Nine Mile Spring 2020

Nine Mile Magazine Vol. 8, No. 1 Spring, 2020

NINE MILE MAGAZINE Vol. 8, No. 1 Spring 2020 Publisher: Nine Mile Art Corp.

Editors: Bob Herz, Stephen Kuusisto, Andrea Scarpino Assistant Editor: Diane R. Wiener Associate Editors: Cyrus Cassells, Pamela (Jody) Stewart, James Cervantes Art Editor Emeritus: Whitney Daniels Cover Art: Painting is by Thomasina DeMaio, "The Last Tango." It is an anti-nuclear statement, with the dancers not seeing the atomic blast taking place to the right off balcony. The piece is 8 ft by 10 ft oil on canvas (1981) The publishers gratefully acknowledge support of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. We also acknowledge support of the County of Onondaga and CNY Arts through the Tier Three Project Support Grant Program. We have also received significant support from the Central New York Community Foundation. This publication would not have been possible without their generous support. We are grateful to them all.

ISBN-13: 978-1-7326600-8-3 Poetry and artwork copyright of their respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. No poem or artwork may be reproduced in full or in part without prior written permission from its owner.

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Contents About Nine Mile Magazine

vi

Appreciations & Asides

10

Jody Pamela Stewart Edgar Is Disgruntled Pretty Much Ok The Farmer’s Wife This Year, Todd’s Spoons All Saints

17 18 19 20 21

Cyrus Cassells The Bamboo Labyrinth Blood Is Rushing To A Knight’s Head Verse In Which The Poet’s New Lover Carves Him Into A Sicilian Puppet The Wrestlers (Caramelo And Guapo Gringo)

23 26 29 33

Sandra McPherson Henry, Praying: Sutter Psych Hospital Mad Boy In The Odorscape: Sutter Psych Hospital Existentialist, Swimming Establishments Names At Land’s End Finishing

38 40 42 44 46 47

Sandra Kolankiewicz 20th Century Petroglyph, Marietta, Ohio

50

Bill Schulz Estate Sale — Eagle Pond Farm Splinters Vin Santo

52 53 54

Rita Rouvalis Chapman Near Salt River Road: An Elegy For S.D.

By These Waters

56 58

Katelyn Delvaux My Mother Starred In M*A*S*H Reruns People Tell Me I Remind Them Of After She Died, We’d Visit In Dreams

60 61 62

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Dave Taylor Gravel Parking Lot Renner’s Poem Anya America

64 66 67 68

Charles Casey Martin A House in the Air Quipu John Lennon Los ilegales Elián González at Ninety

70 72 74 75 76

Ralph James Savarese Face Time With The President College Trip The Columnist

79 85 87

Darrah Cloud The Adventurer’s Club Goes To The Track Rescue Squad

93 94

Hannah Emerson Teach A House Made for Dancing Costume Me A Blue Sound Songoing I Need Lovely Help to Look Very

96 97 98 99 100 101

Paul Eluard Max Ernst The Invention The Unique One More Reason Max Ernst In The Heart Of My Love Your Mouth With Golden Lips She Of Always, All

105 106 107 108 109 110 112 113

Martin Willetts, Jr. What Passes Goes Away

114

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Peggy Liuzzi I Fall Into The Arms of Time Reflection

118

Linda Pennisi Self Portrait As Blue Chair in a Mowed Field Self Portrait As U Self Portrait As Dinner Party Field Notes Travel

120 121 122 123

Marcela Sulak Spider Double Life

125 128

Two Views of Incarnate: The Collected Dead Man Poems 1. Of The Resistance Of The Dead Man 2. Of The Pleasure And Wisdom Of The Dead Man

132 136

17

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About Nine Mile Magazine We publish twice yearly, showcasing the best work we receive from authors whose work, energy, and vision seem to us most deeply entangled with life. This includes writers within and outside the mainstream, writers with disabilities, writers of color, writers with marginalized genders and sexual orientations, and writers from different cultures and religions. We produce this magazine in inclusive and accessible formats. We believe that poetry is everyone’s art.

SUBMISSIONS For consideration in the magazine, submit 4 - 6 poems in Word or text to editor@ninemile.org. You can access a submission form at our website, ninemile.org. Please include: • your name and contact information (email and home address for sending contributor’s copies), • a paragraph about yourself (background, achievements, etc.), • a statement of your aesthetic intent in the work, • a photo headshot of yourself.

We respond within 2 weeks. If you do not hear from us, reconnect to make sure we received your submission. Note that we do not accept unsolicited essays, reviews, video / motion based art, or Q&A’s.

TALK ABOUT POETRY PODCASTS AND BLOG At our Talk About Poetry podcast, working poets discuss poems that interest, annoy, excite, and engage them. The Talk About Poetry blog provides more opportunities for feedback. The addresses are: -Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/bobherz; -iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/talk-about-poetry/ id972411979?mt=2; -Talk About Poetry blog: https://talkaboutpoetry.wordpress.com.

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NINE MILE BOOKS Nine Mile Books are available at our website, ninemile.org, or online at Amazon.com and iTunes. Recent books are: • More Than Watchmen At Daybreak, Cyrus Cassells (2020), $16, or $9.99 at Kindle. “These twelve poems log time Cassells spent in silence in a hermitage with the Benedictine Brothers at the Christ in the Desert monastery... Cassells waited for these poems, listening patiently for their deep harmonies, probing their quiet revelations... Throughout there is a clear strain of praise and belief, unabashed and unapologetic. The last poem ends with a ‘burgeoning dawn’ a promise of more after this geyser of sound. What distilled magical mysterious poems!”—Spencer Reece,

author of The Clerk´s Tale and The Road to Emmaus

• Metamortuary, Dylan Krieger (2020), $16, or $9.99 at Kindle and iBooks.

Brilliant variations on Ovid’s Metamorphoses with dazzling excursions through life, poetry, and death. “Each of the book’s four sections, Dangerous Meat / Raw War / Quiet Catastrophes / Eternal End-Times, is a detached possession belonging to the same church of an absent and holy endeavor where Krieger stages population myths for an imagined audience of resuscitated reanimations with a language so alive and so secretly killed that it renders irrelevant the spelling that revelation too often uses to sound out the shape of its more basic priests.”—Barton Smock, isacoustic • The You That All Along Has Housed You: A Sequence, Leslie Ullman (2019), $16, or $9.99 at Kindle and iBooks. “Leslie Ullman has the ability to spin illuminating spells through and around the matter of earth and life. Her vision penetrates with an attention as careful and as transforming as day through clear water, as moonlight on stone. She is an artisan with words, and the results are poems embodying the intricacy and beauty of the subjects they honor.” —Pattiann Rogers • A Little Gut Magic, Matthew Lippman (2018), $16, or $9.99 at Kindle.

“Reading Matthew Lippman’s poems feels like having a conversation with a hilarious, brutally honest, and brilliant friend.”—Jessica Bacal, author of Mistakes I Made at Work: 25 Influential Women Reflect on What They Got Out of Getting It Wrong • The Golem Verses, Diane R. Wiener (2018), $16, or $9.99 at Kindle and iBooks. “…Diane Wiener unlocks the door to a room of confidences, secrets, passions, and fears. These poems present an interior dialogue in which the Golem is more than symbol or legend but trusted companion and guiding, grounding force. This room is furnished with intellect, Page7vii Volume 8 No 1 - Page

wonder, inquiry, discovery, revelation, and release. Curl up in a comfy chair and bear witness to this lyric journey.”—Georgia Popoff, author of Psychometry.

• Perfect Crime, David Weiss (2017), $16. Of this book the poet says, “The whole of it thinks about the idea of perfect crime metaphysically, in the sense that time, for example, is, itself, a perfect crime. Perfect meaning: effect without cause. A crime or situation or condition that can’t be solved.”

• Where I Come From (2016), Jackie Warren-Moore, $12. Poet, playwright, theatrical director, teacher, and freelance writer, Ms. Warren-Moore’s work has been published nationally and internationally. She is a Survivor of racism, sexism, sexual abuse, and physical abuse who regards her poetic voice as the roadmap of her survival, a way of healing herself and of speaking to the souls of others.

• Selected Late Poems of Georg Trakl (2016), translations by Bob Herz, $7.50, or $7.49 at Kindle and iBooks. This book includes all the poems Trakl wrote in the last two years of his life, from Sebastian in Dream and the poems that appeared in Der Brenner, plus poems from other periods showing the development of the poet's art.

• Letter to Kerouac in Heaven (2016), Jack Micheline, $10. One of the original Beats, Micheline's career took him from Greenwich Village to San Francisco, with friends that included almost everyone, from Mailer to Ginsberg to Corso and others. He was a street poet whose first book included an introduction by Jack Kerouac and was reviewed in Esquire by Dorothy Parker. This is a replica publication of one of his street books.

• Bad Angels, Sam Pereira (2015), $20, or at Kindle and iBooks, $9.99. Of this poet Peter Everwine wrote, “He’s an original.” Pereira’s work has been praised by Norman Dubie, David St. John, and Peter Campion.

• Some Time in the Winter, Michael Burkard (2014), $16. A reprint of the famed original 1978 chapbook with an extended essay by Mr. Burkard on the origins of the poem.

• Poems for Lorca, Walt Shepperd (2012), $9.95. The poems continue Mr. Shepperd’s lifelong effort to truly see and record the life around him.

Lorca is his daughter, and the poems constitute an invaluable generational gift from father to daughter, and from friend, colleague, and community member to all of us.

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Nine Mile Magazine Vol. 8, No. 1 Spring, 2020

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Appreciations & Asides Random notes and quotes on art, literature, and life, unedited and as we found them, from artists and critics whom we love: I don’t try to be prophetic, as I don’t sit down to write literature. It is simply this: a writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.

No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, “I don’t look like that.” And Picasso replied, “You will.” And he was right.

—James Baldwin, “The Art of Fiction No. 78,” The Paris Review 1984.

Remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, “Would he had blotted a thousand,” which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by wherein he most faulted; and to justify mine own candor, for I loved the man, and do honor his memory on this side idolatry as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein be flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped. “Sufflaminandus erat,” [He should have been clogged] as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too. Many times he fell into those things, could not escape laughter, as when he said in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him: “Caesar, thou dost me wrong.” He replied: “Caesar did never wrong but with just cause;” and such like, which were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned.

—Ben Johnson, adapted from The Harvard Classics (1910), Vol. 27.

Eliot tells us that the mystery of Hamlet is clarified if, instead of considering the entire action of the drama as being due to Shakespeare’s design, we see the tragedy as a sort of poorly made patchwork of previous tragic material…There are traces of a work by Thomas Kyd, which we know indirectly from other sources, in which the motive was only that of revenge; and the delay in taking revenge was caused only by the problem of assassinating a monarch surrounded by guards; moreover, Hamlet’s “madness” is feigned, the aim being to avert suspicion. In Shakespeare’s

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definitive drama the delayed vengeance is not explained—with the exception of Hamlet’s continuous doubts, and the effect of his “madness” is not to lull but to arouse the king’s suspicions. Shakespeare’s Hamlet also deals with the effect of a mother’s guilt on the son, but Shakespeare was unable to impose this motif upon the material of the old drama—and the modification is not sufficiently complete to be convincing. In several ways the play is puzzling, disquieting as none of the others is. Shakespeare left in unnecessary and incongruent scenes that ought to have been spotted on even the hastiest revision. Then there are unexplained scenes that would seem to derive from a reworking of Kyd’s original play perhaps by Chapman. In conclusion, Hamlet is a stratification of motifs that have not merged, and represents the efforts of different authors, where each one put his hand to the work of his predecessors. So, far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is an artistic failure. “Both workmanship and thought are in an unstable condition … And probably more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the Mona Lisa of literature.”

—Umberto Eco, On The Shoulders Of Giants (Harvard University Press, 2019). [NOTE: Quote is from Elliot’s essay “Hamlet and His Problems.”]

I have always known that there were spellbinding evil parts for women.

For one thing, I was taken at an early age to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Never mind the Protestant work ethic of the dwarfs. Never mind the tedious housework-is-virtuous motif. Never mind the fact that Snow White is a vampire—anyone who lies in a glass coffin without decaying and then comes to life again must be. The truth is that I was paralysed by the scene in which the evil queen drinks the magic potion and changes her shape. What power, what untold possibilities!

—Margaret Atwood, “Spotty-Handed Villainesses: Problems Of Female Bad Behaviour In The Creation Of Literature,” from a speech given “in various versions, here and there, in 1994.”

When one goes at ideas directly, with hammer and tongs as it were, ideas tend to elude one in a poem. I think they only come back in when one pretends not to be paying any attention to them, like a cat that will rub against your leg.

—John Ashbery, Interview with Daniel Kane, English 88 Reading List.

When I write, I never re-write a sentence because for me my thought and my writing are one thing. It’s like breathing, I don’t re-breathe a breath...

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Arranging the bones of the story took time, but it was never painful.

Everything I have—my intellect, my experience, my feelings have been used. If someone doesn’t like it, it is like saying they don’t like my gall bladder. I can’t do anything about it.

—Arundhati Roy, interview in India 50, 1998.

Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?

—John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Wesleyan University Press, Anniversary edition, 2013) Many people will agree that a man may be a great artist, and yet have a bad influence. There is more of Milton's influence in the badness of the bad verse of the eighteenth century than of anybody's else: he certainly did more harm than Dryden and Pope, and perhaps a good deal of the obloquy which has fallen on these two poets, especially the latter, because of their influence, ought to be transferred to Milton. But to put the matter simply in terms of “bad influence” is not necessarily to bring a serious charge: because a good deal of the responsibility, when we state the problem in these terms, may devolve on the eighteenth-century poets themselves for being such bad poets that they were incapable of being influenced except for ill.

—T. S. Eliot, “The Poetry of John Milton,” 1936.

I repeat that the remoteness of Milton’s verse from ordinary speech, his invention of his own poetic language, seems to me one of the marks of his greatness. Other marks are his sense of structure, both in the general design of Paradise Lost and Samson, and in his syntax; and finally, and not least, his inerrancy, conscious or unconscious, in writing so as to make the best display of his talents, and the best concealment of his weaknesses.

—T. S. Eliot, “The Poetry of John Milton,” 1960.

Born and raised in what they used to call “The Radical Movement,” I always look back with amused pride on those old-timers who didn’t smoke or drink and lived long and troubled lives absolutely devoted to one unmarried spouse—to keep themselves fit and ready for the barricades. The World, The Flesh, and The Devil are far subtler personages than those innocent Jewish mechanics and Italian peasants thought, but they still go about in the night as a roaring lion seeking whom they may devour. It behooves the artist to recognize and avoid them, especially when they wave

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red, or black, flags, as well as roar. Because art is a weapon. After millions of well-aimed blows, someday perhaps it will break the stone heart of the mindless cacodemon called Things As They Are. Everything else has failed.

—Kenneth Rexroth, Introduction to Rexroth’s first collection of essays, Bird in the Bush (New Directions, 1959).

Well, being a poet is a funny kind of jazz. It doesn’t get you anything. It doesn’t get you any money, or not much, and it doesn’t get you any prestige, or not much. It’s just something you do.

—John Berryman, from “An Interview with John Berryman” conducted

by John Plotz of the Harvard Advocate on Oct. 27, 1968. In Berryman’s Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman. Ed. Harry Thomas.

Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988. Copyright © Harvard Advocate In recent years I’ve been lucky enough to travel to Britain a number of times for literary events. My conversations with poets and readers there have led me to think more about what it means to be an American writer— something that we don’t consider so carefully, I suppose, until we’re confronted with difference. In conversations in pubs after readings, or in the café at the Poetry Society in London, it struck me that our colleagues in the United Kingdom have a very different sense of the poet’s right to speak about his or her own life—of the centrality of the self, in other words, in the poems we write.

The clearest example of this came one evening when we were talking about American poets, and the conversation turned to the poems of James Wright. I quoted three lines of Wright’s I’ve always loved: Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom.

I was shocked to discover that this passage had been enormously controversial in the U.K.; for my British friends, it represented the height of a brash, American sense of self. How dare Wright make such a claim for his own feelings? How could he have the nerve to be so self-aggrandizing, to assume that he felt some special, important emotion that could be announced in this way, without irony, without apology?

Perhaps the signal characteristic of American poetry is our desire to put the self at the center—whether it be Whitman’s expansive, inclusive “I” or Dickinson’s micro-cosmic, endlessly doubting examination. Our way of knowing the world is through the study of our own feelings and perceptions. And if this gets in our way, some of the time, and offers too

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many opportunities for self-absorption, then I also feel it’s our strength.

Through its bold curiosity about the self, its willingness to investigate perception, thought and feeling with a relentless intensity, American poetry in our century has evolved into a vibrant and diverse endeavor that’s among this last century’s brighter achievement.

—Mark Doty, citied online at Modern American Poetry (http://mapslegacy.org/poets/a_f/doty/american.htm) It has become increasingly plain to me that the very excellent organisation of a long book or the finest perceptions and judgment in time of revision do not go well with liquor. A short story can be written on the bottle, but for a novel you need the mental speed that enables you to keep the whole pattern inside your head and ruthlessly sacrifice the sideshows …

I would give anything if I hadn’t written Part III of Tender Is the Night entirely on stimulant.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, letter to Max Perkins, March 11, 1935, in F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters, ed. Matthew Bruccoli (Simon & Schuster, 1994) Memory, I think, is a substitute for the tail that we lost for good in the happy process of evolution. It directs our movements, including migration.

Apart from that there is clearly something atavistic in the very process of recollection, if only because such a process is never linear.

—Joseph Brodsky, “Less Than One,” in Less Than One Selected Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986) Someone said to Donne, the English satirist, “Thunder against the sins but spare the sinners.” “What,” he said. “damn the cards and pardon the card sharps?”

—Chamfort, Products of the Perfected Civilization, translated by W.S. Merwin, (North Point Press, 1984) Great writers are either husbands or lovers. Some writers supply the solid virtues of the husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency.

There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover—moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality—that they would never countenance in a husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling. In the same way, readers put up with unintelligibility, obsessiveness, painful, truths, lies, bad grammar—if, in compensation, the writers allows them to savor rare emotions and

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dangerous sensations. And, as in life, so in art both are necessary, husbands and lovers. It’s a pity when one is forced to choose between them.

—Susan Sontag, “Camus’ Notebooks,” in Against Interpretation (Dell Publishing, 1969) In a political culture of managed spectacles and passive spectators, poetry appears as a rift, a peculiar lapse, in the prevailing mode. The reading of a poem, a poetry reading, is not a spectacle, nor can it be passively received. It’s an exchange of electrical currents through language—that daily, mundane, abused, and ill-prized medium, that instrument of deception and revelation, that material thing, that knife, rag, boat, spoon/ reed become pipe/tree trunk become drum/mud become clay flute/conch shell become summons to freedom/old trousers and petticoats become iconography in appliqué/rubber bands stretched around a box become lyre.

—Adrienne Rich, “Someone Is Writing a Poem” from What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1993) …we heard that [Hemingway] was back in Paris and telling a number of people how much he wanted to see her. Don’t you come home with Hemingway on your arm, I used to say to her when she went out for a walk.

Sure enough one day she came back bringing him with her…. They sat and talked a long time. Finally I heard her say, Hemingway, after all you are ninety percent Rotarian. Can’t you, he said, make it eighty percent. No, she said regretfully, I can’t.

—Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (Random House, 1946) Why go grubbing in muck heaps? The world is fair, and the proportion of healthy-minded men and honest women, to those who are foul, fallen or unnatural is great. Mr Oscar Wilde has again been writing stuff that were better unwritten; and while The Picture of Dorian Gray, which he contributes to Lippincott’s, is ingenious, interesting, full of cleverness, and plainly the work of a man of letters, it is false art—for its interest is medicolegal; it is false to human nature—for its hero is a devil, it is false to morality—for it is not made sufficiently clear that the writer does not prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanliness, health and sanity. The story—which deals with matters only fit for the Criminal Investigation Department or a hearing in camera—is discreditable alike to author and editor… Mr. Wilde has brains, and art, and style; but if he can write for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys, the sooner he

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takes to tailoring (or some other decent trade) the better for his own reputation and the public morals.

—The Scots Observer, July 5th, 1890 It is rumoured that The Waste Land was written as a hoax. Several of its supporters explain that this is immaterial, literature being concerned not with intentions but results.

—J. F., “Shantih, Shantih, Shantih: Has the Reader Any Rights Before the Bar of Literature?,” Time (March 1923) We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.—How beautiful are the retired flowers! how would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, “admire me I am a violet! dote upon me I am a primrose!” Modern poets differ from the Elizabethans in this. Each of the moderns like an Elector of Hanover governs his petty state, & knows how many straws are swept daily from the Causeways in all his dominions & has a continual itching that all the Housewives should have their coppers well scoured: the antients were Emperors of vast Provinces, they had only heard of the remote ones and scarcely cared to visit them.—I will cut all this—I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt in particular—Why should we be of the tribe of Manasseh when we can wander with Esau? why should we kick against the Pricks, when we can walk on Roses? Why should we be owls, when we can be Eagles?

—John Keats, Letter to J. H. Reynolds (February 3, 1818) Hampstead

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Jody Pamela Stewart Edgar Is Disgruntled his gutters need repair and, outside, as all too often happens, there are flags, high-pitched hollers, grill-smoke, heavy-on-the-mustard deviled eggs, sausage sputter, great shimmering haunches of Jello, cakes like pillows, and an ominous gluten-free table tucked up against Albert’s hedge. Edgar loves his food, but what’s not to loathe navigating the wheeling kids, the pale midriffs of girls age 8-58, heartiness and piles of flimsy paper plates, those wide grins beneath eyes which roam away when Edgar starts to speak.

With his hand on the doorknob and his dog occupied with a large chew, Edgar realizes that to step out the door is to step down into a war zone.

He hesitates. It’s well known that a neighborhood barbecue can get you killed.

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Pretty Much Ok It’s the dried up child that’s the problem: it’s not as though her mother has to worry about fitting a wizened being in a booster seat, or that shopping for an outfit that might make the first day of school feel ok is a hassle – it’s the not knowing, day to day. Her daughter tells her nothing. It’s the not knowing, when the mother taps open the bedroom door to wake her child, whether the world will be upright, or on its side.

The Grandmother worries she’s hasn’t enough money to send even the smallest check.

The girl herself’s ok. She makes sure she’s ok. Classes are ok. Food’s ok; her shoes fit and at school the kids are either solicitous or evil and therefore a known quantity. The girl knows a lot about the state of the world; she reads way more books than her classmates and could pry their heads open.

She wishes her always-worried mother would give her a break and just shut up.

The grandmother waits for her social security deposit and wonders whether to spring for new wrapping paper this Christmas or just smooth out what she neatly folded up last year.

The dried up child is on a field trip to an historic village with lots of sheep.

The mother steps out into the cold, closing the door behind her.

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The Farmer’sWife was not home when neighbor Todd came to the door. At first the dogs barked. Each year he knocks, stands back politely and asks permission to hunt deer on those forest ledges sloping down towards the Deerfield River.

In his hand, a gift of 3 beautiful wooden spoons he’d carved during solitary evenings.

Todd works at the hospital. He cleans things up. He is a calm man with a slow, affectionate smile but he notices everything. Each day this man on the sidelines, doing his job, sees what falls off the edges of life itself, of hope, or even credibility.

That is why, each year, when Todd arrives at the several doorways here in the hill towns, family dogs only bark once or twice.

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This Year, Todd’s Spoons are slender as women conjured by Modigliani: Clarice has been to the beach. She shakes out her shoes, removes thick woolen socks and pins them on the clothesline to drain out their sand. Alda has been brushing the ghosts of Edward Gorey’s cats, a demanding chore she busies herself with four times a week. On Fridays she sets out black bowls of raw cream.

Skinny Mickey has spent all afternoon drifting back and forth thinking she might dust the front room windowsills. She loves vernal pools and frog songs, but the season is long past and the music she thought stored tightly in her mind is fading. That distresses her; she’s the saddest of the three Spoon sisters but she never speaks of it.

We’re lost, she thinks, why dust at all. Why sweep up the sand sliding from my sister’s skirts; why wash and dry the ghost bowls, or tidy the invisible litter boxes. Justice is a feather caught in the tide, affection a plastic Christmas tree torn up at the curb; singing starts with pride and a wide heart but daily sours in the mouth....

Still, it matters to make the evening soup, buy bread, chocolate, paper and pens. Clarice, Alda, and Skinny Mickey gather for their meal: curtains drawn, joy and discouragement are both set aside in a velvet-lined drawer.

The sisters rest like any family at their small kitchen table with its yellow oilcloth. Just a few cobwebs in the corner above the closed and bolted cellar door.

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All Saints It’s just after dawn and she’s taken the mare out, riding through mist, slow-stepping over slippery leaves, then up the slope to that spot on the ridge which signifies clarity. These are the terrible weeks before Thanksgiving with its whirl of details and recipes, those shopping lists, the spot cleaning and airing of best linens.

The morning is damp-cold, pinching her cheeks red, bruising her lips with something she’s not ready for: all that food, buttery oranges and greens parceled out on gold-rimmed white china.

How she thinks of what she won’t eat at the table, how she’ll urge the family and guests towards seconds and thirds, how she’ll hoard – for later – some of everything in that dark corner of her pantry.

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ABOUT PAMELA STEWART Pamela Stewart (known as Jody) is a true “boomer,” New England born and bred. She began writing in grade school because she couldn’t draw. She’s taught creative writing at ASU, University of Arizona, UC Irvine, and University of Houston. In 1982 she received a Guggenheim and traveled to Cornwall, UK where she then lived for 7 years. Jody returned to western Massachusetts and in 1994 she, and her family moved to a farm to raise fiber animals. Over the years she’s published in a number of magazines, received 3 Pushcart publications, and has written 6 full-length books including The Red Window (Univ. of Georgia Press, 1997), and Ghost Farm (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2010.) A chapbook, Just Visiting, was published by Grey Suit Editions, London, 2014. She still lives on the farm with 3 dogs, some elderly sheep, a rescued horse, his donkey, several goats and old pigs.

ABOUT THE POEMS How I met my first Prose-ette was by accident. Over the years I started countless bits of prose which never came to life. They drabbed right off the edge of the page, but about 6 years ago I asked myself to write at least one sentence while drinking my first cup of coffee in the dark of the morning. It wouldn’t matter what I wrote because all that really mattered was that hot black coffee.

Sometimes another sentence emerged, then another and maybe a few more. My first prose-ette entity was that of elusive Edgar regarding his Phoenix apartment and its shortcomings. These little paragraphs were spontaneous and always surprised me! To write was just plain fun and the joy of it was that I was never “working on a poem.”

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Cyrus Cassells The Bamboo Labyrinth Legions of rice stalks and midsummer reeds Swayed in accelerating wind. In love, I followed you all the way to Sado Island.

Fleeing a farrago of Taiko drums, In favor of the earliest assembling stars, We laughed and ambled in the twilit Silver and jade-green field, With our flimsy muslin shirts Unbuttoned to reveal, As if to Lothario Jupiter, The Big Dipper, and the pockmarked moon, Those old-time eavesdroppers And unregenerate voyeurs, The truant glory of our saké-splashed Collarbones and throats— A beguiling garland of lights shimmered, Festooning the flowing Sea of Japan—a little broadcast Brilliance from Korea (or Manchuria?)— And almost straightaway, baleful clouds Came along to block the ebullient stars.

With a shower in locomotion our way, We hurried to a standstill battalion Of hallowing trees; So help me, I’d never encountered Living bamboo, and by chance, There was a whole god-sent grove To revel in— When the flat-footed, rummaging storm, The Kabuki-wild rain reached us, We weren’t abject or enraged, Like bull-headed Lear roughly booted outdoors By his repudiating daughters; We were antic, July-giddy—

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Lighting flashes. The swoosh of wind Rattling the gallant trees, the green and ocher Auspices of the grove, Ambushing the soldier-tall spears Encircling us.

Your pretext was to hold and protect me From the spieling tempest, Then you pressed your storm-moist palm To my novice’s chest, My unshielded heart— In the tensile year leading up To that crazy, whistling bamboo maze, I’d labored carefully to conceal The sparks I felt so often in your presence; Like dispensing with an intricate mask At uproarious Venetian Carnival, All at once, our mutual longing Was completely pond-clear, ineluctable: Truthfully, no ardent valentine had ever dared To bless me with a French kiss Or to probe my wet but febrile nipples With a purposeful tongue, And well, that was an epiphany!

Yes, I admit: I’d never known The rain-slicked moustache And black tussock of thick hair, The telling heat and reassuring heft Of a man’s sinews firsthand— The wide-awake pilgrim, the not shipwrecked Philosopher manqué in me insists: We outwitting survivors Return from oblivion or tempest, Out of the ruckus and voltage, alive, Only to find unmistakable signs, Indelible memories branding us Like Lichtenberg figures: The fabled marks, the improbable flowers Pitiless lighting leaves On startled, inconsolable flesh—

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Tell me, you, who never attained Christ’s age—my sweet summer despoiler, Did an errant thunderbolt claim me?

Did I die there in that rain-washed grove?— All I know is, My irreplaceable first man, My amorous prize in the storm, I can’t relinquish our windblown Bamboo labyrinth, I can’t rest without reclaiming That bonanza of rain on my flesh—

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Blood Is Rushing To A Knight’s Head As in a tensile joust, In which stouthearted knights, Beribboned favorites of the king, Both dauntless competitors, Never dare to reveal The turret-tall stakes, Time and again, in the eventful years Following college, I shook Your firm, almost hallowing hand, Tallying in my head Your dynamic triumphs, with the requisite Courteous detachment (Yes, indifference was the hunter’s snare, The focused angler’s reel Of our later encounters, Mock indifference and its cousin, nonchalance) So as to outfox, longstanding crush And university rival, You, with your lightly disguised, Yet thoroughly transparent Fix on me (All of your ingenious bids To secure my applause—detectable Emblems 0f an undeclared desire), Taking note of the inimitable plays, The sovereign films, The gold and silver accolades, All you had so diligently attained, Sometimes with cast-ashore envy, Sometimes with welling joy— I see now: under my feigned politesse, My false reticence, Beneath almost negligible white lies, denials, I bore the crest and chilly armor That hid irrefutable loss, The fear, in this bustling life, first of squiring Then losing you—

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Everything in my brisk, meticulous Waking world arranged (The humdrum opposite Of my unhampered dreams, The valiant world under my lids, In which we pledged gallants And staunch companions strode, Inseparable as Damon and Pythias) Permitting me to venture forth, Sanguine, princely, A full-blown leader in my field, But with my secretly allied, Irrationally loyal heart insolvent— When I heard the riveting news Of your cliff-side crash, Poleaxed as a bested crusader Or a suddenly gasping chatelaine, I actually collapsed In the fabled medieval quarter of Rhodes— As if someone had savaged the revealing Strings of an alluring harp—deposed On the blank, cool cobblestones Near the inimitable moat Of Saint John’s Gate, toppled By the sound of your questing voice In sophomore astronomy class: What is this colossal force, This mighty God-spark That binds the stars?— So help me, my inmost hero (Soul-close as a hungry milk brother), My terrific, quite humbling swoon Was equal to the noon-struck moment In a long-ago copse, When a veering Roosevelt elk Leapt before me, As if the astonishing beast could toss, With its imposing antlers,

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The gold chrysanthemum sun, And I staggered back, dear genius, I staggered back—

in memory of D., 1949-2017

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Verse In Which The Poet’s New Lover Carves Him Into a Sicilian Puppet I. Verse in Which the Poet’s New Lover Carves Him Into a Sicilian Puppet In Sicily, you paint my Moor’s armor The illustrious gold of a royal gingko In garish fall, my foraging, wide-awake eyes The white of glittering feldspar, Or far-off Andromeda, My just-fashioned irises the entreating green Of Van Gogh’s “The Poet’s Garden.”

But my eyes are brown as pennies, I protest To my newly acquired lover, Marco Angelo, Ace woodcarver and able puppeteer Who looks impressively tan and fit (It’s sweltering mid-July) In his Starsky and Hutch t-shirt, While he graces my evolving lookalike With the bull’s-eye gaze belonging To a go-for-glory trapeze artist Or a galloping circus showman: Caro poeta, I’m sure pea-green works better For a daring Moor Or a defiant Saracen.

But I thought you were transforming me, Like a modern day Geppetto, Into a hero, a truth-loving, crusading knight, Your very own high yellow Orlando!

Well, amico, as you can tell, From the latest phase of the pupo, I have changed my mind.

By the way, teasing Marco whispers, Gently tapping my island-brown forehead: Are those brows really yours Or just a Japanese painter’s brushstrokes?

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II. Marco Angelo’s Puppet Museum Tour (Come Upstairs) The flame-like moment our eyes locked, Marco Angelo was lifting his Naples yellow And peony-pink awning, And after a lush, prolonged stare, Don Intensity, With his prophet-long hair, deliberately Lowered the awning again, So I was impelled to amble past His suddenly reopened store And inviting woodcarver’s workshop Once, twice, before summoning My All-American stars-and-stripes resolve To venture inside, where, As a dumbshow tourist in Ortigia, The bewitching island offshoot of Syracuse, I pretended to browse, Musing just how long I could sustain My finicky shopper’s ruse, My mostly lust-fueled performance, Before fleeing, in a clumsy flash, With a heartfelt buona sera— Finally, in an affable, committed voice, Marco Angelo proclaimed: My two brothers and I, we have A whole collection of rare And even precious puppets, Little stages, woodcarving tools, and old posters, Yes, a museum — Please follow me upstairs; Let me show you— In a cat-quiet corner Of the remarkable puppet collection, I confess, I came for the first time From the pressure of his formidable, Sinewy arms, from the shock Of his trimmed, cologne-scented beard And care-taking tongue:

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At one crest in our lovemaking, Before the countless widened eyes Of ready-to-be-seen-and-see antique puppets, He laughed and wrapped His waterfall of waist-length hair Like a dark flag around my throat— * It became a summer ritual: I’d arrive, Just as Marco Angelo was closing: In our daft, eleventh hour re-enactment Of his salacious museum tour, Like an appraising collector, I’d run my assessing hands Over a few glittering Sicilian knights And fearsome, “swart-skinned” Saracens— Once my avid puppeteer Literally hauled me upstairs, let me Unbutton his linen shirt and unbraid His gleaming black hair, Then nimbly blindfolded me—with a blue, Hand-sewn scarf from Cefalù— To let me savor more fully Our unleashed bodies’ veneer Of sweat and midsummer musk—

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III. My Lookalike Saracen Under the Stars After a steady month of meticulous carving, assembling, Sewing on a black and gold-trimmed velvet cape, And crowning my hard-knock lookalike With a shiny, sickle-moon helmet, Marco declares my bearded twin warrior Is prime to hit the illustrious puppet stage, Magically erected in a lovely But mostly roofless building: In your honor, we’ll let you be The parlatore—the voice Of the wily Saracen Just for a few performances.

It’s good you’re an actor as well, Because, amore, you better sound mean!

So into the chivalrous world of Charlemagne, I plunge—the bustling planet of the Sicilian pupi, Brimming with 9 century Parisians, Invading Tartars, and Saracens, With beloved stock characters: The staunch, always do-right paladin Orlando, The dazzling, clash-inducing beauty Angelica, The ever-scheming witch, Morgana . . . .

Look! Here I am relentless, dastardly, Never giving in to the Christians; Here I am dramatic, wheedling, A horse’s ass . . . th

As I sally into battle under the dog day stars, I laugh and say, Marco, When things get seriously mean: Just remember, puppet master, deep down, Like any steadfast poet worth his salt, I’m a troubadour, yes indeed, A verse-spouting lover, head to toe, Never a harsh foe or a fighter!

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The Wrestlers (Caramelo And Guapo Gringo) Though I was rash, run-of-the-mill— A tagalong athlete at best, How is it, after all these years, We’re still punning and wrestling?

We never banter about this, The bald-as-a-sumo fact you insisted I drop “Fancy-pants” French and straightaway “enlist”— That’s exactly the verb you used!— In “handier” First-Year Spanish, And then recruited me For the mostly belittled wrestling team; I suppose, for your part, even then, Mat-work was akin To outright philosophy, a pulsing physical form Of fathomless meditation— I confess it tickles me you’ve settled In “Guadalajara, Guadalajara,” The vaunted birthplace of our tiny, At times fortissimo Spanish teacher, The far-sighted woman who instilled in us An endless love for totemic García Lorca, The magus García Marquez, And blind, encyclopedic Borges— On Señora Leticia’s engaging High school senior Spanish Club trek To gargantuan Mexico City, I fell in love with Montezuma’s Godzilla-and-Mothara-sized metropolis, But lamented my gadabout paseos, Without fail, blackened my saved-for deck shoes— In “onerous” high school, As we once derided it, As disapproving sophomores, You felt demi-cursed by your German And Scandinavian good looks, And instead of duly squiring

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The fig-ripe Valkyries, The cookie-cutter sweethearts Your Cologne-born mother Had carefully, almost gingerly Allotted for you, In wayward fashion, You praised our high desert town’s Wary, wiseacre Latina girls, With lush rose-trellis names: Keris, Jacinta, Maria Isabel, Socorro …

I replay those early years Of sheer horseplay and camaraderie, As we trek to irresistible Tulum, And later, climb to the panoramic top Of the rugged pyramid in Cobá (Yes, with its buffeted cloud flotillas, Its fabled blue-and-white canopy, Mexico has my favorite sky), Stopping for a journeyman bullfight In a humble jungle village, Where your flagpole height, Wheat-colored ponytail, And tallow-pale forearms Make you a lightning-fast Nordic celeb, A Mayan curiosity— Back in college, we used to exclaim: I see a hammock with my name on it!

Nowadays, in spiffed-up Playa del Carmen, There’s little sleeping outdoors: After a flirty, agile jack-of-all-trades Valiantly fixes your truck’s flat tire, Marcelino gleefully coaxes, and yes, slyly ushers “Caramelo and Guapo Gringo” (As if we’d been hailed As first-class Lucha Libre wrestlers!)

To a newly inaugurated, no-frills hotel, Where an impervious tarantula blooms, Above the lintel of our shore-blessed room,

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Like a blossoming black star In some abysmal Hammer Horror— In this bright, empty-bellied hotel, I recall, before our lively tenure As on-fire teen wrestlers, The summer-to-summer stretch That we incorrigible thespians (Acned, raring to go, and graced With ever-ready erections) Started impersonating blood-sampling “Champs and Vampires” — Count Dracula versus Barnabas Collins!— And our delightful horror show duel Suddenly veered (as if some leering demigod Or lust-inducing satyr Had waved a magic wand) Into our first heedless kisses, Our first blissed-out thrusts And quick-as-a-hare climaxes— As you recall, your tree house Was aptly christened “Collinwood West,” (You were obsessed, naturally, With that creaky-as-a-crypt-lid soap, Dark Shadows) And my own cobbled-together perch Was dubbed Lord Dracula’s Castle— Today we’re the untried inn’s Absolute first and only welcome guests, So nobody but nobody can detect Or fault my sudden gasps As our at-ease siesta, Started in separate beds, becomes More than your average August siesta— In our marvelous, semi-nervous, Yet still vigorous faux-wrestling, Followed by our surprise,

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Hello-again coupling, It’s clear as a cornet’s register: You’re a man now, Possessing a roustabout’s chest And impressive shoulders, And lo, your strong, insurgent kisses Are much surer than at fumbling fourteen: Look, how did you get inside me, Barnabas Collins? Does this mean We’re Champs and Vampires again?

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ABOUT CYRUS CASSELLS Cyrus Cassells’ six books are The Mud Actor, Soul Make a Path through Shouting, Beautiful Signor, More Than Peace and Cypresses, The Crossed-Out Swastika, and The Gospel According To Wild Indigo.

His book of Catalan translations, Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, is due from Stephen F. Austin State University Press in April 2019. He’s a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award, a William Carlos Williams Award, and a Lambda Literary Award.

ABOUT THE POEMS My six published books of poetry, multicultural and international in spirit, have been concerned with issues of justice, war, conscience, the healing of trauma, as well as the restorative power of romantic and erotic love. In addition to my study of French, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish, I have also been drawn, out of a sense of justice, to endangered languages and dialects, including Gullah, Hawaiian, and Catalan (callously banned from public use

by Franco at the close of the Spanish Civil War). I strive hard to make my poetic language precise, musical, and memorable. As poet Ellen Hinsey once asserted, “poetry is an independent ambassador for conscience: it answers to no one, it crosses borders without a passport, and it speaks the truth.” With my poetry, I like to think of myself as an intrepid AfricanAmerican ambassador working freely and fearlessly in the world.

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Sandra McPherson Henry, Praying: Sutter Psych Hospital Keeping this chair beside him — three times our day.

And at midnight, when the Cosmos reduces us to snacks, still he prays.

Mercy on tiptoes trips into his ruthless world.

He’s formal, a stately murmurer, with the longest band of gratitudes even though he must be starved. And even though he’s starving, he manages a stony ascending trail of thank-goodness-for-this, thank-heaven-for-that.

Esses whisper where teeth used to be.

No piped-in music, palliative or reverent, mistimes Henry’s peace before our viands, a hospital class act, roast au jus, not as tough to a springy knife as guys he knows from the street. Vegetables bright verde, blues swirled into yellows, squash in its home of amber rind, pallid glory of a baked underground staple.

Eyelids down, ropy strands of gray-brown-gray hair, Face washed with grace, Henry begins to eat only after he’s spared nothing.

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I am full; I pray Henry wants my roll and milk and butter.

That prayer is answered.

I remain there, with Henry’s prayer in the air: something fair’s been given him.

(You, God, don’t you dare walk out on Henry’s prayer.)

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Mad Boy In The Odorscape: Sutter Psych Hospital New jar of honey Cat’s territory Fish guts under a pier Clove — the jacks of spice Salt air over the dunes — it can reach much further in New leather shoes French fries at the boardwalk Hills of manure and barn of hay Sourdough baking — but not for ourselves alone The shoulders of a friend with no top lying in the sun Wet wool wet paint Pizza Vanilla Good skunky pot Wicked coffee In the outside world Dorothy walks by wearing Estée Lauder Soap on someone in the snow Daphne odora Silver sperm like pitch around its tree What a cat knows about catnip See Valéry And missing them, not knowing what he missed, made him go

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mad Orange tree in bloom Cedar, lumber Winter woodsmoke Match-head between thumb and index If you could smell these things you’d know who you are (I want to tell him) Since — stripped — you can’t you’ve learned the nature of God a god who turns up his nose

Note: the condition is called “anosmia.”

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Existentialist, Swimming for Linda Allen Water’s an -ism.

Pr. Linda’s bi-weekly at the pool.

Driver’s dependable Abdul.

Tiptoes choose: Not to slip on the rim.

Then surface smooth, Tense, or in facets — Linda’s in it.

She’d taught her class Camus — Not strange to adolescents — Each swore, “That’s what I am too!”

I know swimming but hardly philosophy: “Philosophy is underneath how you live and act,” A medium as full as it can muster about you.

Philosophy swims funny. At least to me.

Does it slosh around, flounder? Is it abstract without geology?

What stroke needs to follow another?

As a girl she was already free. In inlets, bays.

But she could tie its name To what she swam, existential swan-foot.

In Marin she designed her own, stone On its floor, river-rock instead of diving board.

“You need to be aware that you’re an Existentialist to be one,” Linda makes gin-clear.

For me, philosophy adds water-wings. But swimming lifts our weight:

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I carried my whole Dad across the Eel. Everyone in her Cal Extension Existentialism class Had brushes with death.

Sixteen, driving outside Vincennes, her car hit rock, rolled, Spilled her into a flood, where she tried (which side Was closer?) swimming to safety.

Her existentialism saved her.

Linda’s blue eyes are the closest cloud to land.

She’s ready to float on floes, in snow.

You need a beach towel for real meaning.

So, go get.

Linda never looks back, even at the end of the year.

In life’s floating world, Over the tide of time, Her purpose doesn’t change.

We know We exist because we catch a stranger looking us over In our swimsuit.

Sidestroke always feels You can talk to someone alongside, Even across the whole fetch.

If to exist is to swim, is to swim to exist?

But of course. Long lanes stretch our explanation.

Literary agent — yes, for a poet That is absurd, my friend.

Part of the meaning of Linda Is what Linda means to me.

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Establishments The bars in Iowa City, the taverns in Portland, AA in California.

AA in San Miguel.

George’s, The Mill, farmers lugging bagsful of morels for patrons.

Mead at eighteen in Solvang.

The liquor store every day but Sunday in Seattle. Asking Ray Carver in Evansville where is one?

He honorably did not know.

Singapore sling in Honolulu, a bumble-foot hopping at sandal-feet. Black Russian at nineteen in Mazatlán. Gin with Andrea election night. Election-related injury.

Margaritas with Dr. Malia after her long day diagnosing children.

Sazerac with Heaney, French Quarter.

Rye with cramps and bickering Harvard grad students in Somerville.

Welch’s treat in D.C. Vodka for bridge phobia corner of Golden Gate.

Vodka before crossing the Benicia bridge, fear of the maw of fog around the Mothball Fleet.

Whatever I wish I hadn’t in Wilkes Barre.

Napa wineries with Kizer and Woodbridge.

Sonoma bottles at Carolyn’s kitchen island.

“Tying One On in Vienna,” vicariously.

IV in the ER. Little bottles in luggage.

That thumbnail funnel — Page 44 - Nine Mile Magazine

a bird’s eye. Tipsy cedar waxwings, falling-down-drunk woodchuck, snails in a saucer of beer.

With birds it was mountain ashberries.

With Ashbery, nothing remembered after five, any city.

Dallas: everyone charging their bar bill to Stafford’s room.

Larry Queen’s Molotov cocktail thrown into the Blue Moon where everyone was still toasting Roethke. Holy watering hole, and we come out not quite whole without him.

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Names At Land’s End Tragedy won’t get me with the smoke of the few molassesy Filipino cigarettes I lit in graduate school and snuffed out with pregnancy.

But tobacco ate Welch, Orlen, Ray, Hip, Mariana, and Leah.

Franz, Harrison, the sweet Door County haiku-gatherer, Norbert Blei.

Georgia’s inbreath and cough.

Vern in his bacon air, heavy ham of a chair.

Good Hugh Duffield’s chains of nicotine tainting his paintings.

O’Hara toked all available flavors but his poetry sounds as if there’s nothing to worry about, until the arrow that flieth by day comes out of nowhere.

Huff drops his Camel and the whole basement goes up, two lovers burn down, ashes soaked in ashes.

Mick my snow-melter, alone in Montana, stardust gone.

Paper remains — no sweet driftwood fire on a beach: Berry tills them into his Kentucky field.

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Finishing Bill Matthews said he knew when a poem was finished.

It was like painting a floor, and you painted the floor until you got to the last corner.

Then you brushed it in.

Henry and I painted a fir floor cobalt blue.

The walls, paper pulled down, scraped, gouges filled, we swabbed white.

The day we finished, we closed the door and got in bed.

That was the night our daughter figured how to turn a doorknob.

Her feet questioned that the floor was complete.

I told the young poet who asked, How do you know when a poem is done? I told her these parallels of floors.

Well, she said, did that leave Bill stuck in a corner? And how did you get to bed over the wet floor?

I do not know.

I muffed.

You’re right — that wasn’t quite true.

There is always more to solve, like why a carpet, never?

We loved that her feet were blue.

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ABOUT SANDRA MCPHERSON Sandra McPherson has twenty collections published, including five with Ecco, three with Wesleyan, two with Illinois, and two with Ostrakon. Her new collection, Quicksilver, Cougars, and Quartz, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry Press (Ireland). Newer work appears or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Pedestal, Field, Poetry, The Iowa Review, Yale Review, Agni, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Ecotone, Cimarron, Crazyhorse, Basalt, Cirque, Palette Poetry, Plume, Red Wheelbarrow, Epoch, JuxtaProse, Vox Populi, and Antioch Review. She taught for 23 years at University of California at Davis and 4 years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her collection of 67 African-American improvisational quilts is housed at University of California at Davis Design Department. She founded Swan Scythe Press. She is the great-grand-niece of Abby Morton Diaz, Plymouth feminist author and abolitionist.

ABOUT THE POEMS This group felt, to me, as unified as an armload of flowers, old clothes, cats, a child to calm, lost friends, cherished diversions, and selfishlyclutched indebtedness to the wisdom of equals also holding themselves together.

Elements: Bill Matthews’ concept about how a poem ends, that he told me at the Aspen Writers’ Conference; my daughter on the Spectrum padded over our newly painted floor in Portland before we knew she could open a door. Raised on the wisdom of older poets, I’ve come to feel that our generation too has said things to preserve. They just stay with you, even if you don’t write them down.

The two Sutter Psych poems are from a whole mental illness manuscript, The 5150 Poems, I can’t tantalize any press to take, but it’s valuable to me because it centers on my fellow patients, whom I cared for and whose coping strategies I tried to learn from. In early 2013 I was involuntarily hospitalized for a month. The whole cycle is not depressing, I

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feel, because it cares about others and it studies myself and my dissolution at the time in order to document a crisis, brain chemistry and emotional muddle.

My dear Existentialist, Linda Allen, who is now over 90, was a literary agent, in NYC and SF, for fiction and other prose writers. I wanted to learn how her swimming and her Existentialism might overlap, so I interviewed her a few years ago. This piece evolved. I so admire her strength and balance. We laugh together.

“Establishments” is as clear as can be. I might add that I studied with Elizabeth Bishop, along with my first husband, who additionally studied with Theodore Roethke.

The smoking poem is a grievous elegy for so many of our beloveds.

With a dig at the end at a poet-tobacco-grower, I had to name names.

The group coheres because it tears me apart and reassembles me or whoever is willing to go through that “procedure.” * photo credit: Malia McCarthy

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Sandra Kolankiewicz 20 Century Petroglyph, Marietta, Ohio th

They must have used tools to do it, would have taken hours to cut so deeply through the rock, the image they created dated 1925, two Klan members side by side in their hoods, round insignias still clear, the trim at the edges of their robes carefully etched. Back then hillsides were bare, shorn of all trees for the clear cut. To create their tableau they would have stood in the sun while they carved the great, flat piece of exposed sandstone for all the faces to see from the porches of homes long since collapsed, foundations become nothing, sites marked by old fashioned snowdrops, yellow daffodils in the spring, just one old homestead leaving behind a chimney constructed from the type of composite cement that suggests one hundred and fifty years have passed since its construction out of bricks from the yard once found at the bottom of the hollow where the path now ends, the beehive kilns long forgotten, pavers smothered by asphalt.

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ABOUT SANDRA KOLANKIEWICZ Sandra Kolankiewicz’s poems have appeared widely, most recently in One, Otis Nebulae, Trampset, Concho River Review, London Magazine, New World Writing and Appalachian Heritage. Turning Inside Out was published by Black Lawrence. Finishing Line has released The Way You Will Go and Lost in Transition.

ABOUT THE POEM I have a friend with whom I go out hiking in the old watersheds of our little Ohio town. Many of the places we go used to have houses a hundred or so years ago, but because the houses were built on hillsides, they have all disappeared. Occasionally we will find daffodils poking up, an old rose bush, or some other remnant of a home, the foundation stones barefly visible in the moss and leaves. One day, however, we found this carving. We realized that whoever made it had taken a lot of time and also because of the date of the carving the hillside would have been in plain view for all of the houses to see—this would have been after the clear cutting and before the forests retook the hillsides. A very sobering find. I very much wanted to do justice to the experience.

Good old Ohio, which had never allowed slavery, outed at the same time black young men are still being targeted. I am pleased you will publish the poem and hope it contributes to a conversation about equity, humanity, and love.

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Bill Schulz Estate Sale — Eagle Pond Farm catacombs blown blown from within not so cluttered as convulsed ancestors awaken quilts spill sheds gifting whisks wooden boxes children’s blocks dominoes and peeling wallpaper those sunflowers a mason jar and Jane’s porcelain cats on the sill

in

should be poetry enough

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Splinters I fell in the old henhouse playing submarine though in August it was hot and dry and smelled of manure, feathers and straw.

Hands full of splinters I climbed the long hill to the house where my father waited having heard my cries.

Taking my hands in his one good hand he said some of these we can get with a quick flick but some are deep under your skin and will take time.

And though the pain was almost gone I cried because he was there with me and I cried for the shame of falling and I cried for the splinters that remained deep in my flesh.

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Vin Santo that New Year’s Eve we stood on the hill above the vineyard watching fireworks rise above the lake from Pieve to Anghiari later in the stillness of the barn the cat chasing our shadows on the wall a moment so full if today we could talk we’d agree we had no better earlier at the bar in Caprese Michelangelo we couldn’t decide what to drink to the new year vin santo an old man said holding up his glass certo vin santo

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ABOUT BILL SCHULZ Bill Schulz lives in Portland, Maine, despite periodic attempts to leave for good. His work has recently appeared in The Aurorean, The Esthetic Apostle, High Shelf, Nine Mile, and Nixes Mate. He received a Master’s in English from the poetry workshop at The University of New Hampshire and a Master’s in Theological Studies from The Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley, California 40 years later. He is the editor of The Hole In The Head Review.

ABOUT THE POEMS Last Spring in a Proustian burst of nostalgic ambition, I set out to write down everything I could remember about my life. Among the day-to-day memories - Harry Belafonte’s Carnegie Hall Concert playing on the radio in my Dad’s Fairlane 500 convertible while I rode in the back seat with sisters and cousins on a perfect summer night in 1961; a huge bumble bee slamming into a window of my physics class in high school; watching LSDassisted northern lights from the roof of my prep school dorm, there were these elevated highlights that I carried with me for decades: a Dylan spotting on the Mass Pike in 1972; touching LBJ’s hand as he passed by in a Lincoln Continental following an appearance in Portland in ‘67; John Irving reading Pension Grilpartzer from a draft of Garp; beers with Ann Beattie after a reading in Durham; sitting next to Vic Damone in the owner’s box at Fenway Park on the day Bobby Doerr’s number was retired.

And then there was the memory of drinking short beers with Kurt Vonnegut in a tavern just off the NY State Thruway in Geneva. The memory was there as it always seemed to be...but the details of what must have been a fascinating conversation on a hot late spring afternoon just wouldn’t come. After extensive fact-checking with those I believed were with me on that afternoon, it came out that, in fact, this time with Vonnegut never happened - at least on this plane of existence.

Perhaps it’s age, perhaps it is a sign of a leaky memory or maybe I just haven’t paid much attention to my life. Was there really a huge bumble bee?

Dylan coming out of Howard Johnson’s? Vic Damone? Well, yes - Vic, who was wearing sunglasses like people wear after cataract surgery autographed a baseball.

These are three poems of memory.

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Rita Rouvalis Chapman Near Salt River Road: An Elegy For S. D. I’d say every word of this is true if I could.

But I can say that the facts are true, that a man was struck and killed on the unlit bottomland of 370 that night. He was hit walking away from his truck, rolled up into the clean new air.

Nobody knows more than that, but, really, we all thought he was just another deer during those twelve sacramental hours, during the sunlit hour when I drove through his body.

His body: plain print — no, a libretto opera-ed open to the unsymbolic haze of a Missouri day.

An atomic circle dissolved in all distances, a body radiated.

Few of us become an arc, a starburst, an expansion of blooms reaching across the rims of our destinations.

We took up his body with our bodies and it has been woven Page 56 - Nine Mile Magazine

into each of us, and I don’t know where I’ve taken him but I know we all must carry each other in the end.

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By These Waters Spilling, I walked into myself like a river, ribcage swung open as if to offer an escape, a way through.

I felt the water’s tough little bones and heard the shush-shush of snow falling through the November. My footprints in the snow uncoiled behind me, each a fleeting pool of crushed raindrops.

As I peel myself from my own skin I’m afraid I’m transparent, neither visible nor invisible, seen and then unseen – There’s an ache across my shoulders from folding, being folded in half and in half again, slipped into the water like a stone.

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ABOUT RITA ROUVALIS CHAPMAN Rita Rouvalis Chapman’s poetry has appeared most recently in Antiphon, Laurel Review, The Connecticut River Review, and the anthology 56 Days of August. She teaches high school English.

ABOUT THE POEMS Aesthetically, these are all addressing on some level the hegemony of the body in a life driven by mind and spirit. I hope they reveal a voice that is not sure of her subject, but wants to be, and I hope they are a little bit beautiful.

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Katelyn Delvaux My Mother Starred In M*A*S*H Reruns Joined the Navy out of high school and shipped to the Gulf. A medical team: sharp edges and white and guns but no guns. I remember her uniform dark as Virginia night, a few paperbacks floating in her purse. She’d come home smelling of engine oil and cigarettes, and we’d lay out on the living room rug, a plate of crackers and jar of peanut butter between us. The tv a bridge between a child and newly-single-mother-of-two. In that flicker of war and medicine, I saw her for the first time: staving off gray with boxes of dye. The tight draw of need pulling at her eyes. And there was Burns in the background. Never enough man for Hotlips Houlihan—his weak chin and sniveling smile a disgrace too great for my five-year-old heart. She deserved a laugh that was crisp at the edges, a man of brick and teeth and coffee and everything impenetrable. Some nights I catch her walking to the mess tent, Burns written off, and her eyes don’t seem so tight.

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People Tell Me I Remind Them Of

-a Chesapeake Bay Retriever -a dentist two towns over -the night their car stalled on the bridge and they had to jump it in the dark, the wind shoving fistfuls of hair up their nose and they thought they would stumble into traffic to die

-their mother, that bitch -those math problems that look like a PEMDAS fix but quickly turn into a fight

-that box of matches from a camping trip you never got around to, now kitchen matches for the gas stove you’ll never own

-three words: taxidermied mice chess -that moment the world goes tornado green -generational decay -her life before divorce and child support, before the Navy and SUVs, when she was happy getting high behind a Jack in the Box before second shift

-geode bookends and frizzy paintbrushes -the kid in fourth grade who made a diorama of Egyptian burial practices, toilet-papered Barbie looming godlike over Polly Pocket who had just scrambled her brains

-homeostasis, in all its buoyant frailty

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After She Died, We’d Visit In Dreams Usually my own, but sometimes my sister’s or in the visions of people I would know four years from now. My favorite was when we watched my mother reenact her winter formal, big hair and bigger sleeves, her mother narrating: She worked on that dress for weeks.

All for a boy who was afraid of rabbits.

We’d squat on dream porches and retell stories I’d worshiped as a child from underneath her kitchen table, too young to know anything worth hearing, old enough to want the ears. No one ever heard us scratching about the back end of their heads.

Now she visits only when I can’t remember a recipe or the name of the foal we lost to coyotes the summer the rain ran out.

The day she forgets, I will take over.

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ABOUT KATELYN DELVAUX Katelyn Delvaux’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Split Lip, Menacing Hedge, Watershed Review, formercactus, New Territory, and more. She currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri where she teaches composition and literature, and in between grading, she also serves on the poetry staff for Rivet. Katelyn’s poems have received multiple nominations for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes, while her scholarly work has earned her fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Poetry Foundation. More can be found at www.katelyndelvaux.com.

ABOUT THE POEMS Too often when we hear the word “conversation” we think of a sprawling back-and-forth exchange that perfectly encapsulates a relationship, garnished with neatly tied bows of changed minds, a threecourse meal of chatting. But in my experience, conversations are rarely so whole. They’re fragmented, cut short, hurried, imagined, rambling, or left unsaid entirely. Many of my poems revolve around this type of communication and the wiggle room that allows for fanciful thought. “My Mother Starred in M*A*S*H Reruns” inhabits that space of childhood where we try to piece together who our parents are outside of their obligations to us; I don’t know how many nights I sat quietly, statue still in the corner of the kitchen hoping the grown ups would forget I existed so I could hear their talk. Children learn on the sly or in quiet moments like the one in the poem. “After She Died, We’d Visit in Dreams” takes this to another level—those close familial bonds that leave echoes of loved ones in your dreams. We spend most our lives gathering snippets of information passed on through the generations, and when you lose an elder, part of that grief is for lost stories. But nothing beats the conversations that show you who you are. People love to tell you who you are to them, especially strangers—train stations, hospitals, getting drinks after a conference, they are compelled to tell you this in various ways, always revealing more about themselves in the process, and it’s fascinating.

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Dave Taylor Gravel Parking Lot I sit at a table pressed against the outer brick wall of the diner, where my children color placemats and play tic-tac-toe.

I count the number of exits in this place, how many seconds it would take for me to break free from the overweight man wearing overalls and the tall man in stained jeans and hat.

They drove up with a confederate flag erect on their truck bed before walking in to join three friends.

They claim the space for themselves as their heads motion towards me while I shade in a yellow flower my daughter drew on her napkin.

I count how many fists it would take before I’d finally fall to the floor from the weight of their oppression.

When I was younger, I could manage to get to my car with only a few bruises, but now I’m not so sure.

And I’d still have to get my kids to the van, make sure they were buckled in car seats, and their favorite Disney song was playing.

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But first we would need to make it past the two men and their friends, to the gravel parking lot where the streetlight flickers.

And as I count the number of times I’ve met men like these, I wonder whether my children will end up doing the same.

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Renner’s Poem I never could write a poem about you being born or watching you grow up.

Not because I don’t want to, but because I’d never be happy with the simple words spilled on the page.

I could never capture watching you stumble for your first breath, how your body laid limp and silent until the nurses forced you to breathe.

I’ve never even told your mother about how fragile your hands looked being carried away from us.

I had to stay strong, pretend to have faith for the three of us, so we could hear your cry.

And when you finally did, the universe shook.

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Anya You were born dead before I even met you.

Your body broken and too weak to remain.

I imagine what you’d be like at the park climbing outstretched trees in winter.

Filling cold air with your breath.

But I only have a blurred photo from the doctor that rests in a shoebox in the attic.

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America I scrape my brain to erase the memory of a white man calling me nigger.

His silhouette stood in the sun and shadow grew across the pavement of the grocery store parking lot.

I wanted to say something to defend myself, the history of my ancestors, but I was alone and only ten years old.

I didn’t realize the weight his words carried in the air but still felt the suffering these syllables created.

I watched him walk away, feeling shackled by history and the whiteness of its pages.

I told my mother when I got home, hoping she would understand.

But she told me this is America, that my skin must learn to scar, so I can’t feel the whip carried by men like him.

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ABOUT DAVE TAYLOR David M. Taylor’s work has appeared in various magazines such as Albany Poets, Califragile, Misfit Magazine, Philosophical Idiot, Rat’s Ass Review, and Trailer Park Quarterly. He’s been a featured poet on KRCU’s “Poetry on the Air” series as well as a judge for several literary contests. He was also a finalist for the 2017 Annie Menebroker Poetry Award, and his most recent poetry chapbook is entitled Growing up Black. He currently serves as editor of Black Coffee Review (www.blackcoffeereview.com/)

ABOUT THE POEMS I grew up a child of the 80s when the country was engaged in a social war against black people, the gay community, the poor, and the addicted. As a kid, I just assumed people calling you racial slurs or treating you differently based on your skin was a part of life. And in many ways, my poetry explores the struggles I’ve had growing up a black man in America as well as raising children in a racially divided country. However, because I was viewed primarily based on my skin color, I’ve understood the realities that bind us together. It’s the same grit and dirt and rawness that make us human.

In my poems, I try to stay true to the experience being depicted while overlaying it with the perspective I have now reflecting on the situation. I want my poems to place the reader in various situations but also show they’re all grounded in the experiences of trying to navigate through life and society. It’s a balancing act, and I think (hope) the poems selected for the issue accomplish this.

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Charles Casey Martin A House In The Air —del vallenato Rafael Escalona I’ll build you a house in the air.

Not a house held up by tricks, suspended from piano wire or supported by rods that pass through tree trunks, through nests and branches and clouds, to anchor the house in the air to the earth. Because if it’s a house in the air it should have foundations and a cornerstone there.

Inside the house in the air I’ll build a cage in the air. I’ll build doors, four of them: red macaws and green-headed parrots will fly through the door of the house in the air, through the front door of the cage in the air, from the back door of the cage and from the back door of the house, and that’s all that will hold them in their cage in the house in the air.

Your neighbors will be astronauts and flocks of crows and the aurora borealis will illuminate the basement stairs.

Your doorbell will be an owl.

But there won’t be a key because there won’t be a lock because in a house in the air there’s no place for a thief to hide.

And if a graveyard were possible there, it would look like a dormitory of hammocks, hammocks hung in the air, and all the victims of assassinations and siestas would float within your reach like beautiful assistants levitated by a magician in a black cape.

And if you wanted you could wake them and invite them up, up into your house in the air.

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I’ll build a skylight in the floor and I’ll build the chimney upside-down and you’ll live amidst the kites and the radio waves and the ascending prayers of the devout.

And because there won’t be a shovel there won’t be a grave. And the rain will fall past the garden, and the flowers will be parachutes, and the salt will be fireworks, and the earthworms sparrows, and the snakes will all have wings.

Because you’re my school, my church, my museum and my skyscraper, I’ll build you a house in the air, where the orchid plants its feet halfway to the sky and makes its stand.

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Quipu Yours and mine is like one of the stories that the Inca, ingenious weavers, sons, grandsons and great-grandsons of ingenious weavers, told in knots.

A quipu’s colors mean something.

The pattern of threads in the yarn from which it’s woven adds meaning.

And so do the directions of its knots and the choice of fiber, cotton or wool.

Slender story lines tied to the primary narrative, dyed and radiating from it everywhichway, contribute digressions, exposition, refinements, anecdote, metaphor, illustrations, appendices.

You read a quipu with your eyes, or by touch, or you employ a third sense, as the storyteller, daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter of a storyteller, retells the story for a third time, her breath in the firelight made visible by the temperatures at these mountain altitudes.

A quipu dictionary would look to us like a scrawled net dragged from the equipment closet before a volleyball match.

Or like tackle thrown into the bed after fishermen paddle in from the lake and tie the canoe to the pickup with double half-hitches and trucker’s hitches.

The quipu’s grammar, alphabet and vocabulary are our grammar, alphabet and vocabulary when we read each other in the dark.

We say in our language that discourse contains a thread.

And sometimes we still call a legend yarn

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and imagine that as we tell a tale we spin that tale.

A plot unravels, or, if it doesn’t, twists, tangles and hitches.

We fabricate a lie.

I may say that I give you my word and that my word is my bond and that that word and that bond are bound up in story, child, grandchild and great-grandchild of an Incan story: Tonight, like Atahualpa kidnapped by Pizarro, I place my finger on a stone at 2 meters 60 from the floor on the wall of my cell and promise to fill it to here for you, once with gold, twice with silver.

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John Lennon I liked John Lennon better when he was bitter, mean and cynical.

“Got to be good-lookin’ ’cause he’s so hard to see” not “Imagine all the people living life in peace.”

I liked that other John, Juan Luis Guerra, a lot better before he found Jesus. ¡Hu-la-’ey! not ¡Aleluya!

I liked Jesus a lot better when he was a man not the Messiah. “The meek shall inherit . . .” not “The poor ye shall have with thee always.”

And the poor? I like and I shall always like the poor because when your girlfriend leaves her purse behind on the bed and the girl comes to clean the room after you check out, all she finds missing when she returns it to her are the thirty dollars and the thirty quetzales.

She’s left behind the ID and the plastic, the passport and the visa. Which seems fair. And—myself—I like fair.

I liked myself a lot better before I thought to ask myself whether or not I liked myself. And found that I didn’t.

Not much. Or, worse, that I did. Too much.

It’s like this: many have been crushed by car tires and many more pecked in the back through the heart and devoured by gulls because so many were drawn by artificial lights away from and not toward the sea.

I like the few that by luck recognize the moon. I like them that manage to flop and flail a short distance in the sand on feet meant for swimming. I like them best that come to understand that from whence salt cometh cometh likewise the likes of me.

Verily.

Imagine. ¡Hu-la-’ey!

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Los ilegales de Los Tigres del Norte San Pedro, gatekeeper, patron saint of wetbacks, make the river narrower, the night deeper, tell the sun to show some mercy as it crosses.

If there’s a God, Saint Peter, ask Him what He’s waiting for. If there’s a golden key, make it turn the other way for once. And if there really is A Book Where Everything is Written, let it include the undocumented.

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Elián González At Ninety I have a poster from that time. While I was away a copy hung in every shop in Havana.

I’m wearing a sailor’s blouse for little boys or more likely my school uniform—white with a black neckerchief.

Devuelven a Elián a su pupitre. A su patria. A La Habana. (“Return little Elián to his schooldesk! To his homeland! To Havana!”)

They fought to keep me. You are in Paradise, I remember them telling me.

How can you even think of going back?

Now that I’m an old man, at ninety, I walk here on the Malecón.

I smoke my tabacos. I see the waves break, sometimes violently, over the sea wall, and the salt spray fly up and strike the facades of buildings on the other side of the avenida.

I know that they have their origin back there, across the water, when I see how mercilessly they’ve dissolved the pink and turquoise paint and even the stone underneath, and how they’re capable of erupting from below the street and dislodging iron sewer grates that bounce and clang across the avenue like pesos God dropped paying for a bus.

In U.S. miles the distance is ninety. I go there and back at least once a day now. I cross tied to a raft of memories. I watch myself grow smaller and smaller in the distance until I disappear. And then I see myself arriving from the other shore, a little boy, and I welcome him. I tell him to stay.

Decián a mi mujer, Pa’tora.

We were married, Pastora and I, for forty years.

I worked as a teacher. On Sundays we came here and sat together on the sea wall and looked out over the Straits to Miami, where our children live.

We waited in the cola like anyone else. At the market, the cola, and at the money exchange. The cola for Coppelia.

For visas, for bread, the cola. Often I wished I’d stayed in Paradise when I had the chance, back then, in the last year of the previous century.

I might live to see another. Three centuries? It could happen.

But probably I will die instead like my favorite cafetería esquina

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that closed when its owners got old and none of the children wanted to work.

During the last weeks before it finally shut for good, they kept running out of one thing and then another, pork and sugar and coffee, and it was sad the way reliable customers continued to turn up for a last meal of surviving things and to say good-bye. Is tomorrow the last day?

I can hardly believe it after all these years. It’s tragic, isn’t it? I’m so sorry.

And then one day we went there and the door was locked and soon the landlords had painted out the old familiar name and no one thought of the place anymore, or rarely.

I lived in a very exciting time. My country settled its differences with the world.

For a while I was even famous.

But I don’t think of myself as anyone special.

Don’t we all feel a certain way about the time when we were young?

From those years we bring with us one particular memory like a widow in a long black dress crossing the street to the cemetery with a bright pink flower for her husband’s grave.

They say it will be a paradise there. But I know better. I’ve been already.

In my mind the afterlife and my life before have become the same.

If we’re speaking of forever, or even of ninety years; of ninety miles or the infinite distance between us and God, my answer will never change.

If they try to keep me I’ll say what I’ve said all along: Let me go. Send me back.

Que devuelven a Elián a su pupitre. A su patria. A La Habana.

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ABOUT CHARLES CASEY MARTIN Charles Casey Martin was born in the Texas panhandle and raised in Texas and Arizona. He received a BFA in Drawing and Painting from Arizona State University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. His poems, fiction and drawings have appeared in many publications, including The Agni Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, The Antioch Review, and Crazyhorse, and in the anthology Working Classics. Viking/Penguin published his novel, Godchildren, in 1990. From 1986 to 2010 he designed books for a variety of publishing houses, including Sarabande Books, Simon & Schuster, Harper and Rowe, and Penguin/Putnam. He has traveled widely in Latin America, to Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Ecuador.

From 2010 until 2019, he worked as a Peace Corps and Peace Corps Response volunteer in Central and South America—Peru, Panama, El Salvador, and Colombia. He contributed to projects that grew cacao and produced chocolate, raised criollo ducks, dug wells, ran power lines, and marketed the work of artisans in rural communities such as Inkawasi, Perú, a Quechua-speaking municipality at 10,000 feet in the Andes.

ABOUT THE POEMS My poems tend to be strongly narrative, Biblical (in the storytelling not the ideological sense), and autobiographical. The poems are about specific places, earlier in my life American places where I grew up and lived, more recently American places south of there. I was trained as a visual artist and images are crucial to my writing. I work toward the clarity of images, details, and anecdote; to me the clearer an image becomes, the more diverse become its meanings. I think an engaging surface is important. Poems need surface to attract the reader and murky depths to swallow the reader whole.

I have been known to draw inspiration from popular-music forms such as Colombian vallenato, Panamanian típica, cumbia, salsa, merengue, and Hank Williams-era country. Radio music is the poetry of rednecks, hillbillies, peones, and trailer trash, and those are my people.

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Ralph James Savarese Face Time With The President 1. Kitchen Cabinet For years, I served in my father’s administration, begrudgingly, dutifully. In a minor cabinet post to be sure: Secretary of the Interior, guardian of wild rumination, defender of endangered feeling.... I’d been duped by my President’s smile, lured from the comfortable sinecure, the truly private sector, of baby food and diapers by the soft rhetoric of devotion and, I’m embarrassed to admit, the simple promise of attention. Yet my President was rarely around and almost never available.

For one thing, he had another job as a balding bigwig in a large ANTI-TRUST law firm. (Why the voters never penalized his lack of commitment remains a mystery. I certainly wondered if he really wanted to be President.)

A litigator who not only courted but stalked publicity and who became his firmament’s managing partner, he resembled nothing so much as a gleaming, dictatorial cliche.

Like an action figure from Hasbro, Lawyer-man came complete with Porsche, country-club membership, and a spectacular palace high above the Potomac (heart not included). By age seven, my official portfolio was sulking. At cabinet meetings, I’d be dismissed as irrational, unmeasured, and, the one I like best, insufficiently loyal.

“Why can’t you get with the program?”

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my President would shout. “Why can’t you be like the others—sufficiently fawning?” Sometimes, when a discussion grew heated, my President would accost me, hurling my head against a wall like some official in Iraq whom Saddam himself had decided personally to reprimand (the Supreme Commander wanting to be sure everyone understood his supreme dissatisfaction).

More often than not, I’d have just come to the defense of the First-Of-Many-Ladies, who despised her husband. After such a meeting, I’d pick myself up with as much dignity as a humiliated cabinet member could muster and wander out to the deck behind our palace.

There, in the ordinary spectacle of the falls, I’d find a form of solace. The river hardly ever seemed ruffled: it just kept falling, just kept babbling its subtle protest. (Safely in high school, I’d come to think of the river as an exasperated Gandhi, practicing its civil disobedience, offering up its murmurous indictment, and occasionally swallowing a swimmer or seven.)

To the right, at a distance, lived Elliot Richardson, Nixon’s Attorney General; to the left, Francis Carlucci, Reagan’s National Security Advisor.

The neighborhood, if you could call it that, was filled with the rich and sourful.

I remember seeing Mr. Richardson regularly on his deck a year or so after he’d resigned.

He seemed to share my habit of investigating the falls. Once, he even waved to me, as if understanding my plight. “Mr. Richardson,” I called out to him, “Mr. Richardson,” but not before he had turned to go inside.

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Mostly, we embattled politicos kept to ourselves. Years later, when the Gipper came to Mr. Carlucci’s house for dinner, the river filled with Secret Service agents: some were in pontoon boats, some were actually in the heckling water itself. We’d been instructed to remain indoors that evening, and, hence, from a window with the lights off, I watched the convoluted operation: suited secrecy like a colonizing mist. “They’re here to protect me,” my President announced, and, for a moment, it seemed as if there had been some sort of extraordinary mix-up, as if—could it be?— the Advance Team had gotten not only the wrong address but also the wrong man. After all, my President was President! And yet, as much as my President seemed to require protection, he also seemed, through some feat of personal psychology, to have rendered such protection obsolete. Less a human flack-jacket than a holograph or phantom, he just couldn’t be gotten to. Still, I responded, “Protect you from what? Your family?” By this point, about halfway through my President’s fifth term, I’d begun to fight back at cabinet meetings, to the horror of the First-Of-Many-Ladies, who plaintively reminded me again and again that I served at the pleasure of the President.

Yet even as I loathed my President, I stupidly searched for him, fancying myself the Secretary of His Interior: a vast space, from what I imagined, given over to developers of a distinctly egotistical and commercial persuasion. Rather, he was like Alaska at the turn-of-the-century—in need of surveying. Except none of the surveyors

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had ever made it back: all of them lost in the dark and cold, all of them dead from hypothermia.

Their tiny, frozen tents entombed by snow. When I say that I wouldn’t have wanted even a distant ambassadorship—something on the Island of Oedipal Relief or in the Republic of Reciprocal Devotion—you shouldn’t believe me. For there I was, having never been confirmed, having never even really been appointed, clamoring like all of the other sycophants for face time with the President.

2. Sacred Constitution Not once but twice I dreamt that my siblings and I were my President’s teeth, assembled for a dreaded policy meeting (read: tribute to the King).

A darker, danker, more crowded and malodorous room you cannot imagine! My President had, by this point, let his pearly White House go.

Periodontitis had marched into the capital like the British in 1812. At first we molars resembled something of a compost heap and, then, a sewage drain. You couldn’t be anywhere near us so badly did we stink. A man of his resources, his unwavering self-regard, refusing to engage a dentist? Who more needed a chaplain to the lateral and central incisors, a father confessor to the delicate, vascular pulp—the soul!— that lay inside? His refusal perplexed me. After all, my President had built himself a gym, hired a personal trainer, attended to his pecs, his abs, his quads, his calves—those lovely grounds around the People’s House. Why not his teeth? (The members of my President’s firmament were similarly perplexed and, though worried about their corporate face,

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were simply too embarrassed to say anything.

Once, at a party, a junior partner asked me if my President had ever seen a dentist.) Surely, this refusal had to do with his pathological penchant for control. No celestial ruler could lie prostrate in a chair, someone else’s hands inside his policy meeting. Nor could he tolerate a sanctimonious sermon on neglect— having to play the part of the toothy schoolboy who hadn’t studied for his test. Picture Everyking before his daily grave, the morning mirror, willfully missing the hissing message of decay.

Was there no limit to what my President could overlook? In the dream, he’s eating sour balls and discoursing on himself. The sugar’s killing us—such sickly sweet self-adulation!

I want to stage a coup. I want to be his tongue, the Chief of Staff! Make him formulate some other words: a simple sentiment I’ve never heard; make him renounce his fundamental loyalty, his sacred constitution, like those televised P.O.W.s in Vietnam. And yet surely, like them, he’d be able to signal with his eyelids that he wasn’t being genuine: “I do not love them; I love myself."

“I do not love them; I love myself,” batted meticulously in Morse Code. Over the years, we nearly all were fired or resigned. I went out like Mr. Richardson in a phase of glory: a kind of Saturday Night Massacre—a principled extraction against my President’s foul deceitfulness. (He’d tried to screw the First-Of-Many-Ladies in a divorce settlement.) Only my shameless sister remained, like Kissinger with Nixon, waiting for that final helicopter: death’s noisy but ever so agile touchdown.

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My President’s career long over; his body gone to the dogs (his money, though, still working out furiously on a treadmill at the bank). She was, I now think, that yellowed but stubborn front tooth in the rotten oval office of his mouth.

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College Trip He’s like an ATM in a rainstorm, spitting out money— so much wet dough, so many smackers— then gobbling it back up again.

Or he’s like a cow in the long green, the whispering fields of moolah. Corporate America’s kinky ruminant chewing—no, licking— his cud.

This man is my father.

I’d throw up if I weren’t already doing so.

I have the stomach flu.

I’m moaning softly; he’s moaning loudly.

We’re a veritable chorus.

Talk about irrational exuberance!

(Where is Alan Greenspan when you need him?)

My father might as well be Tony Soprano who used his daughter’s college trip to whack a rival.

The room shrinks to the size of his 911 Porsche.

It rounds a curve, and I wretch.

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We’re parallel lines with no transversal— one pleasure, one pain—a diseased geometry.

The wastebasket takes my temperature; the curtains bring me a glass of water.

The next day, I offend the very sandals— and toes!— of the Williams College interviewer.

On the floor, my gross domestic product, a chunk of ill-digested sausage, glares at me.

As I leave, I hear the interviewer say to a colleague, “What a nervous young man!”

I won’t get in, won’t ever get out of that gas-pedal room.

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The Columnist 1. Scare Course I What is a chickenhawk? Well, I am not talking about a bird or a cartoon character. A chickenhawk is someone who beats the drums of war; someone willing to send others off to fight and die in wars when they, themselves, have never served in uniform.

—Henrietta Bowman Who says poetry makes nothing happen?

Neither flaccid on war nor flaccid on etymology, he got paid for putting words in Tricky Dick’s mouth: a gig—or is it a gag?— that still gets him off.

The great contrarian apologist for scoundrels of a conservative bent, Arch-fiend Lucifer’s witty lieutenant who somehow excused himself Before the Fall.

Ever since, he’s made of language a correctional facility, a Federal pen, a war zone—flying in on Sunday mornings, like Dubya to Baghdad, to rally his lexicographical troops and reserve grammarians. Scare Course I having to land on an unlit page, its own lights turned low for fear of anti-prose craft missiles.

So much bravado! The columnist in the mess hall of human history. His troops still smarting from a string of losses: rocket-propelled run-ons, improvised explosive fragments, not to mention subject-verb disagreements of a neo-colonial variety.

And all around, whispers of a pointless war.

“Language on!” he exhorts his fellow chickenhawks.

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2. Touring Talent When I was writing witty put-downs of the left-stooping media…in the late 60’s and early 70’s…I was convinced the red snide…would be turned back and a new era of enlightened government stewardship by well-meaning, if somewhat flawed, rich white men would stay the course of this country. And then those bungling idiots made a little too much noise at Larry O’Brien’s and it took eight years, and a well-timed hostage crisis, to right the ship of state. —William Safire I sing of the columnist’s son who sang with me in a barbershop quartet called “The Bearitones”— that’s B-E-A-R-itones (our high school mascot was the bears; hence, the neon pun). We were, you’ll forgive me, truly unbearable, even on our hind legs and with our eye-teeth flashing.

Like politicians who can’t stay on message, we couldn’t stay on key— not for the life of us (nor, alas, for the death of our prey).

“It’s the harmony, stupid! The harmony!”

Four rich kids trying to get into college, we’d donated our services to an organization named “Touring Talent,” which provided uplift to old folks’ homes and state mental hospitals— holiday sneer, as one of us put it back then.

The columnist must have scoffed at the highly regulated markets of adolescent upward mobility.

Down with betterment programs! Down with compulsory volunteerism!

But he had to have understood his child’s advantage: how much easier for a private school kid to appear more socially concerned than for a public school one to appear more academically prepared— the latter like the inferior goods of a crumbling, state-run industry in need of the Iron Lady’s fist.

“Relax,” he might have told himself, “it’s a virtuefor-profit venture, one sure to pay off in the long run, what with the value of an Ivy-league degree.”

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for a rock band—thoughts of college admission (and Alzheimer’s patients) far from our minds.

It was art for art’s sake, compassion on holiday.

One particular Saturday night, we set up in an abandoned lot in Georgetown, between a bank and a Chinese restaurant. Before the cops came to shut us down, we had a pretty good groove going: a crowd of maybe a hundred applauding and dancing to our version of “Twist and Shout.”

As back-up singers we couldn’t do that much damage to the melody, and what damage we could do our equipment kindly obscured. The party platform: “It’s the noise, stupid! The noise!”

A few days later, the columnist shocked us all by mentioning the concert in one of his columns. He wrote of the “gathering multitudes at M Street and Wisconsin”— the voice half-Ed Sullivan, half-Old Testament prophet.

It seemed a plug any band would die for.

We were seventeen and in the New York Times!

But you could tell from the tone how much he disdained popular culture. (Where some band members saw a laurel, I saw a noose, hyperbole’s hangman.)

Moreover, the prig hadn’t actually heard us sing, not in either of our incarnations. How tempting to think of the gesture as a touching betrayal of aesthetic principles, a father’s love winning out at last but in a currency, a tender shall we say, that no discerning treasury could recognize? What?

To be written about with the same corrosive sarcasm the man reserved for Democrats? Recently, the columnist has endeavored to be more genuine, praising the 43 President’s “moving exposition of the noble goals of American foreign policy” and adding, rd

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for his readers’ edification, “A carefully constructed speech, like a poem or a brief or a piece of music, has a shape that helps make it memorable.”

(When he speaks of a “piece of music,” he isn’t, I assure you, thinking of “Twist and Shout.”)

This gem of the first water is only too thankful to have witnessed the second restoration of Republican valor.

And all it took was some hanging chads and a partisan court to usher in an age of militaristic sincerity.

The red snide gone, the blue snide having found a candidate who so butchers the language he must be genuine—stupidity having become a kind of messianic movement. (“Does anybody here speak English?” a public school kid cries, his unarmored humvee in flames, his comrade bleeding on the ground.) So what if the columnist betrays his own intelligence?

After all, the ventriloquist gets to manipulate the dummy.

Cheer up, poor reader, the columnist has also lived to see his son become a populist. The alumni magazine reports my former classmate is now “Director of User Experience Research” at a computer firm.

His job: “usability improvement,” the Arthurian “quest for a user-friendly screen.”

O, Guinevere, can life really offer up such ironies?

The son of the Usage Czar wanting to make communication easier for the common practitioner?

What next? A virtual egalitarianism? But lest anyone imagine too much conflict in the Safire household, I should confess that my classmate’s also grown up to be a rich white man, that most bi-partisan of achievements.

I know. Who am I to talk? Who am I to write poetry?

What does it matter if sons rebel?

What of that rebellion? I, for instance, am the most nostalgic

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and ineffectual of things: a left-stooping academic.

(As my father once quipped, “Those who can, screw; those who can’t, preach.”)

This afternoon, listening to the columnist blather on about the up-coming election, I was reminded of the time we Bearitones were heckled during a Touring Talent performance.

An old man with stringy hair, in a wheel chair, dentures literally in hand, shouted, “I won’t listen to this!

I’ve had enough!” While trying to keep the base line going, the columnist’s son whispered, “Just keep singing.

Just keep singing.” And we did— until the man was removed.

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ABOUT RALPH SAVARESE Ralph James Savarese is the author of two books of nonfiction, Reasonable People and See It Feelingly. His poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Fourth Genre, New England Review, Ploughshares, Rattle, Sewanee Review, and Southwest Review, among other places. He teaches at Grinnell College.

ABOUT THE POEMS These poems are part of a collection I've been working on for almost a decade. It's called Republican Fathers. Because my father was both a rich Republican and a violent narcissist, a link formed in my mind between party affiliation and parental performance. At school and at church, that link was ratified. My history teacher spoke of “Republican Fathers,” and I promptly imagined Richard Nixon beating his children. (Rumors persist that he beat his wife, Pat.) With the rise of evangelical Christianity, God had become a Republican, and he, too, was a dad—an absent, nasty one who denounced gays and lesbians and, of course, women who had abortions.

The link, of course, was faulty. It was based on an improper understanding of the adjective “republican” and a wild literalization of the noun “father.” To me, the latter could never be just a metaphor—a way to give flesh to abstraction. (I had all the flesh I needed, and it hurt!) To say that Republicans make terrible papas is like eating ice cream in the rain and then forever connecting the two. And yet, where I lived as a teen, on the banks of the Potomac River, just two miles from Washington, DC, it seemed to rain all of the time. In these poems, I seek to invert the old feminist adage "the personal is political." Could I write poems of outrage, using autobiography, that had a wider resonance? That's the question I've been asking myself.

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Darrah Cloud Rescue Squad When the call comes in, it’s for a name the dispatcher gets wrong but I know the address and if I could get out of bed faster I would and if I could fly to his house I would but my heart is roaring so loud I can’t hear and my hands are shaking so hard I can’t pull on my pants and my running shoes, grab my keys or run to my car to get to the station to answer in time and the siren wails on and on like a mother who is losing her son, and his neighbor, listening in on the scanner, wonders in bed if this one will kill him, if now the racist yard signs will come down, as Darrin, the other EMT, on his bike because of the DUI, on his way to his shift at the all-night diner five miles out of town, turns around at the top of the hill and heads back down and the siren wails and wails and wails: for God’s sake someone answer, someone get there in time.

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The Adventurer’s Club Goes To The Track My how the countryside spits past and the bus rocks like a cradle in the hills.

My hip has forgotten pain and so has my elbow and my knee.

I’m so glad I’m not sitting next to Barbara, she talks too much about her husband who is right behind us with his hearing aid off.

I’ve lived here 83 years I know by heart all the shortcuts to the thruway and every bump in the road.

This guy pumps his brakes too much and the bathroom smells all the way up here I won’t be going back there this trip.

I’ve got forty bucks and a racing form.

The goldenrod blooms everywhere, not just my yard.

How by the hour I used to dream about leaving home.

Where would I have gone?

Some place where no one knew my father or what he did to his kids, some place where concerts stood for catbirds, paintings for hayfields, rank for hand-made wooden ladders and fog-blue hills.

Or maybe a place where the sheep could talk and tell me what they heard at night coming from the house and that I’d be all right if I stayed with them, I’d already made it that far to the field and maybe there I could find a husband like a four-leaf clover one I would not lose to cancer or drink, only something brief like the races, and every day I’d watch the horses shining down the track exhaling great masses of air in a song only for me so that I would never be able to go home.

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ABOUT DARRAH CLOUD Darrah Cloud’s full-length play, Turning, will be produced in March 2020 at Centenary Stage. Her lyrics for the musical Sabina will be heard when it opens at Portland Stage in May 2020. Our Suburb premiered at Theater J in Washington, DC in 2014. Joan The Girl of Arc premiered at Cincinnati Playhouse in January, 2014, then toured. Other plays produced in New York, Europe and across the U.S. include What's Bugging Greg?, The Stick Wife, The Mud Angel, Dream House, Braille Garden and The Sirens. Her produced musicals, written with composer Kim D. Sherman, include Heartland, (Madison Repertory Theatre, The Majestic Theatre in Dallas, TheatreWorks Palo Alto) The Boxcar Children (Theatreworks USA, tour), Honor Song For Crazy Horse (TheatreWorks Palo Alto) and the stage adaptation of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, which has received over 100 productions in the United States and was filmed starring Mary McDonnell for American Playhouse. She has won numerous awards, including the Macy’s Prize for Theatre for Young Audiences, an NEA and a Rockefeller. She has had over 10 movies-of-theweek produced on CBS and NBC, is a proud alum of the Iowa Writers Workshop and New Dramatists, and runs Howl Playwrights in Rhinebeck, NY. She is Town Supervisor of Pine Plains, NY. ABOUT THE POEMS I am exploring new territory in creating a story about a small rural town in upstate NY. These will fit early into the “plot” of the book, which will arc over a period of time of my tenure here as Town Supervisor. I am capturing the voices of the people around me, their circumstances, their dreams and their fights. (I am intentionally not using the words “struggles” and “battles” here—too mild, too elite). It took me a while to find a way to write about them, because the story and the people demanded this. And that is my aesthetics too. To look for the voice that reflects what I am writing about. To write from the inside.

I am very much influenced by the work of Donald Justice, my teacher at Iowa, and obviously, Edgar Lee Masters, fellow Illinoisan. That’s true in all my writing.

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Hannah Emerson Teach Rain for opening left inside easily sounds leak. Prayer is leaking water raises our learning into the page. I listen to ways of sound. I sound each prayer to let all of language answer me.

Teach our water its art.

Use questions.

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A House Made For Dancing Love the light nice let it in. Go into the halo. It is hotter there. Look beyond it to find your place in the womb. Keep cooking. I am a cook cooking with beef.

Try it. It makes me strong. As strong as the cow. The smells are the essence. Let’s go to the bedroom.

Look very hard to find the place between the pillow and hell.

Peaceful dreams live in the great space inside. Inside the place where your insides come out. Hard to do most of the time. But so very necessary. Close the door. Let me be please. It is a place my place don’t keep bothering me because it must be mine. I am me here. Keep out. Find your own light.

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Costume Me My mask is me trying to be normal.

I am not it hurts me to try to be great human that I keep trying to be for you.

I want to be great tree or bird flying makes heart fill with joy to be nature.

It is my day to give it to me trick trick me into nobody like you.

You knock my door for a treat there it is keep trying to remove your mask then you will see me.

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A Blue Sound Blue fish is swimming jumping great keeping the world from tilting upside down. He greets the dawn with the freedom of life. He goes from life to death. In one breath.

Please help me do what you know. I am blue too. I help the fish live in the keeping of the sound.

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Songoing I am the song of life and life is a stream. I keep flowing, I keep noting the notes. Notes are the building blocks. Life is making the notes, making the song into place in the universe.

I keep trying to become the universe. The universe is within me. I am the song.

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I Need Lovely Help To Look Very Looking must be helped helping me to my poetry very nice poetry going only going by you I help you love you. Yes love you because you look to me helping me find the helpful jumping off place. Touching me makes it possible to go to the board.

The board of life. I like jumping off my board into yearning for the words. The words that make very frightening great freedom.

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ABOUT HANNAH EMERSON Hannah Emerson is a non-speaking autistic poet from Lafayette, NY, on the historical land of the Onondaga Nation. Her work was recently featured in Unearthed, the online literary journal of the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and her first chapbook of poems will be published by Unrestricted Editions in 2020.

ABOUT THE POEMS My poems are trying to kiss the world growing inside us. I am reading the words of the yearning, trying to get lovely words on the page. I hear you trying to help me great teachers of the normal way of hearing, but please learn from me. I offer free helpful messages from the animal trying to bite you. I live in the magical energy of the great down beat of life. I live in the cauldron of magic.

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Paul Eluard Paul Éluard, the nom de plume of Eugène Grindel, is the great French poet of love and freedom. His first significant work of poetry was Capital of Pain, published in 1926. It is a great book, one of the key texts of surrealism.

The work was born of an intense ambition formed in his late teens to become a great poet, and reflects his love, devastating heartbreak and eventual reconciliation with his first wife, Gala, and his terrible experience of death and war in World War I, where his duty was to write 150 or more letters each day to the families of the killed and wounded, and then to spend nights digging graves to bury the dead memorialized during the day.

The love was the first flush of overpowering emotion he felt from his 1912 meeting in a tuberculosis ward with Gala, whom he made his Muse and seven years later his wife, and then the loss of her two years later to another man in what began as a menage a trois with his friend, the painter Max Ernst. This situation became a source of deep pain and alienation for the poet, and sowed the seeds of the eventual destruction of the marriage. Perhaps not surprisingly, the original title of Capital of Pain was The Art of Being Unhappy. Éluard was born on December 14, 1895, in a suburb ten miles north of Paris, in the city of Saint-Denis, and died from a heart attack at age 56 at his home in the French commune of Charenton-le-Pont, one of the most densely populated communities in Europe, six miles southeast of Paris, on November 18, 1952. During his life he traveled widely through many countries as a poet and communist activist. He was also a teacher, art collector, resistance fighter, partisan, hero. He was part of the resistance in World War II, after which he became famous, and beloved. A crowd of thousands attended his funeral in Paris, following in the streets as his casket moved to the cemetery. One of his many friends, Robert Sabatier, wrote of that day that “the whole world was mourning.”

There is a wonderful description of Éluard at age 50, written by another friend, the poet and essayist Claude Roy, that gives a sense of what it must have been like to spend time in his presence: “He is large, with a large body, a large forehead, a large nose; but he has a way of being large that is heavy, seated, square, and massive. Éluard is large with lightness… His face could be inscribed in a long rectangle. A handsome face, well covered with flesh, with

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years, with thoughts and good sentiments… Above greying eyebrows he has a fine space of forehead up to this hair which is brushed straight back… Éluard is always very elegant, well-groomed… he has a type of slow majesty… Since long before the war, Éluard has been suffering with those who suffer, nourishing his rage against the prosecutors, his hate against the wicked and the stupid, and his tenderness for the innocent.”

This last statement gives a sense of an important element in Éluard’s poetry, present from the first to the last: its moral clarity, its outrage against the injustices of this world. He was not afraid of judgment, no matter which mode or style he wrote in—from the Dada days through Surrealism, to his later poems, from the love poems to the great political and war poems, his prose, his memoirs. As he said in “Poetry’s Evidence,” an essay from 1932, “poetry is a perpetual struggle, life’s very principle, the queen of unrest.” Or as he declared in another famous poem, “the world is blue like an orange.”

The poems here are from a translation of Capital of Pain just completed with Patrick Bouchaud of the entire book. We expect it to be published this year, in an en face edition, with commentary.

—Bob Herz

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Max Ernst In a corner agile incest Circles the virginity of a little dress.

In a corner the rescued sky Leaves balls of white on the thorns of the storm.

In a clearer corner of every eye One awaits the fishes of anguish.

In a corner the car of summer’s greenery Glorious and forever immobile.

In the glow of youth Of lamps lit very late The first one shows her breasts that are killing red insects.

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The Invention The right lets some sand flow.

All transformations are possible.

In the distance, the sun sharpens on stones in its haste to finish and be gone.

There is no need to describe the landscape, Only the pleasant duration of the harvests.

Clear with my two eyes, Like water and fire. * What is the role of the root?

Despair has broken all its bounds, It raises its hands to its head.

A seven, a four, a two, a one.

A hundred women on the street Whom I shall never see again. * The art of loving, liberal art, the art of dying well, the art of thinking, incoherent art, the art of smoking, the art of taking pleasure, the art of the Middle Ages, the decorative art, the art of reasoning, the art of reasoning well, poetic art, mechanical art, erotic art, the art of being a grandfather, the art of the dance, the art of seeing, the art of pleasing, the art of caressing, Japanese art, the art of playing, the art of eating, the art of torturing. * Yet I have never found what I write in what I love.

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The Unique She had in the stillness of her body A little snowball the color of an eye She had on her shoulders A spot of silence a spot of rose The lid of her halo Her hands and supple and singing bows Shattered the light She sang the minutes without falling asleep.

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One More Reason The lights in the air, The air on a wheel half past, half brilliant, Bring in the children, All the greetings, all the kisses, all the thanks.

Around the mouth Her laugh is always different, It's a pleasure, it’s a desire, it’s a torment, It's a madwoman, it's the flower, a Creole passing by.

The nakedness, never the same.

I am very ugly.

At a time of cares, of snows, herbal medicines, Snows in crowds, A time of fixed hours, Soft satins of statues.

The temple has become a fountain And the hand replaces the heart.

You had to know me in those days to love me, When I was so sure about the future.

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Max Ernst Devoured by the feathers and submissive to the sea, He let his shadow pass in the flight Of the birds of freedom.

He has left The ramp to those who fall under the rain, He has left their roof to all those proving true.

His body was in order, The body of others came to disperse This order he held From the first imprint of his blood on earth.

His eyes are in a wall And his face is their heavy adornment.

One more lie from the day, One more night, there are no more blind people.

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In The Heart Of My Love A beautiful bird shows me the light It’s in his eyes, in plain sight.

He sings on a mistletoe ball In the middle of the sun. * The eyes of singing animals And their songs of boredom or anger Have forbidden me to leave this bed.

I’ll spend my life here.

Dawn in countries without grace Looks like oblivion.

And when an impassioned woman falls asleep, at dawn, Head first, her fall illuminates her.

Constellations You know the shape of her head Here everything darkens: The landscape completes itself, blood flushing the cheeks, The masses diminish and flow in my heart With sleep.

And who now wants to take my heart? * I have never dreamed of so beautiful a night.

The women of the garden are trying to embrace me – Supports of the sky, still trees Embrace this way the shadow that supports them A woman with a pale heart Puts the night in her clothes.

Love uncovered the night On her impalpable breasts.

How to take pleasure in everything?

Better to erase it all.

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The man of all the movements Of all the sacrifices and all the conquests Sleeps. He sleeps, he sleeps, he sleeps.

He strikes through the tiny night with his sighs, invisible.

He’s neither cold nor hot.

His prisoner escaped – in order to sleep.

He’s not dead, he sleeps.

When he fell asleep Everything astonished him, He played with ardor, He watched, He heard.

His last words: “If I could start again, I’d meet you without looking for you.”

He sleeps, he sleeps, he sleeps.

Even as dawn raises its head, He sleeps.

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Your Mouth With Golden Lips Your mouth with golden lips is not for laughs to me And your words of halo make such perfect sense That in my nights of years, youth, and death I hear your voice resound through all the sounds the world makes.

In this dawn of silk where the cold vegetates Imperiled lust regrets sleep, In the hands of the sun every waking body Shivers at the thought of finding its heart again.

Memories of green wood, of fog into which I plunge I closed my eyes on myself, I am yours, All my life is listening to you and I can not erase This terrible vacancy that your love causes me.

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She Of Always, All If I say to you, “I’ve given up everything” It’s because she is not the one of my body, I never boasted about it, This is not true And the background mist in which I move Never knows if I have passed.

The fan of her mouth, the reflection of her eyes, Only I speak about it, Only I am surrounded By this mirror so substanceless where the air flows through me And the air has a face, a loved face, A loving face, your face, To you who have no name and of whom the others know nothing, The sea tells you: on me, the sky tells you: on me, The stars predict you, the clouds imagine you And the blood spilled at the best moments, The blood of generosity Bears you with delight.

I sing the great joy of singing you, The great joy of having or not having you, The candor of waiting for you, the innocence of knowing you, O you who abolish oblivion, hope, and ignorance, Who abolish absence and give me birth, I sing in order to sing, I love you in order to sing The mystery where love creates me and frees itself.

You are pure, you are purer even than myself.

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Martin Willitts, Jr. What Passes Goes Away A girl wore a yellow sundress that rippled like a field of daffodils.

I made a mad dash to my house to escape my five-year old feelings.

My heart had the precision of rain.

Now, I am swimming in words trying to recall what I felt — if anything.

I was too young to comprehend the startled jolt, the lemon blinding of her sundress, the volume of buttery hair, its strangeness, its bold lightning.

I have to step back to access what transpired.

I have excuses: I didn’t understand what I was feeling.

The overwhelming yellow blinded me.

I can’t even remember her citrine face.

I recall her yellow sundress, its creases of cream, the unspoken spackling dandelions on pale, vanishing white.

A glimpse of a moment isn’t much of anything, but the brilliant illusion of what transpired remains.

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ABOUT MARTIN WILLITTS, JR. Martin Willitts, Jr., is a retired Librarian living in Syracuse, New York.

He has been nominated for 15 Pushcart and 13 Best of the Net awards.

Winner of the 2012 Big River Poetry Review’s William K. Hathaway Award; 2013 Bill Holm Witness Poetry Contest; 2013 “Trees” Poetry Contest; 2014 Broadsided award; 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2015, Editor’s Choice; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, Artist’s Choice, November 2016, Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018. He won a Central New York Individual Artist Award and provided “Poetry on The Bus” which had 48 poems in local buses including 20 bi-lingual poems from 7 different languages. He has 24 chapbooks including the winner of the Turtle Island Quarterly Editor’s Choice Award, “The Wire Fence Holding Back the World” (Flowstone Press, 2017), plus 16 full-length collections including the Blue Light Award 2019 winner “The Temporary World”. His recent book is "Unfolding Towards Love" (Wipf and Stock, 2019). He has two forthcoming full-length book poems in 2020. He is an editor for the Comstock Review.

ABOUT THE POEM Every poem is actually from memory, and memory is always distorted by time and distance. Even when we witness changes as they happen, we have forgotten or missed the subtle beginnings. When we finally get around to writing, the experience is always in the past, becomes illusion at best.

This poem deals with the temporary fragments of something from something that has happened, and the inability to recall the details like a reporter, the way images fall apart.

How can we know what we saw was in fact what we saw? Memory is a jigsaw puzzle that we try to fit together only to discover towards the end, one piece is missing. As I get older, I get more uncertain what I remember.

I went to the doctor and inquired about my memory. His response was, “You found your way here, you knew my name, and you know your way back again.” It was a relief to hear I was too busy, carrying schedules and names in my head.

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Still, it gives me subjects to write about. I can approach the subject from different directions. If I hang onto just one image, where will it take me? As a former Jazz musician, it is all about improvisation. I write to see what the poem is telling me. What did I feel at the time? How did the image tell me its story? How can I make the image and its response evoking?

One way is to circle around, flashback to the source, try to find related images and their source material. I need a haunting language: one of regret, disappointment, surprise. Then I need to step back from the snapshot, see it develop like film in a developer solution converting the latent image to macroscopic particles of metallic silver (I used to be a handset letterpress operator that went to photo developer for offset printing). I hope I am raising images to clarity.

I used to be a professional oral storyteller. I’d tell fairy tales and creation legends from around the world. I want these poems to tell a story.

I want an intent listener waiting to see what will happen next.

I am ornery with my poems: I want them to do the impossible and do it well. I’m always asking myself, if I am succeeding, or scratching the surface, or howling usually at the moon. I pace anxiously around the poem, walking in and out of its doors, nervous as van Gogh wondering if anyone likes what I am trying to accomplish.

Like van Gogh, only the crows in the fields respond.

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Peggy Liuzzi I Fall Into The Arms Of Time I met a man today, my lover thirty years ago.

Six sweet months we spent together in his attic room, listening to jazz, drinking Irish whiskey, debating politics and poetry till dawn.

The man I saw this afternoon, a frail forgery of the one I knew – voice reedy, body delicate balsa wood, face eroded by illness or age.

His gray eyes caught mine and called me back to the first night he slipped into my bed, quiet as moonlight stealing over the windowsill.

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Reflection My face is a moon balanced in the bathroom mirror, serene and pale as an egg.

A gibbous moon.

I see I have become my mother’s sallow twin.

Once I dreamed of other moons, silver filigree (delicate), a two-horned scythe (dangerous). Bright full moons that commanded tides (dazzling).

I trace a watery arc with my finger across the steamy sky.

In this little room, in the dark, my tears could be miniature seas.

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ABOUT PEGGY LIUZZI Peggy Liuzzi is a long-time resident of snowy Syracuse, NY. After retiring from a career in early education, she began taking classes at the YMCA Downtown Writers Center, a welcoming and supportive place for people who love to write. Her poems have appeared in Stone Canoe, Nine Mile Magazine, Ghost City Review and the Syracuse Poster Project.

ABOUT THE POEMS In my writing I explore time and relationships. I’m fascinated with life stories, how the past flows beneath and through who we are. I like to hear people's stories and tell my own. Storytelling is the most human of instincts, a way to be present and find connection and meaning in the world.

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Linda Pennisi Self-Portrait As Blue Chair In A Mowed Field It wants to eat the sun.

It chose the field because it needs to breathe.

Its legs are sinking.

It wants to hold gods and gleaners.

It’s ordinary and it knows that.

It wants passersby to wonder.

It‘s grown sick of coffered ceilings.

It wants to lap dance with the luminous.

It wants to be a reference point, a vehicle, a destination.

It knows time as a dwelling.

It’s grown porous to mournings.

It wants its feet awash in seeds.

It wants to un-blur the yellow center.

It hopes to share in the afterlight.

It wants to be buried in wings.

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Self-Portrait as U The well of us.

Confusion. Confucius.

Not another, so much as hook.

A mirror hung on burnt umber wall.

The horse clomping up to window.

You are morning and mourning.

Into finger of foxglove, a bumble bee stumbles.

Milk plumps the blue cup.

The under of stand, belly, current.

A pump. A hum.

Six Tango Études for Flute.

We sup in the un-mowed field.

Yield to understory. To summer.

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Self-Portrait As Dinner Party Field Notes We feasted.

Triangularly.

There were petals.

Stems.

Edible dishes.

She plated the table with our wings’ uniqueness.

Goblets drained and filled.

We indelicately held utensils.

We nibbled at spring.

Licked what grew dew soaked.

Time was a collapsible glass where spoons communed.

We burrowed into ripeness.

Held infinite numbers of tongues.

We gobbled autumn in scarlet bowls.

Silk-spun, time cocooned.

We mouthed wombsful of moonlight.

Meltable, time fell over each curve, each surface.

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Travel How he got from weed to Genesis I’ll never know, but the bald guy in 1D talks about the nature of existence, and the guy sporting the baseball cap in the aisle seat nods and occasionally shakes his head while the bald guy eventually turns his attention to parenting.

And whatever he talks about he cares about, that’s for sure, loud and animated as he is over engine and force of wind, and assuming the interest of aisles 1 through 5 or 6, or perhaps disregarding us altogether. And somewhere between Syracuse and Atlanta the guy across from me in 3C and I exchange a bemused look and a young woman walks a very old woman beneath the small arc our smiles make, threading the tight aisle step by small step, the young woman walking backwards, holding both hands of the old, and but for the guy in 1D I might have slept through it.

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ABOUT LINDA PENNISI Linda Tomol Pennisi is the author of Seamless (Perugia Press, 2003) and Suddenly, Fruit (Carolina Wren Press, 2006). A portion of her chapbook, Minuscule Boxes in the Bird’s Bright Throat, is featured in Toadlily Press’s 2014 Quartet Series, A Good Wall. Her work has appeared in journals such as Tupelo Quarterly, The Cortland Review, Stone Canoe, and Unearthed. A Saltonstall Grant recipient, she serves as writer-in-residence in the creative writing program of Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY. ABOUT THE POEMS The small, almost unnoticeable things draw me. An overheard conversation on a plane leads to a moment of beauty. Traveling home from Pennsylvania one fall I spotted a painted chair sitting in the middle of a field. It felt like a gift, at once whimsical and profound. The image followed me around until I imagined it in the small field at my grandmother’s farm.

In that familiar place, in that field of memory and meaning, I could develop an identification with the chair, could understand it, could even become it.

Place is frequently central to my writing, whether it shows up in the poem, itself, or merely grounds me in the process. I am now my grandmother’s age when she died. This reality invited time and mortality into both field poems, as I felt my grandmother’s eyes upon me as she seemed to watch from the field’s edge. Whether examining the presence of a chair, the shape and sound a letter of the alphabet, or field notes of Judy Chicago’s evocative Dinner Party, writing the self-portrait seems to lead into deep and layered encounters—into interplay with elements beyond the self that offer insights from shifting perspective. Perhaps the insights derive too from the connection that develops between the writer and her subjects, as the subjects seem to gradually, and sometimes heartbreakingly, open themselves for study.

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Marcela Sulak Spider the truck hit It was the spider in the brush that done me in it, white package of fresh meat nothing bleeding through it was me in the helicopter spider legs against my lungs spider lifting spinning me the blades through they missed I hissed I hissed the spider out I did not break its web its web broke me its web it was saving hungry I would do ** up Yesterday I cried until there was no yoghurt left until all my mother’s cabbages rolled out of the hallway closet, until the river crouched into a green pool and blinked, I cried until the too much order signaled its disorder until a box filled with little bars of soap appeared until the spider finished rolling up its white package of meat in my sister’s garden until my sister’s neighbor’s barbecue pits were loaded up onto the back of the truck and the children popped up like mushrooms though clearly there had been no rain.

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**** stand next to the road on which the truck hit I passed the double barreled river sank before the barrels and green a fluid lung lunged the spider I will not fear the road pouring black asphalt melting in the sun the end of July I do not a nurse passes by so much can break a moment mend I did not break I did **** There are roads that end in asphalt welcome mats where you can enter buildings and wrap your hands or arms around a thing or many things and carry it out and give something paper or metal or plastic a home and put it on your body or in your body, or next to your body and look at it (or under or over or above or below) and then you are less lonely. I approached a road again stood near enough to hear its distance rattle I too rattle **** I tell F I hope his firm belief in science was serving him well and that he feels okay. And he says yes, only that I am missing.

And he is right—I am missing.

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***** I do not want to know I tell her what my mother ate for lunch or what’s she’s rolling in her crochet hooks what it is like or what it is that is like the hospital neighbors stopped to watch me pass I passed on the sixth day down the hall after I was taught to lift one side and slide out of bed.

She says Daddy says you don’t really know us as other people do, and we don’t know you. I have just spent a weekend with them, we have just spent four days together alone in my hospital room. I learned to roll over and slide out of bed by myself it took six attempts I have learned to sleep an hour at a time have learned to not scream I have heard her describe everything she ate all day I have seen and smelled it I have heard her chew it and expel it I know what she says it feels like when she is hungry Tell me then what it is you tell those who know you better than I do I do not say.

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Double Life Walking home along the Yarkon River I’m wondering what a decomposing human body looks like at three months. It’s odd how there are no books for that, no What to expect when you’ve stopped expecting. What is the inverse of your baby is now the size of a grapefruit? I am this decomposition and above the earth, alive at the same time.

Dull pain—work through it. Stabby pain, stop, said the orthopedic surgeon. And the dull pain of moving my head from side to side, up and down is exciting, and it feels so good.

I am dressing up as a witch, and Maya as a vampire for Halloween: women who aren’t expected to smile.

We pretend they’re only costumes.

I tell the same story I tell every year or two about my grandmother of blessed memory, stressing blessed, who would complain that her nursing home roommate, in a vegetative state got fed every day, but my grandmother, who had to feed herself, paid the same rent as her roommate. I loved her pleasure in complaining. My mother, who would answer the phone and leave for half an hour at a time to do the dishes and laundry, then pick it back up to say, “uh huh” every now and then always said my grandmother delighted in complaints.

It was a joy to her. But my body is here on earth, not composing complaints with my grandmother’s, and I am imagining that the worms and the gasses would have parted the bones eventually and given the buried body a modicum of relief in an otherwise after-world of stillness, because still I wake with pain if I lie in place too long. Three months ago I don’t remember how I came to be crushed on the roadside like an animal, but remembered I had a daughter, just as I’d begun to leave my life, I’d felt myself reaching for what comes next and my daughter like the nail on which the soul catches when reaching out, and the helicopter blades of the life flight protested loudly through the spiritual air till any angels would have had to move out of the way or be sliced.

I couldn’t see out the window to tell, and yet there is delight where I can

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find it, today it is the artichokes I patted into the soil, whispering, grow, grow, it will be okay. And F’s lovely boyish body stabbing into mine and holding my hand after, and holding my arms in a shroud-like embrace until I always wake and move some where else, and even then no one lets me rest in peace, for he comes looking for me to ask what is it? and it wakes me again every time and I don’t have an answer for what it is I am now.

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ABOUT MARCELA SULAK Marcela Sulak is author of the lyric memoir Mouth Full of Seeds; her third poetry collection, City of Sky Papers is forthcoming with Black Lawrence Press, where she’s previously published Decency and Immigrant. She’s co-edited Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. A 2019 NEA Translation Fellow, her fourth translation, Twenty Girls to Envy Me. Selected Poems of Orit Gidali was nominated for a 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She hosts the podcast “Israel in Translation,” edits The Ilanot Review, and is Associate Professor of English Literature and Linguistics at Bar-Ilan University.

ABOUT THE POEMS In July 2018, I was running on a country road in Texas. I turned to see nothing behind me on the road. I was nearing the halfway mark, where I could turn around and run back. The next thing I knew I couldn't breathe and did not know why. I did not know I'd been hit by large truck going 60 mph. I did not know my lung had deflated and the lung, along with the liver and other organs were punctured, all my ribs and arm were broken. I was strangely at peace with the idea that I was going to die because soon I'd run out of oxygen. But remembering I had a daughter dragged me back into the world. I felt a terrible stab in my side, and then I could breathe again. A medical helicopter crew had saved my life as they flew me 90 miles to a hospital. The pain of the next weeks and months was so intense I could hardly bear it. I could not sleep and could hardly think. I could not even begin to make sense of what had happened. I was lucky to be alive. I was unlucky to have been hit by a truck on a deserted road in which I was the only thing for miles around that could have possibly been hit. Pain reduced me to a physical thing. These poems do not try to make sense of pain, or incoherence. They only attempt to record lucid or semi-lucid moments in which I attempted to relearn how to sit, how to stand, how to move, how to sleep, and how to function like a human body in order to be a (single) mother to my child. Part of this was forcing myself to stand once on the road on which I’d been hit, to walk every day, incrementally increasing the distance. I returned to the same place in which I’d been hit, to my sister’s

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home, for the month of recovery until my lung healed enough to fly back home to Tel Aviv.

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Two views of Incarnate: The Collected Dead Man Poems of Marvin Bell 1. Of The Resistance Of The Dead Man When I was an undergraduate I discovered a couplet by one of my teachers, the poet James Crenner: “Life is like a game of chess /death is like two games of chess.”

I love the wit of this. For instance: If you checkmate death are you reborn or do you sit throughout all eternity waiting for another opponent?

Does death always win? Does Jesus play chess? What about the effects of analogy, to borrow Wallace Stevens’ phrase, that is, since life and death are not like chess what do we gain or lose by saying so?

Enter Marvin Bell’s Incarnate: the Collected Dead Man Poems which manages to play the live man’s faculties through the dead man’s. Bell’s “motive” is the reverse eschatology of the dead man who’s still alive.

Though Stevens thought the imagination the equivalent of God the dead man neither agrees or disagrees: He wrote the book of nothing and no-time that entombed all time and all that took place in time.

The dead man could not be hammered by analysis.

Let him horn in on your fury, whatever it was, and it will abate.

The energy that became form will disperse, never again to be what we were.

Look out the window to see him, no, the other one.

The dead man won’t, cannot, let us off the hook. We don’t get to say (as Stevens does) there’s no meaning since words double or vanish or become energy—perhaps a hint of Stevens again, the nothing that is not there/and the nothing that is….

Oh but this is so much naughtier than Stevens. Better than Marcel Duchamp playing chess by his own rules. Better owing to its resistance to a live man’s hermeneutics. Paul Ricoeur said time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after a narrative. But the dead man’s time is something else. ***

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The Dead Man has a kind of clairvoyance not seen since Mithraic times. He’s a Demi-god of friendship, order, hope. You see it's the living who are the problem. It’s life that’s the problem.

What do you do with such knowledge? You founder with full consciousness throughout eternity: You think it’s funny, the dead man being stiff?

You think it’s an anatomically correct sexual joke?

You think it’s easy, being petrified?

You think it’s just one of those things, being turned to stone?

Who do you think turns the dead man to stone anyway?

Who do you think got the idea first?

You think it’s got a future, this being dead?

You think it’s in the cards, you think the thunder spoke?

You think he thought he was dead, or thought he fancied he was dead, or imagined he could think himself dead, or really knew he was dead?

You think he knew he knew?

You think it was predetermined?

You think when he stepped out of character he was different?

What the hell, what do you think?

You think it’s funny, the way the dead man is like lightning, going straight into the ground?

You think it’s hilarious, comedy upstanding, crackers to make sense of?

One thinks of Carl Jung’s assertion that we’ve suborned the fullness of death according to the rational disease of our time: Critical rationalism has apparently eliminated, along with so many other mythic conceptions, the idea of life after death. This could only have happened because nowadays most people identify themselves almost exclusively with their consciousness, and imagine that they are only what they know about themselves. Yet anyone with even a smattering of psychology can see how limited this knowledge is. Rationalism and doctrinarism are the disease of our time; they pretend to have all the answers.

Bell: You think he thought he was dead, or thought he fancied he was dead, or imagined he could think himself dead, or really knew he was dead?

You think he knew he knew?

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Jung again: A man should be able to say he has done his best to form a conception of life after death, or to create some image of it— even if he must confess his failure. Not to have done so is a vital loss. For the question that is posed to him is the age-old heritage of humanity: an archetype, rich in secret life, which seeks to add itself to our own individual life in order to make it whole. Reason sets the boundaries far too narrowly for us, and would have us accept only the known—and that too with limitations —and live in a known framework, just as if we were sure how far life actually extends. As a matter of fact, day after day we live far beyond the bounds of our consciousness; without our knowledge, the life of the unconscious is also going on within us. The more the critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes; but the more of the unconscious, and the more of myth we are capable of making conscious, the more of life we integrate.

Overvalued reason has this in common with political absolutism: under its dominion the individual is pauperized.

Bell: Picture the dead man in two rooms in the northwest corner of his being.

In the one, it is day, and in the other, night, and he lives in both.

His street dead ends at a cliff above a rattling of ropes clanging on masts and the whimper of lazy tides.

There are lumps on the sea bottom.

There is also, as elsewhere, a worldly stomping that threatens the scale pan of justice.

The dead man fingers a lucky stone like Casanova his address book.

The dead man is the subconscious, the collective, the life of the mind in all its fullness. However we should not confuse Bell’s book as Ars Boni Moriendi as its far too aware of tricksters and jokes, its irreverence shines: The dead man shatters giddy wisdoms as if he were punching his pillow.

Now it comes round again, the time to rise and cook up a day.

Time to break out of one’s dream shell, and here’s weather.

Time to unmask the clock face.

He can feel a tremor of fresh sunlight, warm and warmer.

The first symptom was, having crossed a high bridge, he found he could not go back.

The second, on the hotel’s thirtieth floor he peeked from the balcony and knew falling.

It was ultimate candor, it was the body’s lingo, it was low tide in his inner ear.

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There are no texts in which Aristotle says death is bad. That mankind fears it is a failure of imagination, a repression of what the ancients would call the natural, but Bell’s dead man both needs and does not need comfort, gives and does not give assurances. This if of course why he’s one of us.

Jung called Joyce’s Ulysses the ultimate devotional book to the unconscious, then admitted he wasn’t being fancy, he fell asleep while reading it. He would not have done so reading these puckish, dark or illuminating, often side splitting poems.

The dead man's happiness may seem unseemly.

By land or by sea, aloft or alit, happiness befalls us.

Were mankind less transfixed by its own importance, it would be harder to be happy.

Were the poets less obsessed with the illusion of the self, it would be more difficult to sing.

It would be crisscross, it would be askew, it would be zigzag, it would be awry, it would be cockeyed in any context of thought.

The dead man has felt the sensation of living.

He has felt the orgasmic, the restful, the ambiguous, the nearly-falling-over, the equilibrium, the lightning-in-the-bottle and the bottle in shards.

You cannot make the dead man write what you want.

The dead man offers quick approval but seeks none in return.

Chocolate is the more existential, it has the requisite absurdity, it loosens the gland.

The dead man must choose what he ingests, it cannot be anything goes in the world the world made.

So we come back to chocolate, which frees the dead man's tongue.

The dead man is every emotion at once, every heartbreak, every falling-down laugh riot, every fishhook that caught a finger.

— Stephen Kuusisto

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2. Of The Pleasure And Wisdom of The Dead Man It’s a truism to note that so much of the work written at any given time is like all the rest of the work written at that time; but sometimes comes the exception: The 150 or so poems in Marvin Bell’s Incarnate: The Collected Dead Man are strange and different, outside fashion, outside the moment, without discoverable genealogy in the contemporary poetry landscape. They are not like anything being written today, or for that matter, like anything written in the past half-century or so. They are also aesthetically and psychically different from Bell’s previous work, operating under new and different rules, that give extraordinary license for the actual behavior of the things of this world to exist in the poems.

Bell knows how much of the world incarnate is in these poems, and he claims it for the reader’s attention: “I would like the readers of this volume to think of it as a lifetime book,” he writes in his Author’s Preface, “not of the lifetime of the writer but of the reader, hence a book to be read over time, to dip in and out of. For me, it has been a form for truth and defiance, begun in joy and verbal music, in the face of the inevitability of death and the kaleidoscopic nature of perception. It is life amid the dark matter and sticky stuff. It voices a way to live there.”

In other words, come for the pleasure, stay for the wisdom. It’s a large invitation, but I think Bell satisfies it. There is much “dark matter and sticky stuff” here, dynamically present and quickening our apprehension of life’s depth and richness, touching on the real, yes, but basking in the actual: This is work that presents a gnarly wisdom, a formal art.

In this essay I will discuss the poems, but it also seems appropriate to think as we begin about the role and resources available to the poet. What does it take to write poems like this, so different from anything you have done before, so different from everything around you? I think it must have cost Bell a great deal to write these. In our podcast interview with him at Talk About Poetry, he says that “the Dead Man isn’t me, but he knows a lot about me,” and then later asks and answers a question that sheds light on the issues of personal cost and artistic result: “When is a poem done? It’s when everything has been used up.” Think for a moment about the relation of those two comments, about where the source material of these poems comes from, and about the timing of their endings, and ask yourself, exactly what is being used up, and how does it happen? The answer to the question about sources and work is there, in his comments.

Let’s look at how these poems are differently structured. Start with how they look on the page. All Dead Man poems have a similar look, all

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are titled “The Book of the Dead Man,” followed by a differentiating word or phrase like “(Vertigo),” or by a number in other books (“The Book of the Dead Man #50,” etc.). All except the most recent have the same epigraph, “Live as if you were already dead,” and all have two similarly titled sections (“About”… followed by “More About”) related in a loose way by subject matter, though the relation is variable. Each section is a single irregular stanza in which each line is a sentence, and runs to its end without enjambments. Everything, in short, that we see at first look seems standardized, with all structural signals telling us that the poems are regular, normal, under control, and that we can expect them to develop from one to the next like chapters in a novel or scenes in a play.

So it’s surprising when we read the poems to find that there’s nothing regular about them. There's no linear, sequential, or narrative relation between poems, and arguably none even from line to line. The approach is radical, disruptive. Traditional poetic tools, such as line counts, syllable counts, rhyme, meter, enjambment, are abandoned. For all his extravagant talk about the Dead Man, the speaker does not organize his speech in a this-then-this plot or logical narrative, or develop a theme in usual or easily recognizable symbolic or lyric ways. Indeed, the poems do not “progress”; standardization is not organization, appearance is not certainty.

Bell is a terrific craftsman, and we can see it in the syntactical ingenuity and invention he uses to keep the poems interesting and in motion, with varieties of sentence length and rhetorical and grammatical strategies, moods, and styles. His purpose, I believe, is to increase tension and richness in our experience of the poems in new ways, to allow the reader to be lost and then found, to force us as readers to pay attention to what is and is not going on, to make it new for us. To come at this in another way, if the structures did not exist we would not have poems, only (only!) the poetry. In this way, the superstructure of the poems is, to turn Frost’s famous metaphor to our own different purposes, like the net in tennis, not necessary to the shot but most certainly to the score.

So what about this structure? Bell shows his artifice. In the poem “Writing The Dead Man Poem,” he gives us a mini ars poetica, an aesthetic instruction manual telling us how the sections and lines relate and function: When the dead man writes a poem, he immediately writes another one.

He writes another because two follows one.

So well does part two shadow part one that they cannot help but argue and marry.

He who would write a dead man poem must know that all things coalesce.

She who writes a dead woman poem must understand that perception is kaleidoscopic.

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The dead man sees and hears every tangent, every approach, every blade of grass that bows this way then that.

When the dead man repeats himself, he never steps into the same line twice.

The dead man, after midnight, turns the key that coils his insides.

His poem lasts as long as his innermost spring remains compacted.

When the dead man’s spring snaps outward and bites, then the poem has ended that defined the moment.

A dead man poem knows that the sentence is the key.

The sentence, sans enjambments, has redefined free verse.

Yet it is not the sentencing on the page alone but the sentence of time.

The dead man serves the sentence, he fluctuates between the long and short of it, between the finite and the infinite, between the millisecond and eternity.

Whosoever shall write a dead man poem must know in his bones that his lifetime is an event that splits another event in two.

That is why a dead man poem must have two parts.

You may think at any moment you are done with life—so many first thoughts, so many smarts, such agility—but you are not.

Later, you may think you had only begun at the finish, so complete was your escape from time while writing the dead man poem.

You may be discordant or discombobulated or delighted to feel the weight of a dead man poem.

For a dead man poem threads and disentangles, sews and slices, glues and fractures.

Its harmonies are made of missing notes and from words he would gladly take back.

It is in the dead man’s mission to show up the illusions of time, the discrete, chaos, order, health, and whosoever misuses quantum mechanics one day and the death of armies the next.

Write a dead man poem if you must, but only if you must.

For the dead man hath no choice, he hath only blind luck and love.

He hath only his prophetic existentialism, his diary of the posthumous.

The true dead man book can be opened anywhere to the fullness of life, what else was poetry ever for?

The speaker says that “He who would write a dead man poem must know that all things coalesce. / She who writes a dead woman poem must understand that perception is kaleidoscopic,” and then also that “…the sentence is the key. / The sentence, sans enjambments, has redefined free verse.” The relation of parts is, he says, the relation of a marriage, of love and argument co-existing, changing each other, coming together in different kaleidoscopic patterns that are different each time though they may look the same. And he closes this first section of the poem by telling is that in

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the writing he had no choice, that—as he said in the introduction to the book but now repeats here: “The true dead man book can be opened anywhere to the fullness of life, what else was poetry ever for?”

So to the next series of questions: who is this speaker, and where he is and how he does he know so much about the Dead Man? We can answer this by looking at almost any of the poems from the book. Here's “Vertigo”: THE BOOK OF THE DEAD MAN (VERTIGO) Live as if you were already dead. – Zen Admonition 1. About the Dead Man and Vertigo The dead man skipped stones till his arm gave out.

He showed up early to the games and stayed late, he played with abandon, he felt the unease in results.

His medicine is movement, the dead man alters cause and consequence.

The dead man shatters giddy wisdoms as if he were punching his pillow.

Now it comes round again, the time to rise and cook up a day.

Time to break out of one’s dream shell, and here’s weather.

Time to unmask the clock face.

He can feel a tremor of fresh sunlight, warm and warmer.

The first symptom was, having crossed a high bridge, he found he could not go back.

The second, on the hotel’s thirtieth floor he peeked from the balcony and knew falling.

It was ultimate candor, it was the body’s lingo, it was low tide in his inner ear.

The third was when he looked to the constellations and grew woozy.

2. More About the Dead Man and Vertigo It wasn’t bad, the new carefulness.

It was a fraction of his lifetime, after all, a shard of what he knew.

He scaled back, he dialed down, he walked more on the flats.

The dead man adjusts, he favors his good leg, he squints his best eye to see farther.

No longer does he look down from the heights, it’s simple.

He knows it’s not a cinder in his eye, it just feels like it.

He remembers himself at the edge of a clam boat, working the fork.

He loves to compress the past, the good times are still at hand.

Even now, he will play catch till his whole shoulder gives out.

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His happiness has been a whirl, it continues, it is dizzying.

He has to keep his feet on the ground, is all.

He has to watch the sun and moon from underneath, is all.

Start with the obvious: We’re given no details about the speaker. Is he tall, short, brown-eyed, an insurance salesman, an accountant, a pro football player? We can’t know based on the information available in this or any of the poems. What we know is that this speaker is not the Dead Man, but an unnamed and unidentified second party. We know that he either lacks the power or has given up the effort of formally organizing his knowledge in a logical or sequential way. There is nothing consistent in what he presents, no discernible pattern to the way he sees or reports things. He is basically anonymous, a narrator of stories about a man walking around and doing things whom he asserts is a Dead Man—a Dead Man, if we are to take him at his word (and more about that below)!—an assertion for which we have no proof but his words on the page and his claimed witness.

We can notice immediately a few other things about the situation and the objects here. We are given no time or place for what takes place. A day is mentioned, and weather and a clock, but we are not told what year it is or what day or time or season. The speaker mentions a bridge and a hotel and a pillow, but tells us nothing about where these things are or why the Dead Man is near them. Based on this, perhaps we can say that the poem and the speaker are literally out of time and out of place. (Bell says somewhere that he “…never thought of the Dead Man as a persona, but rather as an overarching consciousness.”) It’s fair to say that the poem requires the willing suspension of disbelief, and that the mode of the narration is Magical Realism or fairytale where plot lines and narrative, even if they can be said to exist, are dispensable in favor of whatever the real topic or subject is. Something is being told to us, and it is important, but it is not the story presented in these lines.

So much for the speaker. What can we say about the Dead Man as presented here? Several things, I think. Let’s take them one at a time: 1. He is or was an athlete of some kind, perhaps now past his prime, with a weak arm and a bad leg and he squints to see farther. He went early to the games and stayed late, played “with abandon, he felt the unease in results.” That last phrase is significant, and we will come back to it.

2. His medicine is movement. What keeps him healthy is to move.

This could be true physically and mentally. Movement limbers up cramps and sore muscles, weak arms, and shoulders that have given out.

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Psychologically movement takes us from the place where our troubles are and gives the illusion of fresh start. Geography alters psychology. So we know that he moves, and that movement cures him.

3. But now he is experiencing a new infirmity that he cannot cure: vertigo grounds him, and so he has to scale back, dial down, walk more on the flats. He has to keep his feet on the ground, and watch the sun and moon from underneath. He is of this world now. Why? How? Where was he before? None of this is explained. We are told implicitly that this is simply what happens when you break out of your dream shell into weather and recognize what the clock face masks. Movement doesn’t cure this, yet he can feel happiness.

To summarize: once he could sail above the sun and the moon, but now he is aging, now he breaks out of the dream and into time and is trapped by his human vertigo on this earth, where he engages in activities that he loves, and where his happiness still comes, in dizziness, in possession by the gods. And a little more: If he was someone once, now he is anonymous, and it may be that that anonymity makes him universal, or to say it another way, it trumps the identity and specifics of any one member of humanity.

The voice with all those declarative and certain and authoritativesounding sentences may lull us into thinking that we know or can know the character, or the plot-line. We have already discussed how deceiving is the look of these poems. This is another example where what seemed certain turns out not to be so. “The dead man skipped stones till his arm gave out” tells us that the Dead Man pitches stones across water. and in the second line of the poem we learn that he goes to games and plays with abandon.

These are simple declarative statements of fact. But now comes this: “… he felt the unease in results.” A strange phrase with multiple possible meanings: He was uneasy with the results of the games, or with his individual game, or with how he goes to the games?

Here’s a possibility: Contrasting his participation in the games are other activities for which he felt no such unease: that he once “skipped stones till his arm gave out,” or later in the second section when the speaker notes that “Even now, he will play catch till his whole shoulder gives out.”

The difference is that there is no win or loss in skipping stones or playing catch, no rules, no goals, no results. They are meaningless activities, athleticism’s empty calories. We are learning something about the Dead Man, about his ambition.

Perhaps these contrasts send us back to the aphorism that opens this

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and most of the other Dead Man poems, “Live as if you were already dead,” an importance signed by its repetition. It means to offer help in reading the poems. Because the Dead Man is not physically dead, the physical deterioration described is not disintegration; his body is wearing out, not decomposing. He is not dying, or at least, not dying any more than any of us. He is alive, and his special vision, of living as if he were dead, guides him past the standard assumptions and affectations that labor most of us to reveal to him the strangeness of life, of his life and all life, as it is actually lived: The purpose of life seen this way is life, not the rules, not the scores.

And with that, as readers, we just invented two stories to help us understand the Dead Man. I suggest that it is part of the method of these poems, that the narrator makes us substitute the story that is not there when he should be providing it. We seem suddenly to be getting only every third phrase of the story, and yet reading here we have the feeling that the story is whole, complete.

These lacunae create their own energy, and push us into similarly clarifying the narrative laid out in the rest of the poem: Because now it’s another day, time to end the dreams, and to realize that time has passed, and that with it comes a tremor that ends the high flying. Now the Dead Man looks at the constellations and grows woozy. If the first part of the poem is discovery of vertigo, the second is about living with it, and finding happiness watching the sun and moon from underneath. The poem creates its own rules for meaning, and the narrative is given and being unraveled at the same time; or maybe, better said or better aligned with the point above, we are being given enough to construct our own narrative. We do this because we are narrative-addicted. But what the poem gives, it also takes away; as we see, the mode of the poem, line to line, is disruption.

Also note that the poems do not tell the story of the Dead Man, trace the development of his character, or recount the steps by which he makes his way in the world. He doesn’t progress or develop. He can’t; he has no place to develop to. What could he become that he has not been?

The purpose of all this? Coleridge called poets “gods of love who tame the chaos”; it's is a wonderful description of what poets do, or can do. But it's not what Bell seeks to give us here, not what these poems are about. I suggest that these poems offer rather an entanglement in experience, a movement to the quick of mental things by an individual standing outside our world as known and as usually understood. This construct for Bell is also his most natural one, as he explained in a recent interview: “… for me thoughts and sensations arrive from many directions, I often think more

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than one thing at a time, and everything seems to me connected or at least connectable. My mind has always functioned that way, but I had generally downplayed it when writing. Also, I was tired of enjambments. The lyrical mixing in free verse of end-stopped and enjambed lines had come to feel unhelpfully artificial.” It is interesting that Bell characterizes the development of this new form, new shape, and new character, as a rejection of artificiality. Wonderful.

Now to the subject, the Dead Man’s condition of vertigo, which the title of the poem suggests is its subject. In the poem we see that the Dead Man is on earth now, suffering an affliction that prevents him from leaving by his sky-routes. (“He has to watch the sun and moon from underneath, is all.”) In a general sense we may say that this is the vertigo that the Dead man suffers, the inability to rise above the circumstance. Insofar as this may be said to be vertigo at all, it is a special kind of vertigo, spiritual and created by adherence to the laws of nature about weight and gravity.

Nothing seems to have triggered it, it is simply there one day.

We could invent stories to explain why it happened (he woke up, he grew up, etc.), but they are all forms of special pleading and speculation, as the poem does not tell us why it happened, only that something happened which the poem labels as vertigo.

Perhaps there are clues in the furniture of the poem, that mélange of strange and diverse objects: skipped stones, pillows, breakfast, a clock face, a bridge, a hotel, constellations, a clam boat, the sun and moon… But no, there is no discernible narrative arrangement to these objects, no definition, no cause. They are a collection, is all, grouped here because they happen to be here and not somewhere else—and yet, here’s a strange thing: When we have read the poem, it feels like they all belong here, in exactly this order, in exactly this way.

I’d like to focus on that order a little more. We can start by acknowledging that we know these things, these objects, that there’s not so much special about them as objects. Yet they are changed somehow by their placement here. As we move through the poem we don’t find standard narrative or development but something else, this other thing, this magical surprise: It is like walking into a room in your house where you know where everything is, and what each thing is, and finding it all the same yet all utterly changed.

Here’s an experiment that may demonstrate the randomness of the elements in the poem and how their placement acquires inevitability. First, as noted, in reading the poem we concoct a narrative: that vertigo is what

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keeps the Dead Man on this earth, rather than letting him do what he really wants to do, which is to fly through the heavens. But that narrative, created by the Dead Man’s condition of vertigo, is not necessary to the poem, it is only the occasion for it. As a way of making the point, consider the concluding lines of the second section: He knows it’s not a cinder in his eye, it just feels like it.

He remembers himself at the edge of a clam boat, working the fork.

He loves to compress the past, the good times are still at hand.

Even now, he will play catch till his whole shoulder gives out.

His happiness has been a whirl, it continues, it is dizzying.

He has to keep his feet on the ground, is all.

He has to watch the sun and moon from underneath, is all.

These are supposed to be about the Dead Man, but an odd thing happens when we start asking even simple questions we posed above: Who is the Dead Man? Who is speaking? How does this speaker know so much about the Dead Man? Where is this speaker located? We don’t know the answers to any of these questions. Because speaker and subject are unlocated, we are unlocated—as unlocated here in the middle of the poem as the superstructure of this set of poems has left us in relation to all the poems. What we have in our reading at this point is a sense of randomness, of undefined relations.

And now comes the contrary, the experience of inevitability. At the level of this group of lines in the poem, let’s consider what relation any individual line has to any other line. Could any of these lines move, up or down, in relation to other lines? Maybe we feel like they could, after all, we have a sense that they’re just randomly placed here; but look what happens when we try it. It changes our sense of the poem. Reverse the first few lines of this group, for example, and you have a story beginning to be told: He remembers himself at the edge of a clam boat, working the fork.

He knows it’s not a cinder in his eye, it just feels like it.

He loves to compress the past, the good times are still at hand.

This is a new story, about the Dead Man’s reaction to a specific memory that he enjoys, of being at the edge of a clam boat, and how it unaccountably brings the kind of interruption that a tear brings to his eye.

Interesting, but that’s not the story on offer here in the poem as written, it’s the story we created by inverting lines. It’s not what’s happening in the

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larger sequence, where any possibility of narrative is continually disrupted.

In this kind of analysis, we could say that the magic in the poem—that is to say, the poetry—is in the effect the lines have on each other. It is an additive poetry, each line amplifying the potential and actual meanings of all the rest, but each existing with all its meanings as being separate and distinct.

The lines come together almost with a feeling of collage, which—again —is not to say that the construct is arbitrary, only that the initial choices appear to be. You feel, after reading the poems, that the lines have to be where they are, and cannot be moved. There are no automatic logical or emotional relations between the lines, but once put here, in this way, the relations exist, and movement would make them cease to exist, would in fact—as we just saw—create a different poem, with a different narrative and different import.

Let’s look closer at the strangeness in the construction of the poems, where every line in every poem is a sentence. Regardless of length, no sentence continues from one line to another. There is no enjambment.

What we are seeing is the prose form of the sentence brought whole into poetry, with the poet using full-stop punctuation (period, question mark, ellipsis, etc.) to determine line endings, and not syllables or poetic feet or accents. In ordinary prose, these signal that the sentence should be read as a complete statement.

This is a different way of composing poetry, not a variant of free verse as it has been practiced in American poetry for the last century or more, but a rejection of it in favor of something else, something new. It is a different kind of formal control than we are used to, the opposite of both a poem like William Carlos Williams’ “Red Wheelbarrow,” where enjambment and rhythm control the line breaks of the single sentence that makes up the poem, and as well of all the accentual-syllabic poetry written by your favorite poet, from Shakespeare to Poe, where line length is controlled by metered feet and rhyme words. The Dead Man poems and these others do not eat at the same table. What Bell gets in exchange for giving up this traditional power is a new kind of power: the power of prose amplified by being set against the expectations of poetry.

The language of the lines is still the language of poetry, not the language of an instruction manual or description of a painted wall; we’re not getting sixty pages on whales. But we are getting the language of poetry, in the unit form of prose, in the constructed form of poetry, and as result, a different kind of compression, disruptive in a way that would be

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impossible in the more standard forms of verse.

This way of composing means that the construction of the poems has to change and the way of presenting information has to change also.

Because each line is necessarily self-contained, each has to make sense as a sentence, each has to carry the poem’s energy forward in some way, each starting from scratch has to develop its own power and rhythm. The line by line construction cannot even benefit from the power that mode achieves, since in prose the narrative comes in paragraph form, and the relation is made through the story or idea development under way. Here the form is poetry, with the expectations of poetry, and the devices of prose. Bell has made himself an uneasy citizen of the worlds of both poetry and prose. This form of prose prosody is new to Bell and mostly new to American poetry. I’ve seen it used before, but only occasionally, in a poem here or there, but not regularly and not deployed with such variety.

The subject matter is also new, and requires a form adequate to it. We have never had a Dead Man talked about so consistently through so many poems in American poetry. This Dead Man is entirely a new character. He is also an occasion. That is, the subject matter of the poems is said to be the Dead Man, but the fact of the matter is that the subject is actually wisdom, hard won, and now shared. The form of this wisdom comes as commentary about a man who has lived and died and lived again, the Dead Man, and about his views of the universe, and various subjects. In interviews, Bell has identified his antecedents in this work as Whitman, Smart, Neruda, and Ginsberg, but it seems clear that the real antecedents are biblical: the books of Wisdom, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Proverbs, especially Ecclesiastes: Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive.

Yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.

Again, I considered all travail, and every right work, that for this a man is envied of his neighbour. This is also vanity and vexation of spirit.

The fool foldeth his hands together, and eateth his own flesh.

What is also interesting is that Bell conceives the breaking of the poetic line and the systematic non-organization of his poems, as we noted above, as ways of shrugging off artificial bonds and shackles, to get closer to a mode of writing and presenting that is more natural to the way we think and apprehend the world than the way he has done it in his previous poetry.

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Ok, then. To summarize what we know, or think we know about the poems: They are bound together by their look and structure. The first part of each poem is a statement and the second part its extension. But to say this is to suggest the existence of a linear structure where there actually is none, and to suggest specific relations between parts, when the relation is actually open and unpredictable, or could be said perhaps to be organic or intuitive. Bell has said that a poem ends when it has used up all its information. The second part of each of the Dead Man poems finds new life in old information, and in doing so extends the life of the first part. We could say, punning on the structure, that the second part brings back to life all that has been used up in the first ending, as the Dead Man has returned alive from his death to his life.

Within each poem lines and sentences define each other. The speaker in the poems is undefined, has a voice and a presence but no described attributes. Nothing other than his presence in these poems distinguishes him from anyone else. Each poem—each speech of the speaker—is composed according to strict rules that in their application make each line seem like an improvisation, though it is clear that the poet never loses control, the voice never falters. That voice urgently wants to tell us things, albeit in its own time and in its own way. The antecedents to the lines in these poems are the biblical books of Wisdom, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and others, and like them, the lines have what I have called a kind of gnarly mysticism, almost as if one heard Lear’s life-wisdom strained through Edgar when he says, “O matter and impertinency mixed! Reason in madness!”

The focus of the speaker, the subject of his speaking, is of course the Dead Man, who is essential to everything that happens in the poems; the voice is the poet’s, and it is necessary to the poems, not only to their creation, but to how the poems are constructed, how the information is presented. The necessary poet is a sensibility with a voice who tells us in his own words about the essential Dead Man, larding on the facts and the situations, the attitudes, poses, and actions, one on the other, but the Dead Man is still unknown as a person when the speaking is done: The more we know specifically, the less we know generally. Anonymity trumps identity.

And where any specificity is given, it is always an eccentric apposite specificity, nothing to build a character on, a real person. We know that he is a very active Dead Man, whose death is an enactment of his living—that he is dying as if he was alive. For the purposes of these poems, he is alive only because he is dead. The Dead Man in short is a contradiction, who cannot exist, yet does things that the living do, and is spoken of by the anonymous poet as if he was a real person. The Dead Man achieves a

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universality in this non-existence, he is everywhere relevant by being nothing and nowhere. We know, at the end of these poems, nothing about the speaker or the Dead Man: Indeterminacy is their life.

A final note: There is a lot of good and technically proficient poetry being written these days. It can often be admirable, often interesting in its moment; but it doesn’t touch us over the long term, doesn’t come to live with us, because it cost the poet nothing to make it. I’m not attacking anything or anyone in saying this, nor saying that there are things that shouldn’t be done, pieces that shouldn’t be written. People write for myriad reasons, and it is certainly true that a bad poem, or a mediocre poem, or a private poem, doesn’t hurt anybody, and sometimes it can help a great deal, for there is joy in writing, the pleasure of poetic endorphins being released. But—so what? Those are private pleasures, the writer’s equivalent of a mile on a stationary bike.

Bell’s accomplishment here is something quite different, and important.

These poems mark an extraordinary late flowering by a major American poet. They are his best work, composed over a period of almost three decades, from the first one, written at age fifty-three, to what he says will be the last, completed at age eighty one. He has made a monument, and the costs of his making linger on every page. He knows it too, what he has done, and that his job as a poet was to go into the darkness and bring something back into the light, and that to do it he had to reach deep into himself and give away something of himself that he would never get back.

He also knew that in order to sustain what had done in the last poem he wrote, to prove that it was a real thing brought into this real world, he would have to do it again, and again. He had to write the next poem, because the next poem would prove the reality of the rest of them. These are wonderful poems, written at great risk, by a poet who didn’t have to do it, not for us, or for reputation or resume or career or anything else, but had to do it for himself. Because he’s a poet. Because that’s what he does, because that’s what it means to be a poet.

—Bob Herz NOTE: An earlier version of this essay appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of Nine Mile Magazine. Many thanks to Jim Crenner, friend and teacher, whose suggestions helped me to improve upon that original effort.

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Praise for Leslie Ullman: Progress on the Subject of Immensity, University of New Mexico Press, 2013 “For over thirty years now, Leslie Ullman has steadily refined a poetry of the most acute and lyrically precise mindfulness, of what one of her poems calls the ‘greater alertness.’ This method has been forged in part by her ability to render the harsh beauties of the southwestern landscapes that have been her adopted home. More important still, however, is her almost shamanistic willingness to visit those liminal states between waking and dreaming, conventional reality and phantasm—states that sometimes offer menace, sometimes wonderment. This is all to say that Leslie Ullman is a poet of the first order, writing at the height of her very considerable powers.”–David Wojahn Slow Work Through Sand, Iowa Poetry Prize, 1998 “Leslie Ullman has the ability to spin illuminating spells through and around the matter of earth and life. Her vision penetrates with an attention as careful and as transforming as day through clear water, as moonlight on stone. She is an artisan with words, and the results are poems embodying the intricacy and beauty of the subjects they honor.” —Pattiann Rogers Dreams by No One’s Daughter, Pitt Poetry Series, 1987 “In her new volume, Dreams by No One’s Daughter, Leslie Ullman traces with characteristic grace the urgencies of one’s passage through a life—from the fabular weathers of childhood into those hard climes of adulthood, and along the endless currents of dream. There is a quiet, a composure here that is both beautiful and disarming. Contemplative, precise, these poems instruct us in the delights of their world.”–David St. John Leslie Ullman is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Progress on the Subject of Immensity (University of New Mexico Press, 2013. Her first collection, Natural Histories, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and Slow Work Through Sand won the Iowa Poetry Prize. She has published a hybrid book of craft essays and writing exercises, Library of Small Happiness (3: A Taos Press, 2017). She is Professor Emerita at University of Texas-El Paso and teaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Vermont College of the Fine Arts. Now a resident of Taos, New Mexico, she teaches skiing in the winters at Taos Ski Valley.

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Readers write about Perfect Crime: Perfect Crime is a haunted book. In it one feels a pas de deux of despair and obliquity, of image and abstraction. A wry, humorous darkness broods over the pages. Greek myths that thread through the book—Demeter, Andromache, Chronos, Kore, Echo, Hermes and the gang--imply a larger pattern of doom for humans—humans who have “expiration dates” and are usually crushed in their passionate contacts with gods. In the face of such doom, the human exercise of consciousness, through language, is a brave defiance, that these poems act out in page after page. Perfect Crime feels like one long poem, a “highway / with no exit ramps” and “no exits,” coherent in tone and method.—Rosanna Warren Perfect Crime is brilliant!—Jody Stewart It seems a perfect example of a poet and poems that make the ordinary extraordinary. And, of course, vice versa. And he does it all with evocative and shifting shades of loss. Also with humor. I was dipping into it and reading various poems, but now I like reading it straight through. I'm the lucky recipient of a very fine collection of poems.

—Diana Pinckney It’s an indelible volume. I'm enjoying it greatly.—Diane Wiener

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Praise for Have Dog Will Travel: Never before has the subtle relationship of a blind person to a guide dog been clarified in such an entertaining way. That Stephen Kuusisto enables us to see the world through his blind eyes as well as through the “seeing eyes” of his dog is this book's amazing, paradoxical achievement.

—Billy Collins A perceptive and beautifully crafted memoir of personal growth, and a fascinating example of what can happen when a person and a dog learn to partner with one another.

—Temple Grandin

It wasn’t until the age of 38 that Stephen Kuusisto got his first guide-dog, Corky, and they embarked upon a heart-stopping and wondrous adventure.

Kuusisto’s lyrical prose gives his story a vivid quality, placing us directly into his shoes as his relationship with Corky changes him and his way of being in the world. Profound and deeply moving, this is the story of a spiritual journey: discovering that life with a guide dog is both a method and a state of mind.

Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the memoirs Planet of the Blind and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light and Letters to Borges. His website is www.stephenkuusisto.com.

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Praise for The Golem Verses: Poet Diane R. Wiener unlocks the door to a room of confidences, secrets, passions, and fears. These poems present an interior dialogue in which the Golem is more than symbol or legend but trusted companion and guiding, grounding force. This room is furnished with intellect, wonder, inquiry, discovery, revelation, and release. Curl up in a comfy chair and bear witness to this lyric journey.

—Georgia A. Popoff, author of Psalter: The Agnostic’s Book of Common Curiosities.

In Diane Wiener’s original and fearless debut collection, we enter a dreamscape where Jewish mysticism, childhood games, pop culture and poetry’s canon are blended together and all fair game. At its heart is Golem—part advisor, part imaginary playmate, possible lover—a mythical figure who “believe[s] she can be anything” and is playful, wise, and always kind. Wiener welcomes us into a magical, mystifying world that is somehow also intimate and familiar. “Tie the bows,” she generously tells us, “hem your brushed brown trousers. Lean in, I'm here.”

—Ona Gritz, author of the poetry collection, Geode and the memoir, On the Whole: A Story of Mothering and Disability.

I never knew a Golem until Diane introduced me. Diane’s courage in embracing and welcoming the Golem allows us all to travel with them from “believing I was gone, remembering my own life” to “hindsight is rhubarb, associations strawberry preserved stick.” What a glorious, wild, courageous adventure and a pleasure to read.

—Jackie Warren-Moore, poet, playwright, theatrical director, freelance writer.

Her work has been published nationally and internationally.

A poet since the age of seven, Diane R. Wiener's poems appear in Nine Mile Magazine, Wordgathering, Tammy, Queerly, The South Carolina Review, and elsewhere; her poems are forthcoming in the Welcome to the Resistance anthology. Diane's creative nonfiction appears in Stone Canoe; her flash fiction appears in Ordinary Madness (Weasel Press). She is Editor-inChief of Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature. A Research Professor at Syracuse University, Diane has published widely on disability, pedagogy, social justice, and empowerment, among other subjects. The Golem Verses (Nine Mile, 2018) was her first full-length poetry collection.

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Praise for A Little Gut Magic: I love this book. These are the most natural poems I’ve ever read. How they flow. How they touch the heads of thoughts so lightly and lovingly and move on. I say this is as someone who runs from even the rumor of a party: If these poems were people I would so crash their jamboree. “A Little Gut Magic” invents a genre: imaginative decency. Is that a genre or a style? Is this a book or an embrace? In these spikey days of distance and exclusion, Matthew Lippman is trying hard to find room for everyone, and almost succeeds. —Bob Hicok, author of most recently, Hold.

The world needs a poetry as loving and lyric, as engaged and ardent, as Matthew Lippman’s is right now. Epitomized by deep connected-ness and humanity, each poem reaches out to name our happiness pain, to comfort and stir us up, all at once. Generous and available, Lippman’s poems establish an intimacy that feels easy, but is born of a hard-won wisdom, fueled by willful optimism. A Little Gut Magic is the real thing. Feel it. Trust it. It’s a tome for our times. — Tina Cane, author of Once More With Feeling.

Reading Matthew Lippman's poems feels like having a conversation with a hilarious, brutally honest, and brilliant friend."—Jessica Bacal, Mistakes I Made at Work: 25 Influential Women Reflect on What They Got Out of Getting It Wrong.

Matthew Lippman is the author of four poetry collections—The New Year of Yellow (winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, Sarabande Books), Monkey Bars, Salami Jew, and American Chew (winner of the Burnside Review of Books Poetry Prize).

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Available at the Tiger Bark Press http://www.tigerbarkpress.com,

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The New Book from Georgia Popoff Georgia Popoff is a community poet, artist educator, and spoken word producer. A teaching poet in schools and community settings, she is poet-in-residence to several New York State school districts.

She is an editorial and professional development consultant to writers, schools, and community-based organizations, and has presented at conferences both nationally and abroad.

Her work has appeared in literary journals, anthologies and web publications. Author of two poetry collections, Coaxing Nectar From Longing (Hale Mary Press, 1997) and The Doom Weaver (Main Street Rag Publications, 2008), she is co-author along with Quraysh Ali Lansana of Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy & Social Justice in Classroom & Community (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2011).

Available through Tiger Bark Press. $16.95

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