teeth don’t you.
Yes, those are yours,
the ones with your life attached.

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John Grey is an Australian-born poet, but has been a US resident since the late seventies. He works as financial systems analyst, and has recently been published in Xavier Review, White Wall Review and Writer’s Bloc with work upcoming in Poem, Prism International and the Cider Press Review. John Grey has been published recently in The Talking River, South Carolina Review and Karamu with work upcoming in Prism International, Poem and The Evansville Review.

As a happy Valentine’s Week from Dr. H’s editors, this week we featured some great poetry from friends old and new, including Sandy Day and Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke, both longtime Snake-Oilers. We also saw a great Smithsonian post based on one Dr. Cadmus (a fellow physician), and photography from newbie Patrick Joust. To read these and more, click below!

Valentine’s Week

• Winter
• Monsoon Terza Rima
• St. Valentine’s Day
• The Lady In Gustav Klimt’s “Expectation”
• Expectation
• A St. Valentine’s Day Gift
• A love-ly Limerick

Smithsonian

• The Growth of Dr. Cadmus

Photographical

• Exposure № 062: One for sorrow…
• Exposure № 063: Buenos Aires I

Poetical

• Let it Go

Remember to keep submissions coming in for our Short Story Contest!

Photographer Patrick Joust shares this series of street photos from Buenos Aires. He shoots at night, using Tungsten-balanced film. We love the atmosphere created by the darkness and brilliance of the colors in these images. Look for more work by Patrick Joust in the coming weeks!

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Patrick Joust is a 34 year old photographer living in Baltimore, Maryland. The people and places of Baltimore have played a central part in his work, influencing how and where he points his camera both within and outside the city limits.  He finds “analog” photography especially interesting because of its tangible nature and aesthetic, particularly the detail and clarity that can be achieved with medium format film.

Wilbur Armistead Nelson (1889-1969), photograph by Frank Thone.

.

eeth could sometimes be a reluctant bunch. But Dr. Johannes T. Cadmus was a patient man. He did not pull, pry, or force loose. He talked to a tooth, listened, extracted its secrets along with bone matter. He knew when it was ready. The sign outside the window read “Dr. J.T. Cadmus, Dentist,” but the title was not his true vocation. His dentistry was a dance of extraction and rebirth, a choreographed cycle of creation. He saw the tooth business not as a loss for the patient, but a rite of purification, and an act of growth for him. He was really more of a transplantational horticulturalist.

Johannes’ duty as a dentist was to seek out rot, to root out pain. But his calling was as a sower of teeth, the seeds that masquerade as bone in the mouth. Search and rescue. Johannes weeded the garden of the gums and cultivated plots of his own. Only there could certain teeth grow into their true selves. These were the ones he could hear.

He had not set out to be a sower of teeth. He sailed for America with just his father’s suitcase of dental instruments, with a whetstone giving his livelihood a reassuring heft. He boarded the train and got off at a place with a name that sounded like a thudding stone. He opened his practice in a storefront with a large display window. He did not wait long. The residents of the town came one by one, each with their oral ailments. The community had been without a dentist for some time, and looked with awed curiosity at the instruments Johannes kept sharp and meticulously ordered. Some families came with bevies of children, their teeth already succumbing to the attrition in their lives. Despite this, Johannes noticed that the town as a whole seemed to suffer from hyperdontia. This was the beginning of the reaping.

His dentist’s office was awash in white and gray, but Johannes’ garden was an olfactory color factory. He dulled his patients’ senses, cleansed their mouths, and rid them of rot, but the back door of his practice concealed a wild repository of previously staunched growth. From the impacted molar of a housemaid he had grown a robust oak whose branches drew a map of shadows on the lawn. The broken maxillary central incisor of a goldsmith yielded a delicate quilt of tiny lavender flowers that bloomed once and never returned. The teeth that had caused the most pain and discomfort were often the ones that produced the most beautiful and intriguing fauna.

Johannes had only one operating chair, and his office and living space were two variations on a spartan theme. The architect of the narrow two-story building seemed to have a strong disdain for wasted space and the spreading of limbs. But the backyard was reigned in only by a loose stone fence. When Johannes moved in, the open space mirrored the bareness of the building, but he soon heard his calling as a cultivator. Before long, the sun’s rays traveled across wide leaves, mysterious flowers, and climbing plants, and Johannes told time by the light and shadows. A quarter past the trumpet voluntaire lily, half an hour until the staghorn fern.

