Lummox 6 sampler

Number Six • 2017

$25

“Poetry is important, the poet is not” Octavio Paz

Number Six 2 017

Edited by RD Armstrong

LUMMOX number six Š2017 Lummox Press All rights revert to the contributors upon publication.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the express written permission of the editor, except in the case of written reviews.

ISBN 978-0-9984580-2-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2012201361 First edition

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

Printed in the United States of America

Acknowledgements Some of these poems have been previously published; all credits are cited at the end of each poem or poems. The Editor-in-Chief gratefully acknowledges the wisdom of all the previous editors who saw the value in these poems.

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Number Six / 2017 Cover Art: “Red Sun Black Water” © Richard Vidan Other Art: Jeffrey Lipsky Norman J. Olson Steve Dalachinsky Mike Foti Tyler Ferr Denny E. Marshall Apryl Skies Lynn Tait

t a b l e o f c o n c e pt s The view from down here

RD Armstrong — About This Issue; Letters to the Editor — 8

POETRY i

Rosemary Aubert — Rose Carthame — 12 Brenton Booth — The Last Detail — 13 Kate Booth — Love Song to a Tree — 14 Matt Borkowski — A Walk Is A Prayer — 15 Lynne Bronstein — The Blindest Date in the Universe — 16 Number Six / 2017 Ronnie Brown — Brain Washing — 18 Wayne F. Burke — Scars — 19 Editor-in-Chief Helmut C. Calabrese — Dream — 19 RD Armstrong Calokie — Reconstructing Humpty — 20 Don Kingfisher Campbell — Blue Ramblers — 21 Art Director Pris Campbell — Unheard Voices — 22 Chris Yeseta Micah Card — A Place for Teenage Girls — 23 Published by Alan Catlin — Sympathy for the Devil — 23 LUMMOX Press Grace Cavalieri — Refugees — 24 P.O. Box 5301 Jonathon Church — Intermissions — 25 San Pedro, CA 90733-5301 Wanda Morrow Clevenger — The One With The Hay — 26 www.lummoxpress.com/lc/ M.G. Cohen — She’s Here — 26

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table of CONCEPTS Ed Coletti — Does Donald Trump Have A Dog — 27 Sharyl Collin — Today — 28 Patrick Conners — Hangover — 28 Blair Cooper — Border Crossing — 29 Kit Courter — Outward — 30 Henry Crawford — Every Morning, Maggie — 31 Bill Craychee — Redwood State and National Park — 32 Sue Crisp — Evenings on the Beach — 33 Steve Dalachinsky — i want to escape... — 34 James Deahl — After the Final Picture Show — 36 Jen Dunford — Too Dope Sick To Pay Attention — 37 Alicia Viguer-Espert — The Bus — 38 Mark Evans — Falling Off — 39 Alexis Rhone Fancher — Menage a Trois — 40 Brian Fanelli — The Real Boogeyman — 41 Mike Faran — Village Dream Songs — 41 Joseph Farley — Jerk — 42 Joseph Farina — rio 2016 — 42 Venera Fazio — Dad — 43 Claire T. Feild — Aflame — 43 Mark A. Fisher — a new normal — 44 Kate Flaherty — i like your body — 44 Jennifer L. Foster — Above the Niagara Escarpment — 45 Amélie Frank — The 18 Year Wait — 45 William S. Gainer — NOLA - Sings to me — 46 William Scott Galasso — Aleph — 47 Martina Gallegos — America — 48 Katherine L. Gordon — Once We Were — 48 Lorraine Gow — O L D — 50 Taylor Graham — Stone Dance — 51 Ken Greenley — One More Won’t Hurt — 52 John Grey — The Poor Side Of Town — 52 Kenneth P. Gurney — Make Room — 53 Vijali Hamilton — I Have Made This Choice — 54 Mark Hartenbach — east Liverpool oh — 56 Debbie Okun Hill — Voices from a Human Sluice Box — 58 Gil Hagen Hill — A Peculiar Shade of Moonlight... — 59 Eryn Hiscock — How Many Selfies... — 60 Yuan Hongri — Blue and White Lightning — 61 Todd Jackson — When the Kids Go... — 61 Gary Jacobelly — Love and — 62

