Lummox5 sampler

Number Five • 2016

s m s i -

...

the view from down here

by RD Armstrong

W

hile I was dragging my feet on writing this version of the View From Down Here, I took a little trip down to El Paso...not the old El Paso of song, but the newly gentrified El Paso (well at least they’re trying, but El Paso is still a dusty old town). I’d made the commitment to go and do a workshop and a reading (tho I had no idea what I was going to do and, as usual was flying by the seat of my pants)!

It all started when I got an email from Donna Snyder announcing the schedule for her Tumblewords Writing Workshop.

I think it was for March, and I saw that Cranston Peabody was going to be doing the workshop and reading and feeling frisky that afternoon I sent a reply to Ms. Snyder suggesting that I could be considered for the same as I “put on a pretty good show, myself”...I’m shameless. But to my surprise, she was interested! I suggested that I could come for the Peabody extravaganza, as I’d known old Cranston for decades (well, maybe, 1.5 decades), and I was sure we could work something out.

I think this uncommon bravado came from a recent tail-spin conversation about the caste system in the poetry world in L.A. You know, the “A” list versus the “B” list, etc. It was a pointless argument, but I was bored. When it was over, I realized I’d burned yet another bridge and would have to look elsewhere for venues in which I could sell my wares. Believe me, 23 years of deadends does take a toll. So, I was ready to try out a new market. My only worry was

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this workshop. That and when we could make this happen.

As it turned out, the workshop/reading happened on June 25th. I calculated it would take 2 days to get there and 2 days back, plus a couple of days to see the sights. 6 – 7 days round trip. Now, I’m not gonna lay out the whole trip except to say that I put 2000 miles on the rental (my car wouldn’t have made it out of town, much less across the desert with no AC - in 100 degree weather). In fact, it was the pending heat wave that made me decide to cut my trip short and head north to Santa Fe about 6 hours away.

Now, I have to tell you, dear reader, that it wasn’t without some trepidation that I mounted this enterprise...it was to be a solo trip down the southern route through Phoenix, AZ to Tucson to Las Cruces, NM then into El Paso, TX...all uncharted territory.

Hours spent in silence, no one to talk to, listening to the iPod and the whine of the road; trying not to drift into the memory lane, praying that some truck driver wouldn’t run In the driver’s seat

me off the road (I was warned about this on the stretch between Wilcox and Stein) or worrying about being hit by lightning (on I-25 towards Santa Fe I saw 3 bolts, one was about 6 feet wide and just off the freeway).

The only time I had problems were when someone would try to give me directions (by the time they got to the end, I’d already forgotten where I was supposed to start). Fortunately I had maps on my phone.

So, I got by.

But this was all backdrop, the thing that made this trip a success, aside from turning a small profit, was something that happened during the two workshops (oh yeah, I went to one in Santa Fe as well) I attended. At each one the format was as follows: I read a few poems from Tracking the Rabbit (my newest chapbook), then everyone wrote for a period of time (in El P it was 20 minutes / in SF it was 5 minutes), then they read what they had written (the whole piece in El P / the last line in SF), then this process was re-

peated 2 more times. At the end of the third round in SF each person read all that they had written.

I have to say that quality of writing at both workshops was impressive! But what really astonished me was when I realized that most of the El Paso writers (and all of the Santa Fe writers) were working off of something that I had read...they were responding to a line that caught their fancy.

This was a level of validation that I hadn’t had much of, and certainly not in a long time...at one point in Santa Fe, I was coming back down the hall when I heard one of the poets reverently reading the poem “You, Me and the Dog” from Tracking the Rabbit while the others oohed. This was more of that foreign territory I mentioned before.

And it was rewarding when they read back their poems based on some line that I had casually “tossed off”. I imagine it’s the kind of feeling that a songwriter gets when a roomful of people is singing their songs.

Tumblewords Workshop, El Paso, TX

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This was by far the best time spent on my trip. That and visiting with my friends (old and new). As for the reading? I did a good job, but it was a young crowd...sales were thin. I did much better at the workshop earlier that day. * * * I survived the trip; then it was back to the life I knew. The difference was that I felt renewed for most of the week that followed, but the news was bad and I soon realized that I was slowly changing...that I was getting depressed. I was wandering through my days feeling as little as possible, with occasional flashes of some angry bitterness that tempoarily blinded me, as if the afternoon sun’s reflection was bouncing off a window, somewhere...I was adrift, lost at sea.

And why you ask? Orlando Pulse, the two young men shot by police, the sniper in Dallas...all this violence and hatred, everyday a new travesty to deal with, a new verse is added to a very old song. The coat of many colors gets more and more tattered.

Eventually, something breaks, another line is crossed and the unthinkable moves that much closer to becoming the norm.

And what is my solution? I become more apathetic...I cling to this scrap of wood, this makeshift raft of poetry. As if somehow this sea of troubled waters could be weathered if I could just hold on for dear life.

I’m reminded of something S.A. Griffin is fond of quoting: “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

So, what about this theme: isms? Well, first off, here’s a few of the isms that were

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Me and Lawrence Welsh

chosen: environmentalism, terrorism, racism, fascism, schism, jism, pollyannaism, fatalism, cynicism, adventurism, voyuerism, cronyism, criticism, realism, escapism, dualism, prism...

According to Google, an ism is “a distinctive practice, system, or philosophy, typically a political ideology or an artistic movement.”

There are at least 850 isms on record. Of these, there are maybe 20 political isms, the rest cover a wide range and are glossed over, primarily because they aren’t sensational...much like the focus of the news on gun violence among the black community. Did you know that of the 509 people killed by police over the first six months of 2016 in this country, one-third were black? The remaining half were white with one-sixth on top of that for “non-white” (and “non-black”). Google search this if you are in doubt.

When I had the idea, I suppose I had hoped that we would use our great cultural heritage (our music, visual arts and language skills, ie creative writing) for the greater good and not just as another distraction to keep us from seeing what’s really going down, but then, I was the one who thought that “isms”

would make for a stimulating topic (and it looks like my head was buried deep).

Here, I had hoped to be praising all the amazing poetry sent in for inclusion only to discover that most of the poets submitting were ether afraid of the “ism” theme or couldn’t get past the political implications. I got the “I don’t write political poems” excuse on numerous occasions; or the “I don’t know what an ism is and I don’t want to know.” Now, don’t get me wrong, I did receive some pretty amazing material... it’s just that, for the most part it was pretty safe...in the first month and a half. The last two weeks there was an outpouring of poetry with some teeth.

Sadly, I unknowingly handicapped myself by choosing a “theme” that didn’t appeal to the poetry community. Seems like everytime I come up with an idea that I think is boffo I should do exactly the opposite! Well, I’ve learned my lesson...next year there’ll be no theme, unless you count well-written poetry.

Still, I wonder...where’s the outrage?

Now that Bernie has tilted at his last windmill, there’s no hope for getting us free

from the maelstrom that is this election year. I’ve watched our democracy slowly fall apart since I was in the 8th grade. Since Bobbie and Jack were killed, since Nixon, since Reagan, since Clinton, since Bush, since Obama... And now, it’s the lesser of two evils (egos)? Again? It seems my generation started us down this road with all our ‘ideals’ but started drooling like Pavlov’s dog the first time someone dangled a $20 bill in front of our respective faces. If I were an idealist I’d say it was time that we made up for abandoning our ideals by taking a stand and raising our voices against this tyranny!! But I am not an idealist.

Hmm “A distinctive practice, system, or philosophy, typically a political ideology or an artistic movement.”

This seems to cover a lot of territory and it brings many news items into focus these days (ie Orlando Pulse in mid June). I guess I just assumed that the left leaning poetry community would have something to say about all the hollering that has become the norm among the “patriots”, but all I got was this selection by Cassandra Dallett out of Oakland, CA:

Directions for Elections

Don’t watch the news: All channels Agent Orange and his followers faces the color of matchsticks waiting to ignite the furor, the fury, der fuhrer, white fervor.

Don’t Tweet, Tumble, or My Face: anger seeps into you, in your nightmares men with faces of flame rip your hair from the root, number Five / 2016 •

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tell you it’s your own fault.

Be careful in small towns: stay near the edges of the country, like in supermarkets there are healthier things, with the exceptions of Florida, the Carolinas, and Arizona, be weary of Oregon it may not be an accidental whiteopia.

Do not tamper with Trumpers: They will thump you, on the school bus you learned not to argue with stupid, logic never does prevail. School yard bullies taunt you Go back to your mama if she is dead, that is where they want you.

Don’t get up from old man sucker punch: They will arrest you, as your melanin has insulted his red fist, his white rage. They will shout USA as if it doesn’t belong to you though your ancestors labored here longer than their leader’s.

Later the news anchor will ask, what you did wrong.

Do not expect justice or to be hero: You don’t own this reality show, your assailant bailed out, patted on his back like the good ole days when those good ole boys killed Medgar in his driveway, mangled Emitt in their effort to dim the sunlight of that boy’s smile returned to us, only to be taken again, in the face of Tamir.

Avoid history books: black and white photos of Little Rock and Montgomery children spit on, pushed, and shoved. You already know what it looks like in color on CNN.

Don’t allude to histories’ repetition make comparisons to dictators and war criminals even if we know Agent Orange keeps Mien New Order the Bible beside his bed and having a black president has brought back the redeemers again their redemption gives birth to the Klan.

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Nor has there been much in the way of topical isms, which again confuses the hell out of me...where are the ‘folk’ poets or the fist pumping idealists...why is it that anti-government poets only seem to be the rappers or spoken word artists with an agenda to grind?

Who is gonna provide the soundtrack for this latest version of the American (nightmare) Dreamscape, Taylor Swift or Adele? Again I turn to Miss Dallett, whose submission was a treasure trove of indicting protest attacks on what used to be our great country:

Flint a hard grey to black stone of less luster, unyielding, and used to spark fire

They say don’t drink from your tap things unseen and lethal flow slow build up toxic in your blood you are cloudy you don’t notice no one notices they never expected you to be sharp in the first place

You drink from a river but you live near a lake a blue mammoth of melted glacier the folks at the General Motors drink from tall cool in their glasses city water runs maze of rusted pipes men crunch numbers to save the city one hundred dollars a day send you a bill for water that will leave you dispossessed diseased disabled but they thought you were that all along

a robot does your job at General Motors these days over and over it bends its arm number Five / 2016 •

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unarthritic and immune to lead poisoning your things on the sidewalk beds sofas faulty water filters pay or quit flaps on your door the sheriff shakes his damn head ten years after Katrina celebrities are sending bottles of water as if you were deserted as if you were drowning in broke levy floods your water bills stacking up the water filter that never filtered the notice that came for your home your family is thirsty shaking their damned heads on the curb Now I must point out, dear reader, that I am not suggesting that she is the be-all, endall answer for your woes, but I am enamored with her because she at least made an effort to comply with the theme, in fact, I think she kinda hit the ground runnin’ and never looked back...which is why I’m givin’ her so much leeway here. Wake up, dear friends, wake up and smell the breakfast burning!

But I digress.

I suppose there are two points here (that I want to address): 1). It’s very popular these days to shift the responsibility around and complain about how the young are messing it up for everyone. But if you are realistic in your approach to life’s challenges, you’ll admit that it’s everyone’s job to make sure that we (ALL) set a positive example; rather than expecting younger poets to take more than their share of the responsibility and not allow the older poets to sit idly by and let the young poets do all the “heavy lifting”.

2). Lest anyone mistakenly thinks that I don’t value each and every poem in this

year’s Lummox, let me say right now that I sincerely care about the poets and their poems. Really. Like anybody in charge of a group of creative folks, I want the very best from them. And why do you think that is?

Because I want each issue of Lummox to be as nice an experience as it can possibly be. I hope you will find this as stimulating as can be.

Could it be that the “silent majority” is back? I know that for a lot of older people, myself included, there is a tendency to choose the path of least resistence, to opt for the road most traveled, to withdraw in order to protect from changes to our patterns. I have to write almost everything down now because my CRS* has blossomed into full blown Short Term Memory Loss and I forget to do things that have been part of my routine for years! This makes putting this book together extra difficult. So, I don’t want to change the routine any more than I have to... it was hard enough relinquishing the judging job to Judith Skillman (who did an excellent job judging the poetry contest, by the way). *Can’t remember stuff.

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CONGRATULATIONS!!!!

Speaking of the poetry contest, here are your WINNERS for 2016: Doug Knott took top honors for his poem, “A Lesson in Conversational Portuguese”; Georgia Santa Maria took second place for her poem “Drought” and Jane Lipman took third for her poem “Aphorisms.”

