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The Driftwood Review Issue Five October 2009
Editors: Terry Allen & Dennis Barton
Cover Image by: Peter Schwartz
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Poetry 6
The Pigeon’s Analysis
by
Heather Macpherson
7
First Sign
by
John Grey
8
Still Life
by
Sergio Ortiz
9
Breakfast
by
Kim Lock
10
Rust and Metal Handles
by
Sergio Ortiz
by
Laura Sobbott Ross
12-13 Sending my Daughter to Borrow an Egg 14
Timing
by
Kim Lock
15
Drop
by
J.R. Pearson
16
The Woman who Became
by
Linda Ann Strang
a Prayer Flag 17
Stand
by
George Moore
18
Contemplating
by
Joseph Anthony Vega
19
Grand Coda
by
Heather Macpherson
20-21 The Boys at the Roller Rink
by
Laura Sobbott Ross
22-23 Grass Lake Sibilants
by
Michael Lauchlan
24
by
Ken Meisel
by
Richard Fein
by
Ken Meisel
by
Karen Kelsay
Grand River Avenue, Detroit Riots, 1967
26
Lubricating Failed Social Interactions
27
Boy Reading to me at the Runaway Shelter
29
At the Buffet
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30
Boson
by
Kim Lock
31
Aftermath
by
J.R. Pearson
32
Snow
by
Michael Lauchlan
33
The City is a Woman
by
Ken Meisel
34
Dark Seas
by
Janet Butler
36
Library Terminal
by
Jerry Kraft
37
A Day After the Surrealists by
by
George Moore
38
Thirst
by
J.R. Pearson
39
For the Dead
by
Heather Macpherson
40
Waterfront Anniversary
by
Jerry Kraft
by
Nancy Williams
Cover Sockets II
by
Peter Schwartz
11
B&W Subway Stairs
by
Joseph Anthony Vega
25
Bridge
by
Dennis Barton
28
Birds
by
Dennis Barton
35
Street Woman
by
Joseph Anthony Vega
41
Pines
by
Dennis Barton
42-43 45 RPMs
Art/Photography
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Heather Macpherson
The Pigeon’s Analysis
The way earth worms wash into the street exposed, dank and glint too aloof to swerve on-coming treads. They laze the paved topography – a lexicon of firma and pleasantries unlike grubs and maggots, those bitchy tattletales you’d never invite to tea.
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John Grey
First Sign
No walking two-foot track pattern this morning, no raccoons, no opossums. Nor the two-print trotting gait of fox, coyote. Nothing says nothingness as much as blank snow, the ground so smooth and white, so free of gallop, lope, there never was a living thing. Landscapes know no better than to tell the truth. And here it is recounted by a night of falling flakes, a morning of first cracks in gray, a distant harmless sun. Who’ll be the first to recall all of their experiences, reclaim their instincts from the drug of sleep, respond to need, forgo their fear. Terrain waits like a writers blank page, willing the story along. A squirrel perhaps, leaping like a flurry frog. A deer nibbling through ice. Or even I, first steps of another day, this time with clear rent perforations, cold and windy, chilled beyond bone, more evidence than sense. The world is not the world until the living things take traction. A blue bird fakes it. A crow doesn’t try. A hare it is. A hare by a hair. A plop. A push. A pad. A claw. A mark. An indent. A cavity. Just how the beginning likes it.
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Sergio Ortiz
Still Life
She was a still-life painter, but her spectacular flowers dried and dropped their petals. She picked up the most delicate and repainted the corollas. We thought her compositions would depreciate after she passed, so we watched the bouquets, waited for the wind to blow. winter sleet honey bees and rue in her pocket
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Kim Lock
Breakfast
I tell myself that if I cook the egg without breaking the yolk, everything will be fine, and my quaking legs and knotted gut will become still. I pour you a cup of coffee, knowing that what I have to tell you will not pour out of me as smoothly as the dark liquid, that no amount of cream or sugar will mask the bitterness of my awful truth, that what I did will break your heart. I pass you the coffee. You pull me close and gently kiss my lips. It’s a kiss sweeter than you’ve ever given. I slide the egg onto the buttered toast, my insides caving in. The yolk quivers, then splits.