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Ed Jamieson, Jr. — One in the Crowd of Many — 63 Alex Johnston — Kill the Billionaires — 64 Ted Kane — 4 Poems — 65 Frank Kearns — Paramount and Florence — 66 Lalo Kikiriki — Dead Dog Blues — 67 Diane Klammer — Great Blue Herons — 67 klipschutz — Nostradamus Warned Us — 68 Ronald Koertge — Uptown/Downtown — 69 Raundi M. Kondo — Who Are You? — 70 Donna Langevin — DNA — 71 Laura Munoz-Larbig — Silent Footsteps — 71 Hiram Larew — Custard — 72 Kyle Laws — The Procuress — 73 Marie Lecrivain — The Omen — 74

2017 poetry contest winners Mary McGinnis — First Place — 75

No Father!!; For Langston Hughes; For Robert Bolano; Sedan, New Mexico; Dust Psalm

Ellen S. Jaffe — Second Place — 78

My Mother’s Cream Pitcher; Eve’s Rib; Time is a Trick; The Day I Saw Willie Mays

Dr. Bruce Meyer — Third Place — 82

The Beautiful Neanderthals; My Dog; McLuhan’s Canary; Traveler

POETRY ii

John B. Lee — To find the purpose of a second heart — 85 Linda Lerner — The Power Of A Dime — 85 Bernice Lever — Great Mother Ocean — 86 Norma West Linder — Wounded — 87 Jane Lipman — Grandma and the Cranes — 88 Ellaraine Lockie — The Last War — 89 Philomene Long — Love, You Are Green And Dark — 90 Ron Lucas — David Lowe — 92 Cynthia Lukas — As If Stung — 92 John MacCallum — Afterglow — 93 Adrian Manning — Competition — 93 Georgia Santa Maria — For All The Things... — 94 Wayne Mason — The Poetry In Between — 95 Ellyn Maybe — The Sky Is Falling — 96 Daniel McGinn — We Called it the Bright Spot — 98 Michael McInnis — An Ostrich Feather... — 99 Rhonda Melanson — Circumvention — 99

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table of CONCEPTS Basia Miller — Tres mujeres: Recognition, 2016 — 100 Joseph Milosch — When I Write An O — 101 Elaine Mintzer — The Normal Season — 102 Tony Moffeit — The Code of Billy the Kid — 104 Deborah Morrison — Sacred Circle — 105 Evan Myquest — An Essay Poem... — 106 Linda Neal — Gout Foot Wants to Dance — 107 Robbi Nester — Standing Rock — 108 Ben Newell — parent of the year — 108 normal — for the children of aleppo — 109 normal — from the fire escape — 109 Toti O’Brien — Revolution — 110 Norman J. Olson — St. Agustine at the Mega-Mall — 111 Scott Thomas Outlar — Transcending Definitions — 112 John Pappas — Suicide Sundays — 113 Lorine Parks — hitting for the cycle — 114 Simon Perchik — * — 115 Richard King Perkins II — An Astounding Perimeter — 116 Jeannine Pitas — Mary Comes Down — 117 Charles Plymell — I Sing Praises — 118 Charles Rammelkamp — The Facebook Family — 120 Thelma T. Reyna — INAUGURAL — 120 Kevin Ridgeway — Don’t Get Your Hopes Up — 121 Judith Robinson — Paralysis — 121 Dave Roskos — 30 Forrest Street — 122 C. C. Russell — HELLO, MY NAME IS — 122 Kat Sawyer — The Shore — 123 Robin Scofield — By the Book: Texas Rewrites — 124 Patricia L. Scruggs — Measuring the Years — 125 Michael Seeger — Transience — 125 Linda Singer — Not As Planned — 126 Apryl Skies — Manipulating the Pendulum — 126 Rick Smith — Last View of Mei Leng — 127 Clifton Snider — A Death in the Family — 128 Donna Snyder — After Rumi #2 — 129 T. K. Splake — don’t call it art — 129 Winnie Star — The Road — 130 Kevin Patrick Sullivan — Unexpected Grace — 130 Patti Sullivan — In Praise of Nothing — 131 Paul Suntup — Fall — 132 John Sweet — A Dull Red Suicide — 133

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Lynn Tait — Challenging the Law of Superimposition — 134 HL Thomas — Expressing God, the Moon Awakens — 136 John Thomas — You Bring Me Apple Trees... — 137 Tim Tipton — Hunting For Food — 139 Maja Trochimczyk — Memory Dust — 140 Vachine — Song for V — 142 Grace Vermeer — Her Winter Heart — 142 Jade Wallace — The Cat Doesn’t Care About Poetry — 143 Kari Wergeland — Surfaces — 144 Lavonne Westbrooks — Quickening — 144 Linda Whittenberg — Boundary Waters — 145 Charles Wilkinson — Teaching Asleep — 145 Pamela Williams — Gaia Receiving — 146 Scott Wozniak — Another Brilliant Poet... — 147

SHORT FICTION CORNER

RD Armstrong — Desire in A Flat — 148 Steven Deeble — On The Run in The Getaway Car — 149 Michael Meloan — The Savior — 149 AJ Urquidi — The Pervasion — 150

INTERVIEW/conversation from the vault

Allen Ginsberg/Philomene Long — Your Mind at the Moment of Death — 152

ESSAYS/RANTS

James Deahl — Big Al — 155 Venera Fazio — On Writiting & Dreaming — 158 Susan Ioannou — One Word, A World — 163 Laura Munoz-Larbig — Is Poetry Relevant? — 167 John Macker — Acetylene Sunsets — 170 Naushena — On Rejection — 180 Charles Plymell — If Trump is the Answer... — 183 G. Murray Thomas — Music and Memory — 185

REVIEWS

Katherine Gordon — My Head Filled With Pakistan by Blaine Marchand — 187

Personal Encounters… by Laurence Hutchman — 187 George Anderson — The Mother Goose Market by Ron Lucas — 188

Contributors

Who’s Who in LUMMOX #6 — 192

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the view from down here

by RD Armstrong

I

have always admired the tenacity of poets. Perhaps it’s because poetry is more of a challenge...the idea of trying to convey a point of view using only a metaphor or an image, the less words the better. They work and work at improving their craft, going to workshops or taking classes to improve their skills, always laboring to improve their technique. When I meet one of these tenacious poets, I just want to give them a big hug! Unlike the lilies of the field they toil and toil as life rolls along.

I see that my mission as a publisher of this genre (yes, dear reader, I’ve reached that age where I think in terms of a ‘mission’ – perhaps because my view has become more reflective, since my own skills have begun to fade), my mission is to encourage the craft of poetry as it comes to me. If creation (life) is like a river, then surely poetry is one of the many eddies that feeds that river and makes our journey possible.

Based on the questions that I am asked by poets, it is safe to assume (uh oh) that I have gained a reputation for knowing a thing or two. Of course, we all have heard the saying about “assuming”.

To illustrate this point, I’d like to tell you about a poetry friend...her name was Angela Consolo Mankiewicz (I say was because she recently passed away and I was asked to be the executor of her literary estate). Now, I thought I knew her pretty well. I thought she was one of those other kind of poets, the ones who are blessed, it seems, with an innate sense of language or imagery; for whom the poems flowed, as if from a spring, fully formed, requiring very little editing.

Turns out that she worked very hard to make it look effortless. I discovered this when I began to catalog her estate...She kept meticulous records of the progress of her work over the years.

I’m not sure if she did this thinking of her legacy (I learned a lot just putting the catalog together for the archivist) or if this was something she

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brought from her professional life. Whatever the case, I have grown to respect her tenacity...she was tenacious like you wouldn’t believe!

Angela wrote poetry. She favored free verse (or is that blank verse?) but she could write sestinas, pantoums and haiku. She wrote around 400 poems (published about ¾ of these). She also wrote essays and reviews. This is what I knew about her....what I didn’t know about Angela was that she also wrote stories, a novella, several plays and the libretti for two one act operas! She loved opera, she loved the piano and almost everything she wrote began as a poem!

Now, I’ve written a few songs over the years (long before I considered myself a poet) and I’ve even had a few of my poems converted into songs, but I never thought of using a poem as a springboard for a wholly different line of expression. Never! Perhaps if I had been differently educated, this might have occurred to me (the five or six year college versus the long and winding road of experience). It occurs to me that, in a way, my desire to explore what makes a creative person ‘tick’ might have sprung from my love of poetry...but I must still tip my hat in Angela’s direction, for I wouldn’t be in the mindset that allowed me to draw that conclusion.

What I learned from my cataloging job, aside from the fact that freeway traffic in L.A. has gotten intolerable (4 hours a day just driving), is that there are many ways to go. At first I felt badly that my own record keeping had become a farce! I used to at least try to keep track of my publications and accomplishments...but lately, like everything else in my life, I have become lackluster. A lazy slob, whose only saving grace is this, this anthology, and those of you who actually read this.

But I digress.

One of the things I have been addressing in my personal life, is understanding and, perhaps, getting a handle on my own self-worth. I

mention this, not because I want you to hurry over to your Facebook page so you can offer your support, but because of my tendency towards self-recrimination. I have a tendency towards assuming that I am “to blame” when things don’t go my way or I don’t “measure up”. It’s difficult to accept that there are many different ways of being, something I have become acutely aware of in recent times. My tendency to fixate on my short-comings has become tiresome, hence my motivation to change course. This sets the stage for my expanded education when it comes to personal attention to details, vis-a-vis Angela’s cataloging of her own processes.

Not only did she save and file everything, she made an effort to understand the various connections that were created by this multi-layered approach. It is in this approach that I find inspiration and in that inspiration that I seek penance for my own short-comings.

Thanks Angela, it’s been a pleasure getting to know you better...God speed.

MANY THANKS First off, I must thank all of the poets who sent work for this issue, I believe that they represent a cross-section of the outstanding diversity that is modern poetry among the English-speaking countries of the world! Poets from all over the United States, Canada, and a few from the UK, Australia, Dubai and even China are included in this issue! Also the poetry contest seems to be gaining in popularity, so to those who took a shot at it this year, a big HURRAH for you! Hearty congratulations go to Mary McGinnis of Santa Fe, NM who won the contest with her poem, No Father. The Canadians also were well represented by Ellen Jaffe of Hamilton, Ont. for her poem Another Kind of War Story and Dr. Bruce Meyer of Barre, Ont. for his poem, The Beautiful Neanderthals. Jeanine Pitas receives an Honorary Mention for her poem, Mary Comes Down... read their poems in the special featurette in this issue. Mary will also receive $100 plus 30

copies of a chapbook to be published by Lummox Press before the end of 2017.

Thanks also to Judith Skillman for her patient judging of the poetry contest over the last 2 years. She’s stepping down now and will be replaced by Thelma T. Reyna (the poet laureate of Altadena). While I’m doling out the thank you’s, I’d be a real jerk if I didn’t acknowledge the many Patrons who continue to help support me so I can, in turn, bring Lummox out each year. In the past, there have been some large contributions (completely unsolicited beyond being asked to participate); however this year there were many smaller contributions, one might call it an army! It gives me a warm feeling knowing that many of you think enough of my vision to want to support me and Lummox.

Special thanks to Richard Vidan for the striking cover this year, “Red Sun Black Water.”

Thanks especially to poets Linda Singer, Lynne Bronstein, Gil Hagen-Hill, Frank Kearns, Sharyl Collin, Mike Meloan, Jane Lipman, John Macker, James Deahl and his Canadians... for their willingness to help me survive by promoting this anthology via participation in readings.

They don’t have to do it (there’s no arm twisting involved), but each year, they come back for more. I love you guys!

Lastly, I want to acknowledge one of my oldest friends and the man who makes Lummox and all the books I have published since 1997 (except the Little Red Book series) look the way it does...Chris Yeseta! Chris has been laboring away in his cul-de-sac for 20 years (!), trying to convert my ill-explained and sometimes crazy ideas into something that not only can we both live with, but also something that will catch the eye of the poetry buying audience...wherever they are!

IN THIS ISSUE As I mentioned above, there are a lot of poems in this issue. But there are also a lot of other interesting goodies as well. We have a conversation between the Queen of Bohemia, number Six / 2017 •

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the View from Down Here Philomene Long and Allen Ginsberg. Tho both are dead, they continue to influence fans of Beat poetry. This little gem comes from the old Lummox Journal. There are a number of essays ranging from a “newbie” poet in Dubai writing about dealing with rejection to two portraits of influential poets—Canadian Al Purdy (James Deahl) and American Ed Dorn (John Macker)—to Murray Thomas’s Music and Memory (look for another musical essay from Murray in Lummox 7 – next year).

Also, we have a short (aka flash) fiction section (something new I’m trying out) featuring Mike Meloan, Steven Deeble, myself and A.J. Urquidi. Reviews by Katherine Gordon (My Head Filled with Pakistan & Personal Encounters) and George Anderson (The Mother Goose Market); and wrapping up the issue, art work by a number of talented photogs (Apryl Skies, Splake, Lynn Tait), painters (Richard Vidan, Jeffrey Lipsky), collagists (Steve Dalachinsky, Apryl Skies), lithographers (Tyler Ferr), artists (Denny Marshall – drawing, Norman J. Olson – drawing, Mike Foti – woodblock) and one, lone, internet scrounger (me).

GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN As of this writing (August) the RIP list seems to be longer than last year...my theory is so many poets are abandoning ship because they don’t want to live in our brave new (?) world. Of course it’s just speculation on my part (we are a sensitive lot). Let us now pause and consider the following: Angela Consolo Mankiewicz John Harris Isao Tomita (moog synthesizer pioneer) Matt Borkowski Miriam Halliday-Borkowski Michael Pingarron Bob Rixon Stuart N. Ross Joe Salerno Ken Stange, Canadian poet

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Kathryn Stripling Byer Lynn Manning Jackson Wheeler Shelley Savren Simcha (Sam) Simchovitch, Canadian poet Joe Pachinko Austin Strauss Maya Angelou Liu Xiaobo, Chinese poet * * * LETTERS TO THE EDITOR RD— Perusing your view of the poems we sent you, I feel a bit hurt that you believe poems other than political are not reflective of what’s really going down. I’m as political as anyone, but I certainly believe that the poems we write are precisely about what’s going down be it love, depression, obsession, beauty, joy, war or Trump.

I accept your “apology” to your Poet’s for not having specified that you wanted something like political poems. I won’t beat a dead horse, but if you reread your piece, I know that you will notice that, whether you meant to or not, you were awfully and incorrectly judgmental about most of the Poets in the journal. Why would outsiders want to read an anthology filled 90% with poems you refer to as merest diversions You know that I love you Dog for your spirit and the intensely tireless work you do on our behalf, so I know that you’ll understand the spirit in which I write this.

Cheers, Ed Coletti Santa Rosa, CA RD’s response: Ed, it was never my intention to disapprove of the poets who weren’t submitting political poems. I guess I was the only guy in the room with a crystal ball. Either that or this should have been the ISMS issue, which would have netted a more generalized cry of outrage. Please don’t get me wrong...I admire all the poets in the is-

sue [#5] or else they wouldn’t be there. And I thank you for taking me to task on this issue.