You can find more examples of their poetry about mid-way through the poetry section. * * * You may notice that the Lummox Press is slowing down...I used to put out about 10 books a year, but recent events have caused the old lummox to back off on book publishing. I’ve also cut back on the size of books, preferring chapbooks to full size. To be honest, the anthology is by far the most profitable enterprise at Lummox Press these days, that and the readings that I do to sell my own books as well as the anthology... and since this is my job, I have to use what works, meaning I can’t afford to publish anymore books that don’t sell (which is to say I can’t carry poets who don’t promote their own books anymore, with the exception of Scott Wannberg and Mike Adams).

That said, since August 2015, I’ve published Henry River, An American Ruin by Tim Peeler, When Desert Willows Speak

by H. Marie Aragon (last year’s contest winner), Unbroken Lines by James Deahl (prose poems), In Between the Places Where Night Falls by Joris Soedling, Last Man Standing by Alan Catlin, Indian Summer by David Proskauer, Knitting the Andy Warhol Bridge by Ann Curran, Tracking the Rabbit by RD Armstrong, To Be With A Woman by James Deahl, and Scott Wannberg – the Lummox Years 1996 – 2006, edited by RD Armstrong. The titles that are italicized are chapbooks.

Lastly, I cannot forget the Patrons. They make this possible by providing me with a “budget” to operate on and to print the 300 or so copies of each issue. It takes roughly 5 months to put this baby out; two months to select the poems and the remaining 3 months to collect the illustrations, solicit ads and essays, find the interviews, put the thing together so that my friend Chris Yeseta can do the layout (he’s been working with me for 20 years as of July!) and then the real work begins...

Selling it. So you could help me out if you would tell your friends about this book.

ENJOY...

The call of the open road

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Me and Annie

* * * One of the nicest people I have had the pleasure of meeting in my years in the poetry minefield has died. Her name was Annie Menebroker. She lived for many years in Sacramento. Her quiet battle with cancer ended on July 9th. She was/is an example of grace under pressure. She is missed.

Here’s a poem by Bill Gainer, written about her.

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KISSING SHADOWS ~ for A.M., 3/30/1936 - 7/9/2016 Under the hum of a tired Sacramento air-conditioner we said goodbye.

I kissed her shadow she kissed mine.

We both knew whatever time does however dark it gets we may never again but our shadows always will find one another.

poetry Spiritualism Conversation With Death Last night an old song of the southern mountains came to me, a haunting tune-Conversation With Death- sung

by Lloyd Chandler, a cappella, nothing but a solitary voice reaching the depths of human despair and sending a cold chill right into my bones even on a hot August night.

Like those steep forest-choked mountains and narrow valleys of North Carolina, it shut the light right out.

I’ll lock your jaw so you can’t talk.

I’ll fix your feet so you can’t walk.

I’ll shut your eyes so you can’t see.

This very hour come and go with me.

I woke before dawn with the song playing in my head.

It’s off an old CD called High Atmosphere, recorded in the “60’s.

Ralph Stanley made a version called Oh, Death somewhat famous when he sang it in the movie Oh Brother, Where Art Thou.

Lloyd was an old man then, lived all his life in Sodom, NC and he must be long dead now, 50 years gone by.

Earth and worms both have their claim But the music is still alive, the song as vital and meaningful as ever.

So in a way Lloyd lives on.

And that’s what art is all about, a bit of immortality that springs from that terrible awareness of how little time we have.

Michael Adams the Bardo From a poetry manuscript loosely titled Crossroads to be published in the near future by Lummox Press... number Five / 2016 •

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Elementalism Hood Realism I saw a couple of shoegazers, punks, a death-obsessed ambient rocker wearing a Reese’s tee on his gig; an industrial metal-head who was recovering from his cocaine-addiction, and a poor noise-instrumentalist from Deutschland wearing a tattered coat and standing by the side of his depressed van, smoking and still trembling from yesterday’s hangover.

This all happened in the middle of a hood where on a foggy day shards and shrapnel of graffiti can make you miss your mother.

In the hood you are never alone there is an incessant noise of fear and loneliness that smells like piss, weed half-burnt cigarillos and beer combined.

A gig in a hood is essentially an existential ambush.

Sudeep Adhikari Kathmandu, Nepal First published in Zombie Logic Review, Dec 2015

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Mojave

Dirty is how I take my gin out here. But life’s more than a dash of brine, the livid silence of this desert not unwelcoming of strangers.

Down 66, Chevron Food Mart, teenage girls brush past me in a brief parade of cheap perfume, a cloying hint of low-grade weed.

A boyfriend waits for them in his Pontiac, looks after a tall can of malt liquor in forty seconds flat. He thinks there’s sport

to be had in this rail town yet, its sheer distance from the world, so sparse and simple, he could hold onto it forever.

Jeff Alfier Torrance, CA

RD Armstrong/Retronaut

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Adventurism Caravan with Summer Skies She got her license in an old pick-up that peculiar wasted green of county trucks with column shifts. No one else could drive it but her uncle, who gifted it to her for the summer, in return for her sworn oath to enroll at Sul Ross come fall.

The summer night skies wheeled with constellations. Into the back she threw the cleanest mattress pilfered from the old Nightowl Motel, seized for back taxes, sleeping bags, an ice chest and a camp stove.

A deck of cards and a Ouija Board tucked where girly-girls would keep mascara.

She knew each short order cook by name down the lean tangle of highway she drove city to city, knew where to park in every liquor store lot to avoid nails, scumdogs and glass, knew when to refill the cooler, where to hide the flask, when to get more smokes.

Nights she climbed up in back, watched the stars, séanced the stories she’d grow into, the countdown from seventeen into the grace of adulthood.

Every thickly enameled cup of coffee each morning reminded her of her promise— she loved the adventure but this was for summer, a side-step, a novelette, not her saga’s beginning.

Tobi Alfier Torrance, CA

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Universalism

By Default A life is not things chosen, it is the things declined.

The paths not trod, the partners not pursued, the help not given, the toil not done.

A life is burnt in by omissions whose only traces are ash.

Ed Ahern Fairfield, CT

Animism Untitled On the occasion of watching The twenty-fifth anniversary Of the Ken Burns Civil War Documentary contemplating The stupid excess of carnage I suddenly remembered this Moment in San Pedro at the House on Shepard Street I sat on the edge of the sofa Playing a song I had written For you with such heartache And feeling that the woman I was attempting to impress Was taken aback and said I see that your heart is still Taken by the ghost of your Past Of course she was right I Knew it would never work But I tried anyway and lost Still I regret her loss though Not as much as your loss but Still She played a fine fiddle

Runson Willis

RD Armstrong Long Beach, CA

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Fetishism All Night Racing Radio In the sweet silent rapture of sleep I stir suddenly & listen to the high-pitched pulse of electricity navigating the empty room and soon it all seeps backthe messy divorce access difficulties who gets the dog that dull ache in my lower right gut Headphones on. Unable to sleep I tune into 4KY- the All Night Racing Radio Station.

I love the simple formalities leading up to each racethe state of the track, the sudden scratchings, the assessment of the card- the favourites, the long shots.

I love the names of the thoroughbredsAtom Eve, Cheap As, First Bloom, He’s A Given, Agnostic, Hammered Art, Buckpasser, Ancient Sunlight, Beyond Thankful, Raw Impulse, Remember Razor.

I love the detached clipped cadence of the announcers from all over the nation as they call the race from the opening of the gates to the jockeying for positions, to the rising hysterical chants as the beasts barrel down the straight-

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And as I listen to the call I focus on the sounds of the words & the uplifting barking tone of the race commenter.

It’s like being in a church& as the race unfolds I imagine a priest is conducting a service & in the rise and fall of his melodious voice I am being absolved of all of my sins

over & over again with each race. * I awake much later in the night the radio still whispering in my ears reverently revealing to me the placings & confirmed weights & of the illusory dividends to come.

George Anderson Australia

Journalism Gitmo Orange Day 1: Kurt Cobain’s bore held with essence-snarling potion.

Day 2: Funnel-tubed by diagnosticians, Bound-to-happen morgue rattle an inexhaustible threat.

Day 3: Overhanging suffocation in firm plastic hood.

Day 4: In sea thirst Guerrilla dogs racket.

Day 5: Oblivion dithers, clocks refuse to tick.

Christopher Barnes Newcastle, UK number Five / 2016 •

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Ten Years of Butterflies Ten years of memories created, fears overcome.

Ten years witnessing students grow, step up and step out.

That is where I stand--watching chrysalis turn to butterfly.

Hovering over the leaves they cling to; balancing my roles.

Step out of their constraints to take a chance.

Step up to grab onto that tenuous idea of “potential”.

Cheerleader, encourager, observer, space –maker, sometimes forceful, Sometimes silent, until that final rehearsal.

Then, I turn it over and let go.

Ten years of watching the faces of fear and excitement while standing in front of friends and strangers.

Ten years of bearing witness to the chrysalis dropping away, new wings unfolding, stretching to meet their new journey

Some eager for a chance to show what they have deep inside; Many closed up like a chrysalis in its changing stage.

Students rise up in joy and strength and celebration of themselves.

Watching them find the courage to start, to stumble, to finish.

Closed up, needing time to develop; time to unfurl their wings.

Needing the space to come into their voice.

Ten years of butterflies opening Into their new space in all their glorious colors while I watch with fresh wonder each year.

Taking flight while I stand witness ---grateful, humbled Watching ten years of butterflies.

Belinda Berry Long Beach, CA

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Alcoholism & Defeatism The Battle

Diane Klammer

Could not stand another sleepless night drinking in secret against my will lying awake in a four-post bed invaded by delusions of the four horsemen of the apocalypse galloping across my forehead.

In purgatory searching for providence, I wanted to stop when the monkey on my back grew into a gorilla.

Everyday in the trenches I fight a guerrilla war to stay away from a drink while my jet-black hair turns gray.

Rooming house walls were closing in until a room full of faith restored.

Inflicted with a dangerous disease that tells me if I drink, poems will pour out of me and I will write like Bukowski.

Beer bottles sometimes scream: “drink me” and sobriety unfolds slowly like a Sunday.

Villette -for Charlotte Bronte It took her forever to write, three volumes long, they wanted her to change the ending for a happy one, could not abide the heroine feeling love for two men at the same time. She must change that, too.

She refused.

Debbi Brody Santa Fe, NM

Chris Bodor St. Augustine, FL

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Masochism Why do I love A cat who snarls and stabs me If I lean on his favorite pillow?

Why do I fasten My bra on the second set of hooks?

Why do I bite At the skin of my fingers?

Why do I douse my food With more than 3000 Scoville Units?

Why do I ask myself Why. Why do we put up With the road clog of rush hour.

Why do we tolerate Six minutes of commercials.

Why do we not Fast forward more often.

Why do we sit through Screaming loud movie trailers.

Why do we pay Close to $20 For recycled Remade Reboots With CGI effects.

Why Do we not Ask why.

Why Do we keep electing Submental psychos And why do some of us Not even exercise Our much-fought-for right to vote.

Why do we Learn Not to breathe the tainted air.

When Will we stop believing In faith and luck And love and Powerball.

When Will we stop Asking why.

How Do I get up every day Despite the ache in bones and mind.

How do I face The countless times I hear nothing but no Or I don’t know Or who knows.

How do I why And when and how And who knows and Look into the Nothing Void And why Do I answer the whys With a great big Masochistic smack in the face?

Don’t Ask. Lynn Bronstein Van Nuys, CA

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Pessimism, Mannerisms and Egotism NON SEQUITUR He swears he can’t understand a thing she says. Hates her dambreak gush of verbiage, how her thoughts, her words, flit here, there, “...like a G-D mosquito.” Queen of the non-sequitur, that’s what he calls her now. Once he listened attentively (or at least pretended to) until, finally she said “yes,” and the listening stopped.

Some days she thinks about taking a lover She used to wonder about all the zombies on TV--shambling about frightening and unstoppable. Now she sees then as metaphors

for the stupor of existence after hope & joy have been sucked out.

Some days she thinks about taking her life Coming home late from work (his car absent from the drive) she eats ravioli cold from the can while standing at the sink.

Maybe he’s left her a message, but what difference does that make, she knows , whatever his excuse, it is, most likely, a lie.

Some days she washes down the small, white pill the doctor prescribed to “ease her anxiety” with a large glass of cold Zinfandel so she doesn’t have to think at all.

Ronnie R. Brown Ottawa, ONT. Canada

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Working on the Patio at the End of Winter, I think of Po Chu-I

To James Wright California, 80º, I sit with my pad, staring off into the sky— no change in sight. . . .

45 years and I’m getting nowhere trying to write

about that old governor

working his way slowly up river

all his life . . .

seeing what, if anything, I can find out?

If I were sensible, I’d give up, jump off Po’s raft leading back twelve hundred years to a loneliness nothing’s going to solve. . . .

I’m past the politics,

the infighting

and suffering of fools that wear on you

like a rope tugging against a dock at high tide . . . and all things being equal,

nothing is ever equal.

I had to watch my step

to even end up in this back-water province

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where I’m free

to walk along

as waves crash into the seawall, where I dodge the spray

and sit on a bench watching leaves in an evening gust lift away

with faces from the past. . . .

I put in regular hours

and now have to ask myself why everything turns up too late?

A little cash in my pocket and I’m buying distilled water

instead of champagne,

and each evening leave the stars to bubble and rise on their own.

Weather refuses to arrive above the rose beds;

on the evening news,

snow continues to fall in Minneapolis.

45 years . . . and I keep coming back to your poem—

what’s the use. . . .

At the end

of the garden, liquidambars are a black scrawl against twilight.

I look up again,

and guess I’ll get somewhere by dark.

Christopher Buckley Santa Barbara, CA

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Institutionalism, Criminalism Wife-Beater The jail cell was thin and long; I sat at one end and a wife-beater at the other.

The wife-beater paced the floor back and forth; he was tall and thin and had crazy eyes; whenever he came near I stared him down.

I wondered if I would have to beat on him: Maybe that was why they put me in there.

I did not care who he had beat; I had no opinion on his case; hell, I wasn’t even married.

Wayne Burke Barre, VT

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Enlightenmentism The Whisper Waking Gray and dark the morning is here. The dawn, quiet, lifeless, falls on us and does not care what day it is.

Our minds, still dormant know no world, no great emergencies; lifeless too, it sinks deeper deeper away from the approaching sirens of haste.

That opaque sky of morning returning punctually carefree. A timid day murdered by thoughts all wild.

Deep, very deep in a forest, the mind can find its rest, its paradise of quiet, quiet love.

Helmut Christoferus Calabrese Tom’s River, NJ 1984

Capitalism & Fundamentalism A Psalm for Market Fundamentalism The Market is my mantra I want it all

He maketh me spray pesticides on green pastures and leadeth me to build factories beside still waters where I may lay its wastes

He guideth me to lay off union workers in my country and move operations overseas to hire cheap labor for the sake of maximizing profits

Yea, though I walk through a valley desertified by global warming, I will fear no accountability for my government is his executive committee His media and church, they comfort me

He preparest a banquet table of more than I can possibly eat far from the presence of half a planet of famished masses He anointest beaches from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico with oil spills and fillest skies with over 400 particles per million of carbon-dioxide The landfills runneth over with with non-biodegradable plastic bags and single use styrofoam coffee and soda cups Surely wealth, power and privilege shall follow me all the days of my life and exponential growth will continue forever in a world of finite resources Amen Amen Calokie Pasadena, CA

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25

Living with the Lost Angels (because I am one of them)

Who stood on a NoHo porch In a Huckleberry Hound sweatshirt

Until my mother needed A new Monterey Park tract home

That wasn’t a reminder of Her husband’s first marriage

I met little neighbors on the sidewalk One knocked on our door

For 9 x 12 Lego therapy sessions Complete with Hot Wheels parking plastic curbs

We quickly grew outside Balling in the street, surfing bicycles

Then once inside steel glass and rubber Drove away to find money for a girl

To make out on the bench seats Which led me back to Hollywood

To learn the impregnation arts Necessitating a move for San Gabriel space

For the small creature who rapidly realized His mom couldn’t take the repetition

So I had to search for another Femme desiring cohabital union

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Number Five / 2016

Easy when you have a job A coworker carpooled with me

Into an El Sereno condo life Interrupted by college coeds

Time for a new set of wings Fresh arms wrapped

Around Alhambra culture To produce a mini-her

Decades of hugs ended Driving different freeways

Later sitting at a desktop Found the next companion

To share SoCal sunny daze Maybe this pair will satisfy a while

Long enough to shuffle off Only lonely ours will tell

If I’ll wish again to reboot Because I can’t stay happy

In the land of short promise Always offering higher rents

For the complete revision Of this breathing poem Don Campbell Alhambra, CA

Jen Dunford

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Nationalism Havana Times We sit on a bench at Lake Worth Beach, Cuban sandwiches stuffed into our mouths, a bag of malanga stuck in the shade beneath us. On the bench to our right, a couple argues in Spanish, their hands punctuating the humid air.

To our left, a man talks nonstop in Spanish on his phone.

Black eyed children rush past the bench, flip flops slapping the pavement, voices calling back to their parents in musical tunes I can’t understand.

Cuba slowly moves into South Florida, as Miami, overstuffed as my belly, spreads slowly up the coast creating a different Cuba, unlike the one ridden with poverty and a new dictator who makes no move towards better days.

Bit by bit, English disappears.

‘Se habla Español’ signs spread from store to store.

I wonder if the sea will learn to roar with an accent, if the wind will develop a lilt, a roll of its tongue when it rises in the night or if Mariachi bands will roam our beaches like the hula girls in grass skirts in my Hawaii days.

I cross my legs, glance out at the sea, imagine a flotilla of home-built, leaky boats out there right now, some already sinking, built by Cubans desperate enough to risk their lives to try for ‘touch land and you stay’.

I imagine the joy in their hearts when they find a place in this new land where I, Caucasian and aging, with too much hearing loss to learn a new language, am the interloper, increasingly unable to navigate my own leaky boat through the shifting tides of my homeland so rapidly changing around me.

Pris Campbell Lake Worth, FL

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Number Five / 2016

Environmentalism Arroyo Once winter floods subside, the stream bed wears pale mud chevrons on rock shoulders, flattened grass between stones, sticks and bark wedged askew like trouble by currents gone and sure to return.

Sharp rock cuts

your feet. Hot winds parch me to mere stalk, to dust. I will for you shade, birdsong, breeze, but find only more dry channel, sometimes less steep, wider, or, with luck, walled by more walkable weathered stones.

R. S. Carlson La Verne, CA

First published in The Rolling Coulter (Fall 1992).

Conspiracism Another Place There was no doubt in his mind that he was an alien.

Nothing about him felt human, looked human, ever since he was a kid and the old man beat him senseless on a daily basis, sometimes dragging the process out so he could really experience the pain.

He realized then, that if he went somewhere else in his mind, the beating would be happening to someone else in another place. Part of him died in that other world.

Only the alien survived.

Alan Catlin Schenectady, NY

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Surrealism HAT OF SNOW This is not a blizzard of shrapnel made of metal that cuts and bleeds and kills. It’s just a snowstorm that passes and melts.

Pretend there is ice and and we can cover it which will never die.

snow on the street with white flowers

I would tell you to take some of those flowers and make a hat and, for the joy of it go into the world, because that too will melt but you’ll have had a hat of flowers.

How many can say that.

Grace Cavalieri Annapolis, MD

Leap second It seems that the earth is tilting at a greater rate than the usual Gregorian scheme allows and to maneuver that speck of slipped time astronomers have devised the leap second

well it seems very precious to me this spare bit of time newly allocated and I wonder how to use it best get maximum measure

what chasms must it leap over of the canyon, of Coleridge, of the heart its temporal burgeoning calls for some accommodation

maybe perform a small tour jete perhaps bestow a whisper kiss or, better, save it for the end savor savor savor the final inhale Patricia Cherin Long Beach, CA

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Number Five / 2016

Racism They Didn’t Spare Me the Racial Slurs

At the age of sixteen I swore I didn’t have yellow skin And didn’t celebrate Chinese New Year

To me, yellow skin meant You had hepatitis or something And had nothing to do with being Asian

My mother said I had skin Like a white peach Light on the surface and pink underneath

I said I looked that way Because I was East Asian Chinese, Japanese, or Korean Not Southeast Asian

I hid in an elitist crowd Wearing designer clothes And holding expensive gourmet coffee To show people that I was no peasant No descendent of the Chinese railroad workers

But they still call me “little Chinese girl” Instead of “ma’am” In my care facility in Pico Rivera Men ask me to have sex for money Because, they say, other Asian women have done it Jackie Chou Pico Rivera, CA

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Skepticism

Obsessionism

the night it rained in Maui

over pizza the one night it rained in Maui Tisa tells us in Dallas the police department has a zombie contingency plan

her son’s a cop she’s not joshing us

we laugh openly at this very specific absurdity

and later worry over Dallas grade-schoolers crouched under desks hugging M16’s

Tea and Turmoil

Present universe requiring little, she demands all things from herself.

Write poems, check Facebook. blog. paint, create. Do it all before you die, So little time to breathe, smile, feel.

So much to be before being itself is no more, and nonbeing is or isn’t. So why do much of anything requiring planning, plans at which the gods laugh and at such mortal fools falling over each other boiling like her in her little teapot — so many kettle storms felt only in this one crucible which she with others like her inhabit unbeknownst to occupants of all those infinite pots brewing tea and turmoil and signifying only babble boiling invisibly, inevitably, unknown

Wanda Morrow Clevenger Hettick, IL

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Number Five / 2016

Ed Coletti Santa Rosa, CA

Pollyannaism The Other Side When I was a child, I read a story about a Muslim girl who spent her days inside the walls of a beautiful garden,

where she would pray in the dawn before opening her journal to write of enchanted journeys beyond the garden wall.

I coveted the wall that watched over her, while she marveled at the bloom of rare flowers and believed

only in places that were noble and safe, from a home filled with family who adored her, who would fight to protect

her honor and keep her safe.

Before I learned that walls restrain, deny freedom, the way I saw it when I was young.

Sharyl Collin Torrance, CA Carol Linn

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Conformism Kummerspeck (Lisandro’s Song) Little Lisandro (he’s white, don’t get offended) sits at a desk in a schoolroom he’d rather not be in forced by people he doesn’t know to do what he’d rather not do.

The people keep telling him: “Lisandro, life isn’t always about what you want. We know more than you.”

Lisandro can’t make sense of any of it.

The kids around him don’t seem so troubled.

Sometimes they laugh at him and call him idiot.

The world is angry with Lisandro, and he is angry back.

What did he do?

No one will explain. All they do is criticize.

Lisandro is lonely.

Little Lisandro likes to draw pictures.

They are good too.

Angry.

The teachers take the pictures and the other kids say he is sick.

He got sent to the school psychologist.

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Number Five / 2016

They gave Lisandro drugs so he’d be more like other kids.

But the drugs made him crazy and his drawings were everywhere.

He’d discovered graffiti.

So they gave him different drugs.

He stopped drawing and took up eating.

He ate everything he could get his hands on and nobody cared as long as he wasn’t painting walls.

They took away his mind.

They erased his spirit.

He quit asking questions.

He gained fifty pounds eating school food.

There were plenty of sleepy fat kids at school.

Lisandro finally fit in.

His teachers became more tolerant and starting giving him passing grades.

And besides, the State required them to.

He has a disability.

Little Lisandro smiles.

It took a bit of doing but he finally got them off his back.

Now he sits at his desk and draws and everybody ignores him more or less.

The sleepy fat little kid quietly planning his plan to get even with those motherfuckers.

Bill Craychee Long Beach, CA

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35

beached 2 - for H.N. (weapons of mass production ) 1st time on B right On in a yr 50plus infinite sojourns reconstruction still as in all over B.B. Baths long gone bay 1 still thinks its young carefree plays among the litter corn cobs & plastic not good enough to be called garbage the hammering on girders creaking of the crane music wind & ocean music helicopter music “my god” clouds & sun pacing back & forth in the sky because they are harsh to us we turn against our allies

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Number Five / 2016

because they are harsh to us we kill their sons & daughters because they are harsh to us we loot their national treasures because they are harsh to us we silence all their voices because they are harsh to us we set up puppet governments because they are harsh to us we make them a “democracy” because they are harsh to us we fill them up with fast foods because they are harsh to us we steal their natural resources because they are harsh to us we incorporate their bodies because they are harsh to us we turn them into factories the clouds dominate the sky today the waves crash violently upon this usually calm shore my shoulders & chest convulse w/shivers my teeth chatter my bloodless fingers go stiff & numb

the gulls are beginning to circle only a few children & old men are brave enough to swim at this hr the hammering has stopped the girders silenced the crane still creaks in the wind helicopters still patrol the music’s turned nasty like the weather as the water reaches my feet i feel a warmth within the undercurrent like a comforter a message from hell because they are harsh to us....... because they are harsh to us....... the sailboat beyond the rocks seems so relaxed the white of its sail so still 3 children run from the ocean the oldest ( a girl ) waves something chanting “i found a dollar --- i found a dollar” & she had in the water among the waves the waves .....the last place you expect to find C-A-P-I-T-A-L-I-S-M the waves .....

because they are harsh to us we destroy them then defend them we befriend them then destroy them then we fold up our blankets & go home because they are harsh to us we are harsh to them because we are harsh to them they are harsh to us Steve Dalachinsky Brooklyn, NY 8/9/04

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Jingoism Serpent’s Squeeze

Today we seek solace

a day so wretched with foaming flag wavers

continuous homage to rapacity steak and wine sold with a candidate

the father of outsourcing all venom and lie

rain gives us hope in the draught lets us forget the preciousness of water

how missionaries polluted the earth much as rubber barons

horned ads litter my feed tracking my belief

that with the perfect outfit will come the fierceness I need

to survive peacetime is a liar

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Number Five / 2016

refugees running across continents drowning in seas

tent cities spill in around us our future favellas playboys in high places us starving on low

don’t think it can’t happen here only worse because of our blindness

polls say we’re already drinking Jim’s Kool-Aid arsenic mercury toxaphene turbidity

lapping up our own demise yes massa for crackers

every time you think the wake up is coming it’s only dumbed down

the world run by ratings needs only outrage

to sell product

we buy hate to quench our thirst

Cassandra Dallett Oakland, CA

Escapism Poet walks into a bar. She asks the bartender, “Got rhymes?”

“Yeah,” he says, “I got booze, shoes, and the blues.”

“I don’t have time for all that,” she says, “Gimme a haiku.”

These days, my body and moods are hooked together like fish on a wire: caught in a tangle of flop and confusion, and a dry, trapped feeling of self-loathing that I usually attach to being barely alive against most odds. There is no point in fighting or even gnawing through the problem. The problem is air, and air stings like anger, suppressed.

It’s a Pre-Meditated Zen, flop-to-nowhere, kick-without-legs type thing.

The escape plan is to do nothing-to wait it out with an unblinking hope that something that isn’t me will eventually snap and unravel.

The escape plan, revised, is to try-to chew through the air-sting with words that round out my mouth with fishhooked “Oh” sounds: egoism, onanism, solipsism. . .

An Egoist, an Onanist, and a Solipsist walk into a bar, all chewing bubble gum. The Egoist spits out her gum and circles the Solipsist, shouting, “I’m the center of the universe.”

The Onanist laughs and chokes on his gum.

But the Solipsist just chews her gum and watches. The Solipsist never claims to be the center of the universe, she just is. She finally turns to the Bartender and says, “You know, the only difference between bubble gum and masturbation is that chewing on gum makes my jaws feel tired.”

Relief can be found in the exhale.

Sarah Daughtery Long Beach, CA number Five / 2016 •

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Provincialism The Wrong Kind Of People In the years of my youth one avoided Jews for they hated Christ.

Then the Communists became our enemies, plotting to enslave the world.

And, of course, many Reds were also Jews, and they were everywhere.

There are no longer any Communists, and while the Jews still killed Jesus, today they’re our steadfast allies.

Norman J. Olson

Yes, my wife and our daughters are finally safe from persecution.

The new enemies seek to restore the caliphate and enslave us all with shariah law.

As it was when I was young, the wrong kind of people are everywhere.

James Deahl Sarnia, ONT. Canada

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Number Five / 2016

Fatalism A PICTURE OF WHAT’S TO COME Six of us Were shackled In the back Of a prisoner transport van Eyes wide Like camera lenses Recording What would be For some of us The final scene Of a free world Yet What held our attention Wasn’t the woman Driving next to us With freckles Sprinkled over The bridge of her nose And hair, long and red Like a river of blood Flowing over a Cotton dress Hiked around her waist Exposing pale thighs

It was the cows With numbers punched Through their ears Standing behind a section Of barbed wire fence Chewing cud With indifference Patiently waiting For the cold kiss Of a sledgehammer Deliverance James Decay Spokane, WA

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Intimism: A principal or practice of painters (as in early 20th century France) of selecting as subject matter, familiar or intimate scenes from everyday moments.

Aphrodite After Pierre Bonnard

42 •

1

3

An unlocked door and the welcoming patina of a clawfoot bathtub.

It’s legs, my long legs; a blush of rose.

The oval mirror on The wall across…

What Goddess thrusts her hips spine and intimate splendor into that water?

2

4

The porcelain creature embraces.

Unending first moment of immersion into water.

A self-reflection in a mirror captures dark eyes obscured by displacement of steam rising.

The tub embraces flesh into its clamshell like interior.

I know that you are watching me; a woman in a bath with textured skin of palest ivory.

Number Five / 2016

5

7

In your paintings the intimacy of silence.

Invited into my bath we become seamless as electrons of light in the mirror.

The moment watches us.

Suddenly we merge with one another into the water- into the dream into the bliss of hands smooth on flesh of paint smooth on brush.

6

8

An ocean of water contained in a tub.

Flaxen clouds are yours and mine; a tapestry woven within/without.

A tale of desire a woman a brush stroke a bath.

Diane Dehler Orinda, CA

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Regionalism NEW ORLEANS happy for a plate of beans happy for the doughnut at 5 a.m. and the chance to sweat rice pudding on Sundays.

and pots to scrub and restrooms to scrub and houses to scrub and gutters.

happy for the river happy for the sun happy for the trees.

and the rooms and the rooms and the rooms with no clocks no radios no pictures only mice and a typewriter in the pawnshop and walking two miles for general delivery.

and the scratching out a hole in the side of life and the crawling in and the waiting and the breathing.

and but for the occasional love the bright drunk the soft music the foreign kiss the fresh breast

and walking the streets and walking the streets and walking the streets and watching.

and the rain and the moon and the air

happy for the coins in a loose pocket happy for cardboard shoes.

I don’t think I would have made it.

Matt Dennison Columbus, MS Previously published in Arcadia; this poem “Have Made It” is read by Matt Dennison in the video made by Michael Dickes. View it at https://youtu.be/UnoTelwXuw).

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Number Five / 2016

Aestheticism Haiku Single pink rose bud Peeking through green coverlet Beauty knows no haste.

G.S. Eisen Santa Barbara, CA

Judith Robinson

Alcoholism ALCOHOLICALLY YOURS i see you w/your bad ass & your soft lips & your cigarettes & your small time on this world i see your slow emotion & shitty words & your empty skin & your lost eyes i came to the funeral of your state of mind i shook your patience & said it didn’t move me in either direction

i burned down your throat like it was a home full of bad sex i choreographed your overdose eight fucking times & filed it under my research into nothing

i blackened your sight w/promises & came back w/pills & pardons & clever music you busted open like a piñata & i’m not sure that’s what i wanted but i’ll take it

it’s ninety degrees out & i watch you drink hot bourbon around back where the dogs bark next to the fence and the sun runs down from a dead sky Christian Elder Toluca Lake, CA

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45

Steve Dalachinsk y

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Number Five / 2016

Demonism I realized early on that in order for my life to be a life at all I must have this girl, all of this girl.

I must make her mine no matter what the cost even if I have to sell my soul to the damn devil.

As the music overwhelms him he realizes that he missed his calling of being a musician at least then he would have had a fulfilled life.

“Such a pity that ship sailed a long, long time ago” the devil perched on his shoulder spat into his ear.

Aggressive renal carcinoma spreading more rapidly than expected. So what can I do besides fly down and visit asap. “Nothing. Knowing Kerry I bet he just wants to get it over with as soon as possible” the Devil hisses at me.

Don’t like turning out the lights anymore trying to go to sleep because I don’t know what demons will show themselves demanding my attention for who knows what for how long.

Michael Estabrook Acton, MA

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47

Jingoism & Alcoholism One Moment Please I walk these hollow, empty streets, I walk this strand.

I retrace last evening’s tortured footsteps in the late, late, closing hours of another fucked-up, Jimmy Buffett beach bar night.

Flashes of lunacy. Love is corrosive. Pity the man who knows what he is doing.

In what seems a thousand times a second, I review a liquored-up litany of whiskey-soaked memories from a brain so turned-on.

Gail Eisen

But, just give me one moment. Please.

48 •

There is no one around, just the moon.

No lights on in any home.

No cars on the road.

Not a sound.

Number Five / 2016

One moment please.

I am walking through a cold wind with no smell of the proximate sea.

Muted waves crash on my skull.

This quiet is the sound made one Nano-second before the creation of infinity.

One moment please.

The drunk in the alley is me.

I have these memories that lead me up pathways of Picasso thought, and down cabaret streets of Caligari-like remembrance.

One moment please.

I was born with a past, and I will die with a future.

Alcohol fuels many a random misguided insight—bizarre epiphanies.

I stop my stumble in mid-stride.

I cannot feel a thing. I am numb.

It has just occurred to me that maybe I am just a ghost.

That I am dead.

M.T. Evans San Pedro, CA

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Multiculturalism Opera When my mind is dying and the last of its neurons know that the end is nigh, tell my lover to put it in a glass jar emptied of strawberry jam and bury it underneath a miscellaneous stage in the Cairo Opera House.

Let its last moments be ones of serenating celebration.

Let the likes of Sobhy Bedir be the final voices it hears.

Make it leave this world on the chords of middle-aged relics of a time it was sorely deprived of and maybe then it’ll remember the Nile as a stunning 19 year old with hair that curls with the black of a thousand and one nights till her waist rather than a withered old hag of a soul with nothing to give.

Maybe if the jar is comfortable enough, my mind will fall asleep and think it madness to resist being carried by a multi-lingual ballad to the night sky.

When it’s high up there for the world to look tiny enough Maybe, just for once, it’ll look upon the ancient skyline below and not lust for New York or Johannesburg’s.

Maybe it’ll ask the Angel of Death to wait for just a few more minutes as it extends a hand to the city and maybe, just for once, Cairo will take my hand and dance with me.

Hazem Fahmy New York, NY

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Number Five / 2016

Linda Singer

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51

Experimentalism, Galvanism FOR THE SAD WAITRESS AT THE DINER IN BARSTOW beyond the kitchen’s swinging door, beyond the order wheel and the pass-through piled high with bacon, hash browns, biscuits and gravy, and grits, past the radio, tuned to 101.5-FM All Country - All the Time, past the truckers overwhelming the counter, all grab-ass and longing. in the middle of morning rush you’ll catch her, in a wilted pink uniform, coffee pot fused in her grip, staring over the top of your head you’ll follow her gaze, out the fly-specked, plate glass windows, past the parking lot, watch as she eyes those 16-wheelers barreling down the highway, their mud guards adorned with chrome silhouettes of naked women who look nothing like her.

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Number Five / 2016

the cruel sun throws her inertia in her face. there’s a choking sound a semi makes, when it pulls off the highway; that downshift a death rattle she’s never gotten used to.

Maybe she’s searching for that day in August when she first hitched a ride out of town maybe she’s looking for a way back. maybe she’s ready to come home.

(But for now) she’s lost herself between the register and the door, the endless business from table to kitchen, she’s as much leftover as those sunny side eggs, yolks hardening on your plate.

Alexis Rhone Fancher Los Angeles, CA First Published in The San Pedro River Review, 2016

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Realism The Poet’s City

The green, graffitied sign tells me I’m in Paterson, birthplace of Ginsberg, five-book poem by Williams.

I ponder their quest to capture new rhythms, an American idiom, and wonder what they’d write about the city now— the crossdresser on the corner, her pink wig a contrast to slop and slush on sidewalks, and dust and grime of boarded-up storefronts.

Against February winds, she wears a red leather skirt, torn fishnets, stiletto heels that crunch ice, while black men laugh and fist-bump in front of pawn shops, as a mother waddles across the street, her arms weighed down by grocery bags while her children follow behind and drivers blare their horns.

I think of Williams’s poem “Proletariat Portrait,” and the woman in it who pauses, pulls a nail from her shoe, and then presses on, like the crossdresser who touches up her lipstick, and then moves forward on green, the swagger of her hips a declaration that this too is America.

Brian Fanelli Dunmore, PA

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Number Five / 2016

A Summer Rain Shower We don’t get very far for being who we are -need to squeeze ourselves in a doorway while others walk with English umbrellas, tiny coats for their poodles I don’t even know why we came then you murmur, So I could look at the shoes The narrow doorway forces our faces closer and I can feel the chill in your cheeks but your heart races with a young girl’s anticipation until you look into my eyes and realize that your old broken shoes will have to remain friends for a long time -perhaps friends til the end Mike Faran Ventura, CA

Catholicism doctrine when I was young priests and nuns handed me a heavy cross and said, “carry this.” it was not placed upon my shoulders by nature, no inheritance, this was a gift given. the weight has worn upon me grinding at bones and joints.

I doubt it has made me stronger; weaker maybe, and narrower of mind. when I seek to cast this burden off into the street it grows back of its own accord returning in greater heft until eyes must look to heaven and plead for a god beyond stars to lift or lessen this torture and let life be a song, not sad or maudlin, but full of joy and love, a smile replacing the crack of the whip from above.

Nostalgiaism winter of 63 the singularity of that year would not be understood until decades passed, when historians would write what we sensed but could not then express the pandemic sorrow of novembers’ kill the cure of infantile paralysis the dream of freedom and equality events and philosophies to be studied in a future tomorrow. all i wanted now was to hold her hand every time i saw her standing there scandals, revolutions and conspiracies were foreign and far away childhood magic was ending to mystery and lust the never ending curse of parochial morality and in the inevitable longing of the things we left behind.

J.W. Farnia Sarnia, ONT Canada

Joseph Farley Philadelphia, PA

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MARS That crimson orb third sibling sphere with saltwater rivers, amniotic.

Oh if Mars is now what we were 13 billion years ago— will Martian trilobites turn pterodactyl turn bird turn plane turn pirate ship turn printing press

Neeli Cherkovski

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Number Five / 2016

turn villanelle turn marble bust turn silk turn gold turn fibre-light turn one green song?

Kate Marshall Flaherty Toronto, ONT Canada

Surrealism sky eyes as I rest before the long walk home I guess long past the posturing and good intentions there is me sitting alone by the abandoned building in sad sun that looks like the ocean’s only splash the dusty is jewel bright pointillism hidden along her nudity and smile how she knows the day is changing and that we’ll never be together but we have these rags of now rags that come from the holy places rags expensive or for paupers rags with a map you can’t complete of all the eden, babylon desires but at least, she says the start of a journey never finished takes you somewhere and she smiles those aqua topaz eyes that always say it’s time to go now Danny blink and I forget what I was thinking but the jug of old magic wine is an empty Desani water bottle again, there’s glass on the parking lot and I’m not quite sure but I was thinking something about not being tan enough for summer something like isn’t it lovely that cheeks are watermelon when people have perfect tears that keep their souls so human Dan Flore III Lansdale, PA

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57

Jingoism The Repentance of Elijah I. Elijah called in the coordinates from his cell phone since the telepathic net was down due to the gravitational anomalies on the western side of Mt. Carmel.

In a few moments the priest of Baal were a smoldering mass of indeterminate human flesh strewn on the side of the mountain: the brush fires of California, the incense offered to the Bamiyan Buddha, the shards of New York, blowing dust over Qandahar.

II. Elijah walked amid the searing blast of Hiroshima regretting the day he pushed the button on his hand-held missile silo.

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Number Five / 2016

And he rode his bicycle over the pacific waves on a solar pilgrimage to Bikini Atoll.

The prophet suddenly knew that his anger at the altar of illusion had accelerated for two and a half millennia: ending badly in nuclear drones armed with back-pack bombs on the Elysian Fields where the American War Gods played golf and baseball until the crows flew home.

III. He ran away to Tarshish with Jonah— only to be deported by the whale and the vulture— dropped in Nineveh in time for Isis to cut off the penis of the gender traitor.

Casteism Nichols Canyon

The company of the prophets looked on in disbelief.

The mystics, martyrs, Sufis, and monks, rolled knuckle-bone dice on the desert rocks summoning the healing angel.

IV. But these days there are only bombs in Gilead.

The Wadi Kerith runs with Syrian blood and the skewered flesh of humankind chars dark in distant corners of the dying orb.

Robert Foss East L.A., CA

Bougainvillea and Birds of Paradise tango along parkways as I motor down this prosperous lane.

Boxed hedges border properties of mint green stucco where circular driveways capture Bentley’s and Porsches

My busted-up Corolla drives courteously, careful not to leave skids and mud or otherwise embarrass me

while I calculate mortgage payments.

Jerry Garcia Studio City, CA

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59

Indeterminism BETWEEN YOU AND ME I liked it better when you were At the back of the bus Then I didn’t have to look at us To look at all the similarities Between you and me

When you were Sitting in the back of the bus It became easier to believe The wore out stereotype myth That you bring this all on yourself

It was easier when I didn’t have to see That we treat each other so differently When you’re not sitting right next to me A place for everybody And everybody In their place

It made it easier for us to get along When I couldn’t see There was something so very wrong With these invisible divisions Between you and me

It made it easier to tell us apart When you stayed in your ghetto And I stayed in my trailer park

It’s simple to mock and dismiss Arguments about privilege When you aren’t next to me Both of us naked and vulnerable In the sameness of our humanity J. W. Gardner Lakewood, CA

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Agapism AGAPISM DEFINED AT THE BORDER We were presumed dead – the walk was long, heightened by a pattern of hot, dry what ifs and maybe mañanas, but it was the prayers to the Blessed Virgin what kept our wide feet deep in the sand, the mud, the distractions.

El Norté we whispered, trusting the lies of relatives better off with under-the-counter tips and free lunches of burgers and fries, with greased palms and manicured lawns thanks to Pedro and Juan and them.

It was the last fives miles which made the difference, moonlight – she did crawl across without fear, hidden in the Chevy, the bumpy road, the smell of birth, the scent of love.

Honduras promised us nothing, instead relied on our offerings, sacrifices wrapped in bundles, overlooked by the river, discarded in El Paso, left with madness.

No one really cares, just as long as the game is played – played well by men in suits, and white men with guns.

Freeze their smiles – did the child survive the crossing?

Lorraine Gow Cambria, CA

Retronaut

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Fatalism A DECOMPOSITION ON MARRIAGE

The corpse has no interest in lying down.

It’s gone from metaphorically living on in people’s hearts and minds to actually busting up through box and dirt, strutting down the avenue, catching an outbound bus, stumbling off at your stop.

The corpse appreciates the flowers sporadically sprayed across its tombstone.

And the tears were heart-warming.

Even the weevils said so.

But flowers and tears are no future for the dead.

If it really has to die then it’s going to live.

So the corpse is coming for dinner.

It plans to sleep beside you in your bed.

Agreed, your sex-life shriveled up at forty two.

But it’s a new man now that it’s stopped aging, started rotting.

And it apologizes for its half-disintegrated face.

Where your life is now, you can’t be choosy.

The corpse will smoke a cigarette after despite its losing battle to lung cancer.

It may even indulge in a little small talk.

You’ll hear what life is like at six feet under right from the corpse’s mouth.

When it kisses you, it promises to wipe away the dust from your lips, both its dust and your dust.

And should a body part break free, you can keep it as a souvenir.

It’s a generous corpse. It’s an affectionate corpse.

It’s putrefied heart doesn’t do it justice.

Sure, love gets old after a while.

But remember, it can decay forever.

John Grey Johnston, RI

Runson Willis

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Atavism ALL TOO COMMON At the end of the film the beast becomes a handsome man, but retains the essence of a rutting beast.

It was not a film, but a girl’s bar stool imagination applied to an attractive boy animated in his search for relief.

His agitation started in the womb—child of a troubled mother, herself a survivor of the privileged male class.

The boy feels the beast inside him, the conflict, the natural unreasoning unbalance of his hormones and history.

The girl, like many girls, believes there is romance in his tragedy.

Does not see the approaching tragedy when No loses its meaning.

The boy does not mean to not hear her, to not cease and desist, but his body and emotions overwhelm his rational mind.

Afterward, they sit together in mutual sadness and lost words.

Shame rises to alter the surface color of their skin.

His hand brushing her hair returns him to himself.

His hand stroking her hair distances her from herself.

He knows she did not ask for this.

She fears she asked for it.

He offers to walk her home and asks to see her again.

She refuses the company but says yes afraid in his presence not too.

When he dials the number she gave, he learns its disconnected.

A week after not hearing from him, she begins to relax.

Kenneth P. Gurney Albuquerque, NM number Five / 2016 •

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2016 poetry prize winners Third Annual LUMMOX Press Poetry Contest first place winner:

Doug Knott * Winning Poem * Lesson in Conversational Portuguese After a prayer meeting with the spurting of chicken blood In the dusty and livid interior of Brazil The father of the saints (pae dos santos) Who had killed the chicken Earlier that afternoon Took a liking to me “Voce tem o preconceito mistico?” “Are you of the mystical persuasion?”

“Tenho, sim,” I said – “Sure, of course, dude” “Entao, eu so faco bem” – “I just do good,” he said, In a juicy morse-code flicker of offering That raced over my heart like a fleet of gazelles “Mas si voce quiser mal” – “But if you want ‘the bad,’ I know someone who can help” I declined, with some regret at opportunity lost In the quick tropical sunset Reversed and flat like a bed-sheet – But I had respect for this father of umbanda Like the toad has for the wheel

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HOW I EXPLAINED “NON-LINEAR” TO HER Flowers of clouds be to you and to you!

I say, and greet every ambassador Holding my sadness in my extended hand Like an unopened closet holds the wind Sadness is a cloud A flower I hold my feelings like a horizon holds clouds I hold my feelings like a man Holds flowers In his hands

“Voce tem o preconceito mistico?”

On the chair, my hands shook like bamboo Of course, I have seen the fountains go out In someone’s eyes In the struggle under the skin I negotiate bad spells In Brazil, I got into a big taxi-cab And got the hell out of there And the father of the saints still sat there in the dark With the air slightly twitching around him Like a house full of lizards waking up, And he sucked in light like the moon When I got far away, I felt backwards behind me And he was still there, a faint lamp on a dark street And in my wallet was a fresh card that did not exist.

It said: “Eu so faco bem” – “I only do good.”

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BEACH WEAR by the BROTHERS VOID We halted sunset in its red tracks I reached for you in the evening breeze Like the white moon reaches for the rolling sea We drove out there summers that beach now far in the simultaneous past.

Trees arc over the road; white Beaches stretch beyond the disappearance point Of memory.

At night I push a sleep-cart into drive-in movies directed by the Brothers Void, In theatres right above the neck, And I meet the people in my sleep, and Listen to the words they speak resting on sand grains Resting on nothing

Silver I see its starry swath Trail off in the air As I polish knives and spoons Years ago I polished kitchen silver With a Tibetan Lama Rinpoche Who spit, and rubbed And showed me the magic sparks that fly From the ends of forks and knives, And then he whispered, “And do you know what is the most beautiful thing in the world?”

He smiled like a jade gate “It is – the woman.”

I was both stunned and pleased And thought that he Was either a really wise man Or a very good comedian And I have carried the buried ax-handle Of this knowledge until tonight As I watch you take Off your clothes And gusts of night-metal fly Off your body.

You turn, and the silver trap within me Snaps shut at the core

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JUNKIE TRANSFIGURATION STREET POEM No! The holes in my arm Are the SEEing eyes of the Virgin Mary I AM immaculate I have gone over the Cliff of Love I hang-glide through wind-tunnel canyons of Bright Thought My eyes are glit-glit My hairs are really fLAMES! Ach, mein gott, ist vinter.

Das trees have shriveled into der little Swasticas Der pinen haben die needlen hangen from der limben The little armband I tighten around my arm, Makes my veins roll like DOLphins!

(Don’t you want to sail on the open sea, where the dolphins dance in Ecstasy?)

My entire Reich has only vun per-SONE in it, And I am INfinitely LARGE – NOW, and Now, and now... (and now) Wait! There is LOVE, Drumming his fingers on a parked car.

HE is a dirty old man, after all, With rhinestones and flower pants...

But look!

His hairs are really fLAMES! You touched my arm, Love, And NOW I am bleeding into the street.

Will anybody SEE? PEOple, peoPLE, we are all bleeding, We are all running into each other Through – our – EYES!

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QUEEN OF THIN AIR

Mt. Whitney summit, highest peak in USA People far apart move slowly like underwater Express surprise I am so old and still a-grunting Body a hyper-ventilating machine made of mortal sticks, Will-power pellets, lust and forgotten lust, Muscles that hold personal traumas like hot dog buns -And a desire for transcendence from it all!

Or I wouldn’t even be here Stuck like an insect on God’s bulletin board beyond clouds Where so very clear is scary A speck of living gland Hanging forward off the postcard without a scaffold O spires of rock so twisty, and long way down to bargain-basement realization after death: That I was so stupid to be here, And foolishly, like in tarot card #1, pursuing a casual agenda On this jagged stairway to tremulous afterlife O day, dark blue and disappearing in the giddy void Mountains 80 miles away clear as exclamation points amid big bold text of sky Toy feet stick off concrete stilts called legs I lift and crook up rock and more rock Which goes sideways in shards of shimmering granite Long as office buildings, A spaceship of stone ribbed in ice And me outside desperate for air I inhale a breath, thin as rock is thick Braced against the shelf with free hand, Camera drops to dangle --

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Stare, stare far upstairs Into the birdless blue smile of the queen of thin air Her cobalt kerchief bearing the greeting-card logo of great vacuum heights where endless invisible souls intone “Welcome to Vertigo: The state without any boundaries at all.”

THE AWARE WOLVES To the aware wolves belong The space between ghosts And night of eggplant dark

They lope alongside me And when I look at them Their eyes get bigger

The moon, himself a wandering lost soul, Peers through tree-tops for My heart – a deer frozen In a forest of eyes Shaped like leaves

I treat them now as my children Feed them everything I have They all live with me And I am everything I wanted to be Except I am living it backwards

I know they are near I see them when they Blot out the moon Hear them when they call My name. Summoning them Is an entertainment At my own expense

‘It’s time to wake up,” I say, “It’s Time to make furniture and food; it’s time to open the big front door and find the Universe whizzing by in peak form, and true” And at night I draw these new friends around me Like a fur coat, and look up at the moon Awash in darkness, and the hunger That comes out of me is A long wail in the night

Doug receives $200 + a chapbook from Lummox Press (he gets 40 copies)! number Five / 2016 •

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FIRST RUNNER UP:

Georgia Santa Maria

* Winning Poem * Drought This drought: an invitation to decadence noticeable only by increments-blades of grass diminishing, the paucity of tepid squalor, Hope-continuing, intermittent, and rare as rain.

A cursive snail’s trail of water-lawyers, protecting wealthy clients.

Still-the wood on old barn sides logs the insults of the wind.

Whorls and spirals spinning, a mirror in the wood tells everything.

The orchard stumps remembering the juiciness of apples held aloft birds, singing.

Even the magpie can’t find anything left to steal.

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The licoriced clouds that used to carry rain have drowned.

And left a dust-cloud, just as black: It takes, instead of giving.

Obscures the mountain and the sun, and lonesome cows, gathered beside the last, lonely pond-stand, eyes to tail, side to side sheltering each other from the sand.

Apology to My Husband Instead of cleaning house for your cousins’ visit tomorrow, today I wrote a poem.

I really loved the poem. and no blankets, other than the dog bed in the corner.

Loved writing it, and loved reading it.

I won’t be cooking tomorrow, either. You’ll Loading the dishwasher, not so much, probably have to get something to take-out.

I admit.

I haven’t shopped since the leaky chicken— The bathroom floor is full of dog-hair, y’all might need some eggs or bread or milk. and the toilet has a pink ring around the bowl I’ll see you later— like a Texaco, neglected on Route 66.

I’m taking my poem up to Santa Fe, And the chicken-juice from the groceries last week and reading it to my friends. is still puddled up on the refrigerator’s second shelf.

Tell your cousins I said “Hello, and Best Wishes,” Your bed, which they’re supposed to sleep in, and that I wrote you a poem. has the same sheets it had six months ago

Revolution (Pacifism & Feminism) For Grace Lee Boggs, June 27, 1915 – October 5, 2015 Revolutionary Civil Rights Leader & Activist Revolution is not hard— it is soft. Rolls in, like the moon on the ocean, and back out again.

Uses guitars, and paint brushes more effectively than guns.

Changes minds and emotions before the explosions of blood and hatred.

Revolution lasts better on a full stomach— involves family recipes, and new ingredients, untasted flavors, and the suspension of sameness it takes to learn to like something new.

The best soldiers are children:

babies teach patience, and how to soar by the seat of your passion, and imagination.

The best revolutions begin in the kitchen, move to the den, with friends and wind up in the bedroom: most marvelous advice, sleep on it.

A revolution should grow at the speed of grass, take hints from the wild flower, who says, “See—I‘m not a weed!

Who else will feed all these wild birds, and make good use of bees.” number Five / 2016 •

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WOMEN ON THE MONEY Eleanor Roosevelt had no chin.

Buck-toothed, and a little too fat.

Dowdy, even, besides she was a pushy dame always wanting this and that, fairness, etcetera, for workers, children and blacks.

RD Armstrong/Retronaut

And, while you might trust Rosa Parks, to clean your house, or raise your children, why put her on the money, when we didn’t even want to pay her, much— why do you think she was riding the bus, anyway?

She didn’t even own a Cadillac.

As for Sacagawea, we already went there once, with those pretty little gold dollars that flopped. Except for birthday presents for the kids and gathering dust in coin collections.

That should be a hint.

Carrie Nation got us prohibition.

What an idiot idea was that?

Clara Barton was a pretty good nurse, and nobody minded her beside their bed.

But a nurse?

And not a doctor?

What’s with that?

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Dolly Madison threw great parties, and her name’s still on the pastries.

While John Adams was away in Paris, Abigail took good care of the kids, and wrote some awesome letters.

I suppose they were both pretty nice girls.

Hillary might well become our first woman President, because she has that “Clinton Dynasty” behind her, and she went to Yale when it was nearly still all men, which is impressive. But, do we want someone who’s always wearing pant-suits?

And she wasn’t willing to throw her husband out for cheating, or under Ken Starr’s bus. Though, God knows, it was her fault that he cheated, for being such a frigid witch.

I heard she threw a lamp!

Do we really want somebody who can’t control her temper?

Or her hairdo?

Or Bill’s dick?

Let’s put Marilyn on the money!

She already has a marvelously successful stamp!

God knows, she was the epitome of pretty!

Had great tits.

Had the grace to die young, before getting dumpy.

And was glamorous enough to date presidents.

We use her image to decorate all those “retro” diners coast to coast. She was blonde, and didn’t venture an opinion anyone can remember.

And, just knowing she’s in your pants will make you want to carry tens.

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SECOND RUNNER UP:

Jane Lipman

* Winning Poem * Aphorisms Just because I’m adamant doesn’t mean I’m sure.

When everything’s in gear, critical mess moves.

We weep what we have sown.

I want to live happily ever during.

Marriage is an unlimited commitment to an unknown person.

It’s hard to be a Buddhist with ants in the kitchen.

There’s no hope for the Saved.

We spend the first half of our lives building an ego, the second half dissolving it.

Comedy defies gravity.

All opera ends in a heap on the floor.

Love doesn’t know in straight lines.

Satsang spreads like wildquiet.

I’m a lie-down comedian.

Give me your fool attention.

Exactly where do the Indian and Aegean oceans meet?

The ultimate democracy: we each have 24 hours a day.

Never better than late.

I have a great sense of humor, except when it really counts.

The New Art—each day a person is photographed by hundreds of surveillance cameras.

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“I Return to the River Where Once”

Answers

A painting by Dawn Chandler

Because the Fawcett Crest salesman sold books by day

and dressed the stars by night because the visitors to the Russian orphanage stumbled upon a room of hidden wall-eyed children because she loved to hear stories about the seven stages

of Al Wessendorf’s anger because the woman on Zoloft painted her entire apartment purple because the raven called

and I had to answer because the architect climbed the stairs in a way that they never creaked because he carried in his arms his own cradle because like snow my brother

fell and fell and

f e l l out of himself, out of the window, out of the sky, out of the world, out of life

On the river where once you held me I became illiterate—cloud, current, foam and the river’s melancholy music.

My clothes tattered.

Was I body or dress red spider-web or river-blue tornado?

Do you hear me? I am sky I am fire My hips dissolve into blue horizons, my thighs are sea, twilight You pulled me closer to the silence.

Do you remember?

The quilts of my ancestors receded into tree trunk, sandstone….

We watched my soft belly and red dress melt from time into cliffs.

Our torsos blued into water into tears—transparent, unfathomable.

into into love because these are things I want to tell you sometimes as my body dies of flowers in your arms. number Five / 2016 •

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Sanctuary My mother was dying of cancer and my aunt couldn’t stop talking–– droning on and on like a tree saw about the cleaners, the butcher, the shopping list, where the dog pooped, who stood in front of her at the supermarket that day. I had tolerated all I could, was about to say something cruel, when I looked outside. The trees were swaying in the wind and they took me into their waving arms, made a place for me inside their sap and greenness and I stayed there. The miracle lasted.

Whenever I looked to them, they unlocked me, took me into their sacredness— I opened, woke inside, and in their sanctuary, safe and held, like moisture rising off the tips of leaves, cruelty left me.

First published in Echoes #7, Fall/Winter 2008 Published in Echoes Anthology, Fall/Winter, 2012

Publisher’s note: Aside from getting this special feature in Lummox 5, Georgia and Jane also receive a special Lummox Coffee Cup and a fraternal hug which I gave them back in late June!

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Interviews John Sweet

Interview by George Anderson

This interview first appeared on the blogsite Bold Monkey <http://georgedanderson. blogspot.com.au/> and is reprinted here with George Anderson’s permission.

John Sweet was the first recipient of the Lummox Poetry Prize. * * * Bold Monkey: Congratulations John on your book The Century of Dreaming Monsters being picked the winner of the 2014 LUMMOX Poetry Prize. Is the final product close to your original submission or was it necessary to make extensive alterations?

John Sweet: Thank you! I think there may have been one poem that RD asked to be removed, everything else is the original manuscript as I submitted it. He’s a dream editor/publisher, has total faith in the author’s vision. He did mention the overriding bleakness of the collection after I’d submitted the manuscript (and he was 100% accurate), but he stood behind it. The man is a prince.

his choice. The silhouette seems to reflect a dream state, and senseless human violence has always been a recurring theme in my work. The Dreaming Monsters, to me, are the people who hold power in the world these days, the ones who abuse their wealth & their position. They’re the people who have the best chance of effecting positive change in the world, but they ultimately turn their back on this potential. They’re bullies of course and, like all bullies, they’re ultimately cowards who will run and hide when the odds are against them.

BM: The cover design of your book depicts a silhouette that appears to be of medieval men of war on horseback. Can you briefly explain the background to the design and the choice of the title The Century of Dreaming Monsters?

BM: Your literary style appears to be an amalgam of different perspectives and voices to create a composite of what you want to achieve. This vision is layered and is best understood on an emotional rather than rational level. Is this a fair assessment of your work?

JS: The cover came from RD, but I love

JS: Definitely. It’s very cool that you… number Five / 2016 •

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talking with an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and the stories I heard were so compelling that they sort of took me over.

They are the inspiration and foundation of my book. I’ve fictionalized where necessary, for my own artistic purposes and to protect my source’s anonymity, but my ultimate goal has always been simply to articulate the emotional and psychological truth of those experiences.

DP: Is there a purpose for the mixing of plays and poetry in the book?

Ryan Guth

Interview by Dustin Pickering

Ryan Guth’s most recent book, Body and Soul (Lummox Press, 2015), was a featured title at the 2015 Southern Festival of Books and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Dustin Pickering, founder of Transcendent Zero Press and editor in chief of its journal, Harbinger Asylum, is the author of two poetry collections, The Daunting Ephemeral and The Future of Poetry is NOW: Bones Picking at Death’s Howl. * * * DP: What led to the creation of Body and Soul? What inspired the idea?

RG: It actually began as conversation. I was

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RG: You know, my publisher (RD Armstrong) asked me the same question. And it’s probably the most demanding aspect of the book, from a reader’s point of view. My character Cassandra, as an abuse survivor, suffers in adult life from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) – what we used to call “multiple personalities.” Psychologists believe that these “alter” personalities are created to help carry a patient’s emotional load: the burden of remembering, of responding to physical and emotional trauma. Like most DID sufferers, Cassandra has an unusually complicated relationship with reality, both past and present. She often has trouble understanding or articulating her own motivations, and sometimes detaches completely, imagining herself from an external point of view as if through a camera.

The piece titled “Part of the Show” illustrates several of these DID symptoms.

It’s intended as a parody of true-crime TV – you know, the programs that feature supposed documentary footage or re-…

Essays

Poet Heal Thyself

living with con-artists, liars and thieves

by RD Armstrong (This was originally published in the Lummox Journal in 2005)

S

ome years ago, it came to my attention that a poet from back east, who was famous for his tales of mayhem during and after the Viet Nam war (where he claimed he was disfigured while he served as a Navy Seal), was lying about his whole war experience. It’s even doubtful that he served at all. Yet his books (which were published by the thousands by a reputable press operated by Henry Rollins) are often cited as true chronicles of that horrible time.

Apparently he had a vivid imagination.

Then, last year, a poet of modest success here in the kingdom known as the small press (or more accurately, the alternative small press), staged his own death. This guy couldn’t get enough play from the drek (my opinion) that he called poetry, so he decided to pull a fast one, letting it be known that he had finally succumbed to his demons and taken his own life. When he was found out (and he was found out because he announced that he was still alive), a shockwave of disgust and anger rocked those of us who gave a damn…imagine, a poet operating

with impaired judgment and an ego the size of Penn Station! Shocking, indeed.

This was a bitter pill to swallow for all the editors who’d been busy fitting this guy for a halo and a pair of wings. Naturally they were pissed off for being tricked as well. No surprise there. Nobody likes to be fooled.

Now there’s a “poet” who claims to be Algerian poet, Amari Hamadene*, who is submitting work around The Web that he has plagiarized from other poets whose work has been published on reputable websites, such as Pedestal Magazine. What has become of our little poetry heaven? Yes, it’s a deceitful world, but not in our ‘house’ – say it isn’t so!

Well friends, it is so! And it’s a damned shame, too. But, let’s get serious for a moment.

How can we be surprised by any of this?

After all, isn’t it high time that we (I speak as an editor as well as some poet with an opinion) accepted some of our responsibility in all this? I mean, these jerks wouldn’t be able to get away with this if it weren’t for the editors who supposedly know the difference between the good stuff and crap, publishing their puerile and pusillanimous dreck…all in the name of artistic freedom, or free speech, or some other jingoistic nonsense. Yes, it’s…

* I received an email from Amari Hamadene in which he claims that his name was used by an unknown person in the commission of these fraudulent submissions and that he is the victim of a hoax. One wonders what the point is here...why would anyone bother to sign someone else’s name to stolen intellectual property? But then I suppose, given the thrust of my essay, anything is possible.

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Teachers

by Christopher Barnes

I

f You Can Read This, Thank a Teacher!

While this bumper plate chestnut enunciates the obvious, it applies to creative arts even more so than remedial skills.

Wherever a poet gets to in his/her life— one book from a small press or a Pulitzer Prize—whatever level of celebrated accomplishment or simple satisfaction with craft, almost no one gets there alone.

You have models in your reading of course, the fields turned over before you arrived to show you the way, the ways, that in general you might go. Along the road, you develop friends and fellow writers who, if you’re lucky, are candid, rigorous with feedback. But what brings you fully to face and embrace your life, to risk the real possibility of failing, the lack of rewards, and a lifetime of thrift store shopping, is a good and generous teacher. For what little the world cares about a book of poetry, the humble life we’re fortunate enough to make in the endeavor to write it, we wouldn’t have even that modest bit if not for significant teachers.

There are exceptions, but rarely. I once asked my friend William Matthews about his writing process, and he said he wrote two or three drafts of a poem and if he didn’t have it by then he tossed it and went on to the next one. Bill was a prodigious talent, possessed of an encyclopedic mind and fabulous wit, and most of us will not profit by comparing our talents to Bill’s. Still, I

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know he had poet friends such as Stanley Plumley, and my bet is that they offered helpful responses. My long time friend Gary Soto—also a quick writer—wrote three or four drafts and went on to the next poem.

Early on he relied on fellow Fresno poet Jon Veinberg for critical response; then over time, I became the main editor Gary turned to for poetry. He would show me a ms. and we would finalize it by tossing out the weak poems and those that too closely echoed something he had already written, and what we had left was the book. Most of the time I did not have to do too much line-by-line editing or suggesting. However, when Gary began writing fiction and nonfiction with marked success, he set poetry aside for a while. When he showed me his next poetry ms., a good deal of time had gone between books. In short, as we say of athletes, he was out of shape. There was editing to do, a lot of shifting and suggesting of re-writes, especially for the endings; he worked diligently at revising the poems and made a good book. He was talented, learned quickly, but did not arrive in the classroom writing prize-winning poetry. Who was his teacher? Philip Levine at Fresno State.

When I arrived in the MFA program at UC Irvine in my early 20s, my great good fortune was to have Jon Veinberg, Soto, and Gary Young in my workshops, my good friends and friends in poetry to this day.

Most of us were struggling, but Soto had…

Selected Poems

by Christopher Buckley

S

o, I see myself in a couple years, leaning on a podium, this “slim volume” in my hands . . . 45 minutes to regale 30 people with 9 or 10 poems standing in for 40+ years of work—depending of course on how much engaging patter is engaged in between each one. . . .

And the volume is slim, the redoubtable press’s requirement for Selecteds—the editor sure that something around 100 pages is the only book with a chance of selling, though I know 95 % of poetry doesn’t sell a lick, having never accumulated enough royalties to make even half a down payment on a Tesla Model X. I’ve been sustained by a vision of a Selected like those I’d always seen, thick as a telephone book—if you remember those—one thick hefty enough that if it was dropped from a balcony it could crack a sidewalk, one with a type face just as minuscule so I might pack in all the pithy things I thought up to say.

The slim volume idea is really a stab at cost effectiveness, or, in the last resort, something that will slide easily beneath the doors of unsuspecting reviewers in NYC out to lunch with novelists.

No room for “New” work, the usual New & Selected, making it ineligible for the crapshoot, grab bag, insider trading prizes I’m not connected enough for anyway . . . so a bit easier to give up on the Bible-thick concept as I had to un-select several books completely to trim down to fighting weight,

to just stay in the ring with requirements.

No doubt archival dust will flap from my coat sleeves as I turn back reading a younger man’s work, vague in memory, if not execution. . . .

Yet I take some comfort from Auden’s preface to his Collected, (nearly two inches thick) in which he says that if one chose only those poems for which he was honestly grateful, the volume would be too depressingly slim. One could have worse company—not that that I’m suggesting comparisons. That comfort and two dollars will get me coffee in a paper cup.

And all this angst is only worth it if the book actually sees light; edits, comments, a contract were due last fall and we’re into summer now, though with the drought in California it’s hard to tell one month from another . . . (it does no good to think symbolically here. . . . ) In any event, only a bit over a year until the projected roll-out, scarcely time to alert the press, hire parking valets, take out a loan to cover trays of blinis and bits of fishy something on toast points, employ grad students to funnel cava into empty bottles of Mumms and Moet White Star saved for an occasion. . . .

Waiting to step out to thin applause, the thin book shaking in my hand, I will be thinking of Fernando Pessoa, wishing I could assume an ersatz personality, observe safely from the side. But I won’t be reading my poem influenced by Pessoa’s… number Five / 2016 •

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After a Reading,

charles bukowski returns & gives me the lowdown on fame, mutability, the afterlife et al...

by Christopher Buckley

I

’m not even drunk!—we both say that—as, ship-size and grey, he floats in . . . . I’m on the second floor overlooking the motel’s postage stamp pool. The TV’s turned itself off, and I’ve drifted in and out of the hot arms of a Santa Ana wind, door open to the background tracts of ocean and boulevard.

His face is still rough as a potato, and right off he tells me to open us a Bud, and light up one of those knock-off Hondurans-even the smoke and ash of this life are still beautiful, he says. Set that bottle over here by the window where I can remember it, you don’t need another one—tomorrow, no one will care who didn’t show up.

Hell, I’m gone five years and I’m still publishing more than you--the books just keep coming like horses rounding the turn at Santa Anita. Life’s not fair--but death’s no nap in the park. Listen pal, I had a huge backlog, one publisher, and no awards—I didn’t gripe, and I never did drink as much as I used to.

You’d better just keep up with your typing—you’re not young enough to complain anymore. The days run away like, well you should know that one at least-like taxis at rush hour in New York let’s say, but I can’t help you there. You’ve been out of the friends-and-glory loop since the

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get-go. You don’t really want to be one of those three or four book Selected Poem types—then what’s left? Look, there’s nothing they haven’t already not given you that they can’t give you anymore—you’re bullet proof. Have another on me, but spare me the rhymers and one more villanelle— Jesus, just remember who you are, those holes in your sneakers in grammar school, and write something someone will want to read before they die.

Besides, there’s no one over here in a monkey suit passing around silver trays of sandwiches with the crusts cut off and a pitcher of Manhattans, little envelopes with awards from the Academy. Nothing really changes. Someone goes around with star dust and famous sport coats, all fitted out before you arrive. You have to be in line with the forty-dollar haircut and a handsome mug. Christ, you might even have to have a theory. It’s tough all over.

All that stuff happens over a famous lunch—it’s just the arithmetic of fate, like comets rolling up more ice and dust, or a sandwich wrapper on the sidewalk gathering more flies. Yeah, I read about that Prix de Rome, guys in pressed pants walking the Via del Corso praising the pines, memorizing names of Italian aperitifs when there’s perfectly good beer—all on the…

Too Much Moon?

by Alex M. Frankel

I

have nothing against the moon, one of the most spectacular sights in nature. I once listened to the Moonlight Sonata on an airplane late at night with the moon just outside my window—I was traveling in outer space! And I’m old enough to remember the moon landing. I was eight, and my family and I were watching from our little mobile home at Napa’s desolate Lake Berryessa. We had a black-and-white set, and I shed a tear as the lunar module landed (I was a very sentimental child).

Our moon made many appearances in pre-twentieth-century poetry. The mass migration to the cities didn’t start until the time of the Industrial Revolution, so for a long time humanity lived in the countryside, and most poetry invoked the sights and sounds of nature. People in those times were much more aware of the phases of the moon. Without the distractions of electricity, television, and the bright lights of big cities, the moon loomed large, much larger than most of us can begin to appreciate.

I have in front of me a book I always keep in the trunk of my car, the Norton Anthology of World Poetry, starting with the Bronze Age and continuing to the present day. Here are some titles from the first pages: “Prayer to the Gods of the Night”; “The Marsh’s Plants Bewilder”; “Hymn to the Sun”; “The Voice of the Swallow, Flittering, Calls to Me”; “The Calf and the

Ox”—and so on. Life was rural then. Here are some lines by the Greek poet Sappho, who lived six centuries before Christ: The moon has set and the Pleiades. It is Midnight. Time passes.

I sleep alone.

The Chinese poet Li Po, who lived seven centuries after Christ, wrote these lines in “Drinking Alone in the Moonlight”: Beneath the blossoms with a pot of wine, No friends at hand, so I poured alone; I raised my cup to invite the moon, Turned to my shadow, and we became three, Now the moon had never learned about drinking, And my shadow had merely followed my form, But I quickly made friends with the moon and my shadow.

The English boy-poet Chatterton wrote this in the 1760s (from “The Minstrel’s Song”): See! the white moon shines on high, Whiter is my true love’s shroud, Whiter than the morning sky, Whiter than the evening cloud.… number Five / 2016 •

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Human Fundamentalism: a bill of rights, first draft

by Bear Jack Gebhardt

T

hinking about war, recently, and it’s origins, I was struck by how many such wars-- perhaps most wars-- begin with people who hold to extreme fundamentalist beliefs, such as the fundamentalist Hindu beliefs, fundamentalist Jewish beliefs, fundamentalist Christian beliefs, Muslim beliefs. Doesn’t end there. Some people hold to fundamentalist republican beliefs, or fundamentalist democrat beliefs, fundamentalist American or monarchist beliefs,

fundamentalist hip hop or fundamentalist NASCAR beliefs. And, alas, many of these folks seem quite willing to kill, intellectually, emotionally or physically, all other people who don’t hold to their own brand of “fundamentalism.” Thus, the wars.

So I started musing as to what beliefs might make up “human fundamentalism” --what a “fundamental human” might believe in, prior to religion or politics or geography.

This is what I came up with so far:

I AM A HUMAN FUNDAMENTALIST AND I BELIEVE: 1. No human “deserves” to die because of what his or her parents believe; 2. No human “deserves” to die because of where he or she was born or raised; 3. No human “deserves” to die because of the ignorant, inhuman, misguided or even murderous policies of the national government under which he or she has been destined to live; 4. Every human can be held responsible for only his or her own actions, including actions of encouraging violence and murder or for following orders of violence and murder; 5. Men and women are equally human, and absolutely deserve to be treated equally in all political, legal, religious, social and moral affairs; 6. As humans, we are citizens of the planet first, and citizens of countries only secondarily, and thus we deserve to be free to travel on this planet to anywhere we want to travel, as long as we do so without taking guns. …

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Sovietism & Revisionism

I Never Liked Neruda

by Richard Modiano

“I never liked Neruda. At any rate, I would never call him my one of precursors. Anyone who was capable of writing odes to Stalin while shutting his eyes to the Stalinist terror doesn’t deserve my respect. Borges, Cortázar, Sábato, Bioy Casares, Nicanor Parra: yes, I’m fond of them.” ~Roberto Bolaño “…when one recalls Neruda’s complicity in the murder of Leon Trotsky (in his capacity as Chilean consular official in Mexico) it becomes perfectly clear that we are concerned here, not with a poet, but with a contemptible advertising agent employed by the bureaucracy and secret police of the Soviet Union.” ~ The Chicago Surrealist Group “I haven’t looked at his work in years, and I don’t know Spanish, but I never liked Neruda.

The rhetoric struck me as too easy and loud. One can quarrel with Yeats’s ‘Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’ – can one really draw a firm line? Isn’t each conflict based in large part on the other? But it always occurred to me in connection with N. The most precious and difficult word is ‘we,’ and he uses it as if it were unproblematic. It’s as if our both our and Latin American culture needed a big, apparently generous voice, in which leftist critique was submerged in populist feeling, and N. was it. I like his younger fellow-countryman Jorge Teillier.” ~ Frederick Pollack

N

obody more embodied the phenomenon described in the above paragraphs than Pablo Neruda. Federico García Lorca said of Neruda, “He is closer to blood than to ink;” it was an insight of great depth, and today, unbelievably enough, the reputation of García Lorca has been annexed to, and overshadowed by, that of Neruda. It is time to treat Pablo Neruda as the French surrealists once recommended dealing with another Nobel laureate, Anatole France: Let us box up his memory with his books and throw the whole thing away. As Breton wrote, “There is no reason that, once dead, this man should create any more dust.”

Or as the Chicago Surrealist Group put it, “Let us state plainly that even his earliest literary productions reek of vanity and cowardice and have nothing to do with the quest for the total liberation of the mind by which surrealism chose to define itself from the very beginning. The mildewed cuteness and stale, limping images, the various little aesthetic postures place these early works of Neruda’s, from the surrealist point of view, squarely in the domain of the inexcusable.”

Neruda’s main public is located not in the Spanish-speaking nations but in the Anglo-European countries. Yes, his work… number Five / 2016 •

85

Money in a Material World

by Norman J. Olson

A

s Madonna once said, “we are living in a material world…” Yes, and money is our yardstick to measure pretty much everything. Those who know me know that I like to sit and draw in public places. I find the people around stimulating and useful in keeping my drawings grounded in a way that satisfies me. I also enjoy the occasional comments that people have to make about a person making a work of art in public. People who find my drawings ugly and uninteresting do not come up to me and tell me that. They just walk on by. So the first comment that people make about the drawings is some positive comment that they “love” it and find it “amazing.” “You are so talented,” they say.

Then, when the compliments are done, they invariably ask, “Do you do this for a living?” i.e. do I make money from this art I do.

Money is how we value things, even art or maybe especially art. I say that I do not do art for a living and in fact do not sell art at all and give my spiel about being a non-commercial artist. We can have a conversation about that if the person is interested, but usually they move on to “What does it mean?” another common question for which I have a stock answer (i.e. it is a work of art and you, the viewer, have to figure out what it means – I don’t know).

When talking about money, I like to ask people what they would do if they won the lottery. The most common answer seems to be “Travel.” Then I suggest to them that maybe one should try to live his or her life

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so that winning the lottery would not make any difference. Making this suggestion is so entirely contrary to how most of us look at and think about money that people have trouble wrapping their head around the idea and say something like “you mean like buy a Ferrari and not pay for it?” Well, yes, in the sense that I think it is an interesting exercise to think about what you want in this world and how badly you want it. Do you want a Ferrari badly enough to steal one, or is it just some trinket that you only want if it is not a bother to obtain? If that is the case, then it is not something you value very highly and if you became rich enough to buy junk that you do not value very highly, then it seems like not a very big change in your life would be wrought by winning the lottery.

Money is nothing. It is a handful of paper or a pile of coins, an electronic blip in a bank computer or a plastic card with your name on it. You can’t eat it sleep on it or under it and it is not all that interesting to look at. Money is only important because of what happens when you spend it.

I think that people often do not know themselves very well in the sense that people think they want to spend money on things (like a Ferrari) that they do not really want or they think that they would be happier if they spent money to make changes (like moving into a gigantic house) but truly, those changes would not make them happier. I think that this dysfunction…

Romanticism

the ISM for our times

by Lorine Parks

C

all to arms, citizens! We are all Romantics, with very few exceptions.

Seldom has such an ism trumpeted its way into permanent institutionalism as this one. Romanticism will never be phased out.

We are all latter day sons and daughters of Romanticism, that celebration of the odd, the singular, the natural, the self, which itself gives rise to many of the new ism’s that followed: liberalism, radicalism, nationalism; the profundities of alcoholism and the labyrinth of Freudianism.

The mid 18th century was defined by momentous political, social and intellectual revolution. As a reaction against Rationalism, Romanticism celebrates individualism and the common man.

In literature, Romanticism opposed the tyranny of classicism with its rigid rules about style and subject: only Eden and angels, kings and demi-gods needed to apply. The new, the exotic and the mysterious contrasted with the elegant formality and artificiality prevailing in Classical forms of literature, such as the English heroic couplet in poetry.

Today Romaticism faces a new challenge, the environmental crisis.. How do you celebrate a beauty which you are rapidly destroying? Eco- Romanticism is to poetry is what eco-toursim is to the explorer, the Green Party to the ballot, and to Greenpeace activism which opposed the

French nuclear tests in the South Pacific in the 90’s. Romaticism’s victories in our time abound, from John Muir and the Sierra Club to conservation-ism.

Is praising nature and promoting one-world-ism, as in “we all inhabit this globe together,” enough? Mary Oliver and Marianne Moore examine starfish and say yes. Robinson Jeffers, that notoriously Californian nature poet, bypasses Christianity and turns to pantheism.. When he sees a needy vulture he is able to imagine “to be eaten by that beak and become part of him…what a sublime end of one’s body, what an enskyment: what a life after death.”

Romanticism in English literature begins in the 1790’s, when William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge collaborated.

Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the second edition (1800) of their Lyrical Ballads, describes poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” Emotion is prized over reason, and spontaneity and imagination become the lode stars of the English Romantic movement in poetry.

A brief pause to answer the question, what is this thing, Romanticism? The etymology of the word can be traced to the old French romanz, which referred to the ‘romance’ languages, Italian, French, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese and Provençal, which were developed from Latin, spoken

by Romans. … number Five / 2016 •

87

Eating and Drinking with the Beats

by Charles Plymell

A

fter the famous Gough St. bash where the Beats met the Hippies, Allen [Ginsberg] invited me over for a light dinner. He was just back from India trying to get Neal [Cassidy] settled in, and Peter [Orlovsky], and Anne . They later shared the Gough St. flat with me. Allen was staying with his old friend from the beat days, “Dr. Radar”, who lived just down the hill from Ferlinghetti. A few days earlier we had visited Larry at his house, ate some salad Larry made, and some cheese and wine.

Larry liked good French wine. Radar had a monkey in his yard. Allen said I had to go through the “Monkey Test,” whatever that was. He told me it would bite if it sensed the wrong aura. I passed the test. Allen had gone shopping in North Beach with Larry and had bought some caviar, wine, fruit and cheese. He asked me if I liked caviar.

I didn’t. He had some dark bread to put it on. We pieced around and drank some wine and rolled a joint. He told me about his Indian travels and asked me about McClure and some other poets from Kansas. Peter came to the door and walked right past the monkey. Allen said he would come over to the Gough St. flat and bring some poems for a little mag I was doing, called “Now.” Both Mike and Allen had written a poem to each other, a kind of apology to each other to set the tone for the new “love” generation.

Bruce Conners, an artist from Wichita,

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would soon paint LOVE in street lettering in the lane where Oak St. turned onto the freeway. I formed my lasting impression of Allen Ginsberg: He came to make history.

It was Thanksgiving dinner at 1403 Gough St.,1963 just after the Kennedy assassination when Robert LaVigne dropped by, talked to Ginsberg, who was tidying up the kitchen. Robert spotted dirt on the floor and wiped it clean, making a point to Allen, who had lived in the flat in the 50’s and had taken Robert’s love, Peter.

Later that day was the big dinner in the dining room. Neal Cassady was rolling a joint from his shoe box lid, telling stories, while Anne and others were planning the traditional Thanksgiving meal. As the day grew late, several others confounded the cooking. Old Frank, my sister Betty’s…

Plymell and Pam

Reviews A Long Forgotten Art of Listening Ryan Guth’s Body and Soul (Lummox Press, 2016) Reviewd by Dustin Pickering

P

erhaps this book, a reckoning inside a girl’s head, is only for those who can sympathize with victims of abuse. It may arouse nervous thoughts in the reader otherwise. Perhaps you are interested in how a young woman, who would be the gentlest of creatures otherwise, becomes a monster who manipulates and risks lives by driving drunk and recklessly engaging in illicit behavior.

This is as much a story of a woman as it is “poetry” in the figurative sense. It isn’t activist or metaphysical, but it employs methods learned from those disciplines of technique.

Cassandra, who is one person fragmented in several other personalities, is the victim in this sequence. She creates a myth of her own using Southwestern folklore and her own personal symbolism. Her purpose is to understand her situation and dig deeper into her own doubt. As the book is not a mere plaything for thoughtful minds but also a way of seeking understanding and building empathy, this collection of uncensored verse will break your heart. The protagonist is not a bad girl. She is a confused girl with no control.

She carries a rage unbeknownst to her that is the price for her hardship. As a victim of severe sexual abuse, Cassandra can’t fight her demons. She can’t even remember them. The last moments of the book leave the reader in tears, wanting her to find peace and resolution but seeing that she can’t remember. She just can’t remember. Details of the entire story

are hidden through the first two-thirds, but the entire event sequence is revealed at the end with Cassandra reviewing court hearings and testimony and playing each role. Yet she can’t remember; she just can’t. The hurt is too deeply buried, and dangerous to unleash.

A part of her chooses to forget so she can live—perhaps a stray memory would set her aflame like the Phoenix and she would lose all control, and destroy all sense left in her life.

Yet she already inflicts distress, confusion, hurt, and patterns of negligence on her family and the men she chooses to interact with. We know these patterns are outside of her control and we want to help, to dig our cold, frightened hands into the story…until we realize this is a story, and our minds are getting away with us.

If you know someone who is a victim of sexual abuse and developed dissociative identity disorder, this book may be a way to come to an understanding. I was hospitalized years ago with an older man, a Buddhist with a genius IQ and a sharp collection of wise words, who suffered with this problem. He knew what happened to him but did not understand it. I, having read The Three Faces of Eve in high school when I developed an interest in abnormal psychology (especially the effects of sexual abuse and rape), endeavored to explain why his behavior lacked rationale. “You have internalized severe rage because of the violations against you as a child, and the alternate personalities are your psychology’s way of handling the torment and uncontrollable impulses.” The older gentleman knew of his diagnosis but the…

This is only a sampling of the entire issue. To order the whole 256 page book, go to: http://www.lummoxpress. com/lc/lummox-5/ If you order between now and Sept. 1st, 2016 you’ll save $7!

After that it will retail for $20 + Shipping (USA only).

You still save some dough!

number Five / 2016 •

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Number Five • 2016 In this issue…

Mike Adams Jeff Alfier Tobi Alfier Sudeep Adhikari Ed Ahern George Anderson RD Armstrong Christopher Barnes Belinda Berry Chris Bodor Debbi Brody Lynne Bronstein Nadya Brown Ronnie Browne Christopher Buckley Wayne Burke Helmut Calabrese Calokie Don Kingfisher Campbell Pris Campbell RS Carlson Alan Catlin Grace Cavalieri Neeli Cherkovski Patricia Cherin Jackie Chou W. M. Clevenger Ed Colleti Sharyl Collin Bill Craychee Steve Dalachinsky Cassandra Dallett Sarah Daugherty James Deahl James Decay Diane Dehler Matt Dennison Jen Dunford

Christian Elder Gail Eisen Michael Estabrook Mark Evans Hazem Fahmy Alexis Rhone Fancher Brian Fanelli Josepf Farley J. A. Farnia Kate M. Flaherty Mike Faran Bob Foss Dan Flore III Alex Frankel Jerry Garcia J.W. Gardner Jack Gebhardt Loraine Gow John Grey Kenneth Gurney Ryan Guth Vijail Hamilton David M. Harris Clarinda Harriss George Held Lenore Hildebrandt Debbie Okun Hill G. Hagen Hill Eryn Hiscock Lawrence Hopperton Susan Ioannou Gary Jacobelly Ed Jamieson, Jr. George Johnson, Jr. Ted Kane Frank Kearns lalo kikiriki Diane Klammer

Doug Knott Laurie Kolp Ron Koertge Donna Langevin Kyle Laws John B. Lee Norma West Linder Jane Lipman Ellaraine Lockie Alexander Long Glenna Luschei Ron Lucas Glenna Luschei Sharon Mahany John Macker Ed Marcowski Ellyn Maybe Mary McGinnis Michael D. Meloan Basia Miller Joe Milosch Richard Modiano Tony Moffeit Kyle Moreno Deborah Morrison Linda Neal Robbi Nester Ben Newell normal Norman J.Olson Amanda Ortiz Scott Thomas Outlar Lorine Parks Tim Peeler Richard King Perkins II Dustin Pickering Charles Plymell Kennon B. Raines

Kevin Ridgeway Denis Robillard Judith Robinson David Roskos F. Albert Salinas Georgia Santa-Maria Eric Paul Shaffer Nancy Shiffrin Linda Singer Jerry Smaldone Graham Smith Jared Smith Rick Smith Clifton Snider Ken Stange Winnie Lee Star SB Stokes Kevin Patrick Sullivan Patti Sullivan John Sweet Lynn Tait Kelly Talbot Tim Tipton Cynthia Toronto Anna Totta John Townsend Grace Vermeer Richard Vidan Scott Wannberg Eternity Wauls Charles Webb Scott Wozniak Mark Wyatt Carrie Zhang Kelsey Bryan-Zwick

PO Box 5301 • San Pedro, CA 90733 • www.lummoxpress.com/lc/