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Sergio Ortiz
Rust and Metal Handles
I live in a death house. Root rot between sugar maple and dogwood burns my toes. But I'm not sad or thirsty, I've got the wind and a little piece of sky. When it thunders I stick my bones out, wait for rain, and smile.
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B&W Subway Stairs by Joseph Anthony Vega www.driftwoodreview.com 11
Laura Sobbott Ross
Sending my Daughter to Borrow an Egg
I had stopped stirring, tapped the wooden spoon to the rim, flour tumbled with cinnamon, the oven set on purr. Through the pasture, she carried home a single egg like a glass pearl. Whole in smooth opaqueness, the neighbors had plucked it from a foam cradle of a dozen, rows now missing at least one, like the teeth she thanked them through before heading back, wary of nettles and fire ants, the silent cows, the early moon being passed alongside her
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from oak to oak to oak. Through the same window I’d watched her carry home phlox and jewel beetles, lemons from orchards, icicles snapped off pine fence rails. And once, a garden mole, the pink pads of its tiny human palms turned up— a praise for every fragile thing tended with awe, the providence of girlhood— egg-balanced, like tunneled light meant to break open in the end. At the door, her small hands hold the egg like a wick cupped in wind. The moon loosening from the grasp of those high, dark branches.
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Kim Lock
Timing Five delicate, pale-blue orbs surreptitiously deposited by a mother duck nestle on dried grass and felted fluff in the midst of the delphiniums next to the front porch. I thought she had abandoned them, deciding that such proximity to dogs, cats, cars, humans, and lawn mowers carried too great a risk. I imagine the cool yolks floating in protective albumen, their DNA suspended in time, waiting for the change in temperature that sparks life and action. This morning there was an early-morning freeze. I step outside to check the eggs, fearing the worst. Suddenly, mother duck shoots out of the delphiniums, flapping, quacking, up, up, up toward the rising sun.
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J.R. Pearson Drop a song forged from the bare rhythm of the night & you'll hear petals fall from her voice. Follow the sound of sweat to the roar of her breath in your mouth. She hums your name with her pulse lost in the dark & a magma bleed from a Milkyway of holes in your chest. Hours after Geronimo walks the skyline, silent tongue-tips feather stones in a held breath before an Apache tracker's sunrise. Eight legs of daybreak climb forearms & drink a bead of sweat from wet hair horned by your bad collar. Cygnus opens its last luminous wing across the sky's black mouth & she winks at the dead air in an eavesdropper's lust for padded vice grips. You recite the underground alphabet tattooed on the back of your eyelids & think of the last honeydew that sings in the summer sun.
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Linda Ann Strang
The Woman Who Became a Prayer Flag
Man and oxygen, you are the purest atmosphere, twisting through valleys, holding handfuls of fabric, hair and fervent prayer. The earth is made of cotton: you can fly the Himalayas like a kite, rolling the sun on the tip of your tongue. Even when you settle against me, like a low cloud, for the night, my gown whispers the ecstasy of aviation, through frills, into your forehead; your hand relaxes as you fall asleep, releasing a supplication.