Johannes first heard a tooth while inspecting the mouth of an aging widow. She told him of frequent toothaches and a feeling of crowding in her gums. When she opened her mouth, he saw her supernumerary situation. He got straight to the extraction, but while he was choosing his instruments, he heard a quiet humming from the woman’s gaping jaw. As he addressed a baby canine embedded high in an inflamed gum, the whispering, suspiring chorus continued. White-gloved and tough-jawed, Johannes felt the canine’ s residual resistance and slowly guided its path like the hatching of a chick. With an encouraging caress, he willed it to join its long fallen-out brethren. Coaxed by Johannes’ reciprocal whispers, it and the rest of the vestigial teeth finally came with a series of soft, gummy sighs.

Long after the widow was relieved of her aches, the sounds did not abate. Her extracted teeth still lay on a tray, and no matter where in the house Johannes went, the mysterious wailing carried to his ears. He thought he might be able to hear voices speaking, but he could not fix the language. As he tried to sleep, the noise hummed and thrummed. Finally, he took action.

Deep in the night, with a shovel and a bag filled with the teeth, Johannes stood in the yard, the moon a dull rock overhead. He could feel the dental detritus shaking with sound in the bag. He could think of no other way to silence but to bury the bones. In a corner of the yard, he emptied the bag into a shallow hole and piled on some dirt. With a gentle hiss, the mound retired into quiet. Inside, Johannes fell into a firm and noiseless sleep.

He woke to the sensation of green on his face. The window looked like stained glass, and the whole room had a verdant glow. When he opened the window, smooth fronds gently brushed his face. He was standing in the fanning leaves of a sturdy palm tree. Out in the yard, it cast a green sheen over the ground. The sun seemed to shine more brightly into the space, drawn to the novelty of plant life.

The inadvertent palm tree transplantation gave Johannes over to a deep listening. He grew to understand the humming teeth, that they were calling for new roots. As he eased the town’s toothaches, cut out rot, and culled the residents’ dental overabundance, he cultivated his garden sprung from gums. After each extraction, some new and wonderful plant took its place in the fledgling jungle. All Johannes had to do was heed the calls. Soon, he thought, the wall would have to come down.

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This post is part of our series of works inspired by the Smithsonian Institution’s photo archive, made publicly available on Flickr. If you would like to, choose an image from their collection and create something – be it prose, poetry, audio, or visual art – inspired by it, and send it to snakeoilcure [at] gmail [dot] com.

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Claire Brindley lives in Washington, DC, where she walks herself silly in search of the unknown. This is her first contribution to Snake-Oil Cure.

Photographer Josh Thornton tells us about “One for sorrow…”:

This was taken at Stoke Newington station on a cold autumn morning.  I’d woken early to go and visit a friend on the other side of town, hamfistedly thumping at the beeping alarm clock to bring about an end to its metronomic annoyance, stumbling bleary eyed around the house, before pulling my scarf tight around my neck to protect from the London frost.  I wandered through the crisp dawnlight on the five minute walk to the station, shuffling heavy feet in waltz time, dodging cracks in the pavement to ward off bad luck.

Arriving at the station I gazed down at the empty platforms, normally slick with weary commuters all now dozing their way through a Saturday sleep.  Bought a ticket, change ringing against the steel tray, and made my way down the stairs to be greeted by a magpie on the opposite platform.  “One for sorrow, two for joy” I thought as the solitary carrion stalker stared me down across the cold steel track.  Ever ready camera in hand I ran off three shots, shutter stutters shattering the morning calm.  In a graceful flurry of feathers the bird was gone, leaving me to ponder what dreadful fates might conspire to befall me through the day.

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Josh Thornton is a photographer of sorts whose hobbies include pottering around, attending car boot sales in the hope of finding expired films, and spending too much time online. He is based in a noisy flat in London where it rains, even in the summer. You can see more of his work here. His other contributions to Snake-Oil Cure can be found here.

i never again want to miss
your gentle but oh so hot kiss
on mouth and on cheek
that is what i seek
you’ll send me to ulitmate bliss

i want you here under my cover
it’s a place to enjoy not to suffer
when you touch my skin
i feel better than sin
don’t you ever stop being my lover

A limerick by Ella Hansen

Flight will merge us, answer our quest
For what transcends visible things;
For now, as each hemisphere sings
Differently, I wonder if you’re dressed,
Watching the open moon as I suggest
With these words my moth-like wings,
My fluttering being seeking meanings
That, once consummated, will rest.
And when time has concertinaed,
When the butterflies near the blue
Tropical water keep time our rhythms,
When the aloneness that made us add
A search for love so undeniably true
Has ended, the universe quietly hums.

by Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke