The Belfast Review Team | 29 February, 2024
Welcome to Week 2 of our Spring Blog. Each week we will feature a handful of new creative works by artists, photographers, writers, poets, and song writers. Different days of the week highlight different creative forms: Feast Your Eyes Sundays (art, photography), Wordy Tuesday (fiction, flash, nonfiction), and Rhythm-Verse Thursday (poetry, song lyrics).
This week we're exploring the theme of 'Improvisation.' It's a deceptively simple skill – you have to know the rules to break the rules. Along with that it takes confidence, perspective, and most importantly, freedom. The freedom to think, feel, and transform the established and predictable into the new and unexpected.
In other words – it's all that jazz.
Featured poet: Brandon Shane
TW: Grief
We were struck by this poet's exploration of the final moments of his father because it reached from the confines of a hospital into the dream world of vision quests and back again, and touched on something profoundly archetypal.
Everyone tells us there are rules for grief. There are stages. A level of progress that can be charted. An orderly progression, with occasional backsliding. We evolve through it, we are told. But there is no greater embodiment improvisation than grief, that shadow sister to love – who also follows no rules. It is the companion journey that we must go on sooner or later, adding depth and dimension and contemplation of our place in the here and now, and in the beyond.
The Last Terminal
BRANDON SHANE
I sat beside him after everyone had gone.
The beeping machines were no different than birds,
he'd scooted up as if pretending to be asleep for all
those hours relatives waded with their flower vases,
and we found ourselves star gazing atop cool red dirt,
surrounded by Joshua trees, preternatural gusts came
and we didn't question their origin. He'd often ideate
about immortality - how the experience of death would
be mimicked through perennials, yet soon found after
cancer had grown on his motor cortex, that we don't
choose our masters & those who get which is desired
usually accept so begrudgingly. He asked me if this
was the view from the other side because it wasn't
so bad being among the scorpions and snakes. I was
awoken by an avian orchestra playing beautiful music,
nurses rushed into the room, and my father was still,
for the first time looking like a patient & it was then
he had gone. I sometimes wonder years later if he's
wandering that desert, eyeing undiscovered planets,
an uncharted system, a night sky that I couldn't
recognize; a man who was finally at peace.
AUTHOR BIO
Brandon Shane is an alum of California State University, Long Beach, where he majored in English. He's pursuing an MFA while working as a writing instructor and substitute teacher. You can see his work in Acropolis Journal, Grim & Gilded, Livina Press, Bitterleaf Books, Remington Review, Salmon Creek Journal, BarBar Literary Magazine, Discretionary Love, among others.
Special thanks to the poet for trusting us with his work.
Thanks to all of you readers for reading! Be sure to like, follow, and share.
Be sure to visit our other posts for this week: Rhythm-Verse Thursday with poetry by Ren Pike. Wordy Tuesday with fiction by Ankit Raj Ojha. And Feast Your Eyes Sunday with photography by Gaynor Kane.
Follow us:
Instagram @thebelfastreview
Twitter/X @belfastreview