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George Moore Stand
In the beginning you think nothing will ever come of this lingering anticipation, the wait for what is real, the meaning, if the word still holds some truth, of this living thing. Like life were a plaque above the door of where you’ve come or where you’re going, somehow the inside of the house indistinguishable from the great outside, and you want to know, simply know, what the plan is behind the million machinations of the world, evil and good, self-created and conflicted with your self, and one day all this will sort itself out, become the woman or man who was meant to be. Perhaps it already has. Under the place you mark your name there is an invisible line running out to the edge of the darkness, and it radiates like a beam of light, which has no meaning and only tries to illuminate, touching the things it encounters on its way. This is not wisdom, nor insight, but the suspension of those. Nothing stands in the way if one way is to stand, one move, the one simple process of you, neither enfolding or unfolding. But I can’t say this outright. You look past me into the night where we have met again for coffee, a brief word, the turning toward that you so desire. There is only your next move. www.driftwoodreview.com 17
Joseph Anthony Vega
Contemplating He lifted the glass to his lips contemplating tomorrow, while today was growing fainter; he lowered the empty glass to the bar.
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Heather Macpherson
Grand Coda
What you do to your body: demonstrate the perfect clavicle, hide pricks between fingers and toes. Infected, you sing orchid songs, beg for money and sell skin and bones; neglect bicuspids weak and septic. You were legs –rhythmic credulity, gestures and movements. Now une jolie fille, you are ersatz smile and grey iris decayed.
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Laura Sobbott Ross
The Boys at the Roller Rink The boys at the roller rink came from the wrong side of town. They swallowed the oval floor in strides that never wavered or sent them spinning with outstretched fingers slippery from their own oily scalps, body odor at least a length or two behind. Wind in billowy polyester shirttails, they were often called out for skating too fast, although the wheels of their rented skates could be readily stilled in the rim of rubber matting. It was grace— theirs, not ours, which made us hide in the girls’ bathroom once an hour when free skate became couples only. A sweaty palmed proclamation that stirred the mirrored ball in the ceiling, dizzying sequins shed across the dimmed room.
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We were afraid that the boys at the roller rink might ask us to join them, link their pale fingers into ours and wing us across their roadmap of shadows, the relentless gravity of hard surfaces, leaving an ache beyond any Three Dog Night song played back to back. Maybe we were afraid they wouldn’t ask us anything at all.
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Michael Lauchlan
Grass Lake Sibilants A breath soughs through sedge and grass cattail and reed. Something with hands tousles hair, fluffs a shirt, would puff linens and sails if lines hung over docks, if boats plied the soft waves. None do. I catch a bit of this hush and pull it into lungs, into blood cells that roil toward brain, toward muscles at rest— a breath of listening, a lifetime making. What if I only wait, cranestill, breathing sound with air. The hush which floats over the waves makes a place of no place, a voice of sound seeping from a hole. Always, building comes after, building a case, building buildings, building as music rises toward an end. But what moves over the reeds has no end, comes from somewhere in Alberta (and before?) and empties over flat Ontario farms
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of tomatoes, beans, and wheat. I take a small sip from that ocean of air, hear a few notes of reedy opera. Once, I heard a political argument in Persian, missing some details (who were the infidels, the heroes?) but I got that it coiled through dust, blood, and rhetoric to Detroit, to three men shouting at one who answered in soft bursts—the rapid counterpoint rising in spittled pitch and breaking finally in exhaustion. What moves over Grass Lake has a cadence, a pace, a few sibilant notes. It offers its own suasion—stay, stay,
wait through sunset as I unlace your knotted chest, poor bound one. Breath calling breath, it names no infidels, but pulls and sways toward undulation without end.
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Ken Meisel Grand River Avenue, Detroit Riots, 1967 Sometimes in a young mind there are rabbits sniffing pine cones and wet grass in the morning. The world is an aural landscape of meditative beauty. In my young mind I’m driving with my father. I’m not sure where in the hell we’re going. It is July, 1967. And there is smoke billowing out of roof tops. Army vehicles, which look like big violent bugs, churn forward down the streets. I’m told to duck down in the station wagon. I’m told there could be sniper fire. My young head could be blown apart like milkweed. So I grip the back of the seat with my strong arms like I’m hugging the side of a wall for protection. My stomach, which is full of acid and stones, tightens. My father looks ahead as if sniffing down a long corridor to a doorway, something golden and light. I’m guessing he’s looking straight into Heaven, for I am Catholic, and I can’t guess ahead to anything else. Nothing but white light. And there are angels, big weeping winged things caressing the burning cars exploded down along the side streets. Some angels genuflect. Some blow saxophones or trumpets and they throw them down on the street loudly. And it sounds like wailing or crying, as if all of Heaven’s gate had fallen like glass over us. Then I peek up, see the black men running away. Man, some of them run into store fronts with no glass remaining. And their faces are terrified ripped pieces of rubber. And the police cars race forward after them. Fire trucks roar down the road and blow hoses full of water all over them. Someone calls them devils but it sure isn’t my father, for his heart is as wobbly as a bowl of milk and he loves them. And the angels, which are large insects with beating wings and wailing faces that resemble sun flowers bursting apart, race and swoop down on us. And one of them cradles the window of the car like a blanket, a large bursting mouth of howling. And he yells at me you will be named John one day and you will tell of the apocalypse here. And every story you tell will be true. And bewildering. For you fear all this and it breaks your heart.
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Bridge by Dennis Barton
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Richard Fein
LUBRICATING FAILED SOCIAL INTERACTIONS It happens with either banal banter or soul searching conversations, or anything in between. It follows the demise of dialogue, those words not spoken after the end of a love affair, friendship, business partnership, or chitchat between two passing strangers. It’s like Novocaine weighing down the tongue with all the gravity of a black hole. It’s those tortured moments of nothing more to say, when eye-to-eye discourse devolves into restless fidgets and distracted eyes are desperate to gaze anywhere but face-to-face. It’s when I’m bored-to-tears-with-you is euphemized as I’ll-be-seeing-you-soon and each knows the other is politely lying.
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Ken Meisel
Boy, Reading to Me at the Runaway Shelter
Rain, falling across the street and a squad car heavily thundering through it, lights lit, sirens squealing loudly as we practice ducking down again to dodge the bullets known to fly around here, like rabid pieces of darkness cut loose from the section of the city known as Crack town, corpse town, the 5th precinct. We’re sitting together at a table, reading. He looks up at me, eyes small and bright, like little birds trying to fly above the tall trees. His thumb and his fingers carry a page over to another one, simply, like a little wind gently lift-nudging stuck things forward, and he looks down again, traces his eyes over the pictures, the words, all the news of the world that’s given over to print. Now, because there is an angel hovering over his left shoulder, something alive and special like a medicine name, or a fairy god mother, he mouths one of the words on the page, something that calls his vast future to him. He tries it on his tongue again, tastes it, forms his mouth around it, like a gold coin. He whispers it to me, says it out loud again, college.
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Birds by Dennis Barton
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Karen Kelsay
At the Buffet Two upper teeth protrude when he smiles. His receding hair is turning gray, the color of his almond-shaped eyes. Only the shrillest sound enters his ears, clunky eye glasses slide down his nose. He unfolds his napkin the way he was taught as a child, slowly and methodically. Over utensils, hands pause politely by the plate, his grin broadens; teeth dart out. This is his time to choose the food he eats and how many helpings fill the dish, escaping into a merry world of lemon pudding, roast beef and ice cream. There is no conversation-only an occasional thumbs up between bites.
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Kim Lock
Boson Earlier this year, particle physicists hoped to find the hypothetical Higg’s boson under the border between France and Switzerland in a circular, seventeen-mile-long, multi-millionEuro tunnel filled with enormous cylindrical magnets. Detectors witnessed particles smashing into each other at nearly the speed of light. And in that moment, Higg’s boson—referred to by some as the god particle—would reveal itself for a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second. Evidence for the boson would be found in telltale spirals and streaks left in the detectors. Guys, I hate to tell you this, but I could have saved you a lot of time and money; I found the god particle this morning in a slice of kiwi fruit I held up to the light.
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J.R. Pearson
Aftermath Nothing holds you like an open tomb snowing tulips over your dead brother. Hair a frozen blaze. Your sister speaks and you think: Now there's a voice that's been kicked in the chest. Later, when you're gunshot broke in a trigger-lit wake his face falls thru you like opened vein's wish on a perfect blade. You wonder why everyday the desert pulls heat thru bleached ribs; sun twists life from the sand & why his eyes always looked like a tipped over eight. He said once he had a voodoo doublehelix written in a wave of bone. Said he'd burn himself down just to watch the faces rise thru flames. In a waking dream he tells you the sky is a tear in La Brea tar so blow a sideways kiss to infinity & fly into everlasting ice like a crossed up skin bird.
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Michael Lauchlan Snow What creature flails like an old man? You find Moceri struggling, lost in a drifted alley and bring him home while the blizzard blows. Small, frail, good humored but soft on details and documents, he has no ID and no idea where he lives. After soup and dry socks, the story spills out. Daughters grown, a son in jail, he lives in a downtown flop. We start into the white, silent city. ―This depression,‖ he tells me, as I swerve through rutted streets, ―is tougher than the last. Then you could get help. We were all in the same crappy boat.‖ Ice tears at my muffler as I bounce across lanes. When he is delivered to a sour room behind a well-chewed door, I emerge to blow steam into the bright gloom and compose a story for you— of Moceri warm and safe at home. I'll skip the way the street curls its lip as he passes, the way the glass shakes in his one window as the wind slides in. But you know already the thin fabric of our skin, the threadbare coat we clutch against every winter to come.
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Ken Meisel The City is a Woman Said the man on Forest Avenue. He was holding his brown bag Of fortune & his eyes were salt. Do you know she loves the body Of a man even though he’s beat Her? All this as the gulls rose up Over the black chimney towers And the trucks stomped & rolled Into the Eastern Market district. To love a woman, I think, is to Try out for size what it is to be A swollen watermelon. The heart Is full of redness and dark seeds. There are stories & dark truths. Murder and mayhem and a laughter That is really a strange card game. We take our chances when we Love someone until the end of it. The heart of a city, this one, is full Of coughing & dead radiators, And men whose time is a lottery. The women in it grow dark & mute And hum songs to hanging laundry That is never fully cleaned off. The children in it are leaving it. We must remember that the city Is a woman, he said.
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Janet Butler
Dark seas The sound is faint, but grows with silence. A swish of silk as waters froth and ruffle moon bleached shores, white sands that hem a sea heavy with summer. Its warm waters cool to a late night freshness black skies another sea washing distant shores that wait us.
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Street Woman by Joseph Anthony Vega
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Jerry Kraft Library Terminal
In the library, at the keyboard next to mine, he typed intensely. Beneath his desk, a boy of four or five crawled, clearly bored. In an idle moment, I glanced at his screen. His email began: I’m married, too. Would love to meet. Adventurous. Can we find a time? You seem to understand. And I looked away, embarrassed at my intrusion. Now hearing only the tap of keys, the child pleaded, ―Can we go now, Daddy?‖ More unheard sentences were sent to the screen, the whole creation a furrowed brow, then less insistent tapping, while the voices in my own head would not be quieted. They whispered of another day, of need and sorrow and shame, having known his place, having written such words, having risked too much, and with every step a downward spiral to catastrophe, all to that tapping of keys, passion and need, and as I felt myself being swallowed again by the hungry screen he signed off, stood, and took the boy’s hand, perhaps off to some Little League game, and then dinner at home, mundane chat. The blank screen a dilated iris, staring back into my silence. He quickly left, but I stayed there. Hum of the machine. Remembering and repeating never again. Never again.
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George Moore
A Day After the Surrealists There is so much the world could have been if only the words might have jumped off the page and become someone, a girl with long braids, a man with one leg, a woman interested only in her children. But the last was not surreal in the sense that even today this is possible, like seeing the things science will make ahead of time through the mad visions of the marginalized, whose children are their wildest dream.
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J.R. Pearson
Thirst Granddad always said Indian kids don't sing for fear of cobras & your mom sure ain't got no venom till that unquenchable thirst holds her hostage for a deeper shade of burn. Jack whiskey & shots of two X sheepdip don't got no handle on that; said he'd seen her turn night satin side out then put a blind eye in the bottom of a bottle, watching stars warp & shiggle. Told myself the man was commode hug & tore up inside, didn't know up from no down even after a contusion of aspens drank his blood and a vacant sky evaporated thoughts like state-fair fireworks. Swear I seen him go. Two years later she pulled dusk down like a midnight shade over a golden-haired confession. Day sloughed a skin moon. Her eyes all chipped ruby. Shattered pearls rolled over cheekbones, she looked at me like a sunflower waffled reverse in a convex mirror, sliced & bigger by the second. Swore she held a bead of dew or the whites of my eyes in her hair, looked in her face & saw me: boy with straw locks & no heartbeat. She spoke with the smell of fresh cut leaves bleeding from a liquid sieve under her tongue; another attempt to kill autumn footprints from her forehead once and for all-Then, someone took the words out of her mouth & put them in the voice of a jackal, she says: thirst don't take no for no answer. Where'd you put my drink.
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Heather Macpherson
For the dead
who settle open-eyed with winsome smiles who yield to the constraint of air; gossips through bygone specks of sand and muck, unaware of pebbles between fingers and toes or tree roots teasing the femur; who creep and crawl under floorboards, eavesdrop on moths flittering near halogen bulbs, chat of enigmas revealing rudimentary truth about kick the can and flashlight murder. There is something I need to tell you: wake up wake up wake up! The moon is out it’s time to sing, time to play; nourish your hunger with backyard rituals and stray from ordinary games.
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Jerry Kraft WATERFRONT ANNIVERSARY Taste of hot clam nectar, thrush of wings, gulls stealing tourist-tossed French fries. Metal tables along the wall provide space for young couples who can barely afford their shared fish and chips. We are older now, watch the slow-moving ferry ply its regular way across the Sound, sigh to one other, recalling our last time here, weighted by solemn freight, a slow wake spreading wide from that passage. We return to mark a simple sentence finally said, ―I'm still in love with you.‖ Even after years of separation, even then we heard the splash. Now years later, we’ve seen how the world spins on such a simple declaration; how love so long unsaid becomes an ocean's voice, tide and current. We mark another year of our being; we sip the broth, these smells and sounds, our private tidings to savor; taste how long time is, how briefly on the tongue; how a ripple of love becomes the fathomless deep. Our hands entwined, we see the distant horizon, one true thing said, and how the waves never still.
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Pines by Dennis Barton www.driftwoodreview.com 41
Nancy Williams
45 RPMs
New kids, from Philadelphia, intrude. We summer lakers, Detroiters, form a clique around the needle that grazes the black hills of the latest Motown rock and roll. We’re in the groove. Phonographs, records, are us.
We dance our plush green lawn into a floor of stomped twirls. Strolls and twists blast into chicken flaps. Monkeys, jerks, and hand jives. Dance craze, at the hop. Show-offs, us. Arrogant, them, these new kids
who hug the water’s edge like imaginary gymnasium walls. As if they know it all. But their eyes, glued wide, betray them. Hah! So we thought. One sculls away then back on slapped waves of music, a Pennsylvania beat of 45s.
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Stacks of mashed potatoes and raves, dancing in the streets. A trove, this rock and roll, an equalizer. It spins, lifts and spins, mixing east coast and west into the Midwest, night into day, dark into the hands of light, as we all dance.
Heads droop, eyes shut. The sun finally wearies of its watch. Some day-birds have already trilled themselves to sleep, others, even night-birds, loudly object to our racket or fly off. Remorse has yet to spin in its own deep groove.
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