How else will I learn? It’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks, but I gotta try, at least!

Further thoughts from Ed....

RD, Since the advent of the Orange Fascist Administration (OFA), I have become much more politically active.

For the longest time, I referred to myself as a non-joiner. I after all am a poet, an artist, one who speaks out through art. However, in this age of Trump and the growth of fascism in America, I’ve had to reassess this stance and have begun joining organizations including the Sonoma County Democratic Club, Indivisible, and also others such as Swing Left and Sister Districts for efforts beyond my own geographical area. Additionally, I have been making trips to Congressman Mike Thompson’s office and have attended his recent town hall on the ACA and healthcare in California. I have learned quite a bit. I even attended the Democratic Club’s recent fundraising Crab Feed along with 13 of my close friends. Another group of 13 responded to our invitation and joined in a brainstorming “Huddle” at our house.

For those of you poets who may feel that such involvement is not for you, I suggest that you, as have I, look into yourselves and ask “Is what I am doing by writing anti-Trump poems and speaking out among kindred poetic spirits doing enough? Is it effective in reaching an extensive audience? The title of this ten-plus year old blog may contain a clue. While most readers may agree that there is very little money in poetry, we should realize that, beyond the purity and value of art for art’s sake, we may be having little impact upon the broader population which must be reached to effect social change.

I commend Bay Area poet Katherine Hastings for her material involvement in political organizations working to influence congress. I use her as example here. I am certain that many other poets are working through grass roots or-

ganizations and the Democratic Party to effect change. We now realize that merely writing and grousing is not going to get the job done.

Overhauling the words of Milton, “They really do not serve who only stand and wait.”

Ed Coletti Santa Rosa, CA Re: Lummox 5 Happy to be included again in such a grand company of poets and essayists that’s in every Lummox publication. Speaking of essayists, I loved Richard Modiano’s essay on Neruda in Lummox 5. I also appreciate the prodigious work you do in getting Lummox to the world.

CaLokie Pasadena, CA Editor Appreciation It means a lot to people to have our poems accepted by a wonderful journal like LUMMOX, and also because you sometimes include encouraging or appreciative messages to the poets. For instance, Blair [Cooper] was thrilled to have a poem accepted, and Georgia [Santa Maria] once told me that you told her you love her work. I most appreciate your accepting some of my most personal poems that many journals wouldn’t consider at all. Because of you they didn’t get locked away in a dark drawer. You gave them a place to be, and to be shared. And you gave me the courage to read some of them in my St. Johns reading, and the feedback I got––it gave others courage to write some of their secrets.

May these gifts come back to you a thousandfold.

Jane Lipman Santa Fe, NM * * * So now, we can move on to the beauty and blight, the wistful memories and jarring shock of “reality”, the joys and sorrows of this world, our little blue planet, alone in the vastness of the universe...unleash the dogs of poetry! number Six / 2017 •

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poetry i Rose Carthame The artist tells me that this is a fugitive colour that its brilliance its sweet rose red reminiscent of spring of wine of the lips of a babe will flee.

Beautiful shade red shadow fine and fleeting bright as the light caught in a ruby or a real rose.

Fine and fleeting like fire like a red leaf like a living thing.

Like me.

Rosemary Aubert Toronto, Ont., Canada

Norman J. Olson

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THE LAST DETAIL We had been friends for 8 years and had some really good times together and tonight was the first time I had seen him since he read a book of poetry I recently had released one of the poems was about a gay relationship I had 14 years ago there was a large group of us at the bar we had all been drinking for hours when the bouncer kicked him out for being drunk

I was the only one that left with him no one else wanted their night ruined it was late and all the other bars were closed and I suggested we go to my place he didn’t answer I said it again and again no answer as I started to say it the third time he spoke over me: “You’re a fag! I am not going back to your place!

You make me sick!” he said with fire in his eyes I didn’t know what to say and left him drunk and alone on the crowded street.

Brenton Booth South Penrith, NSW, Australia

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Love Song to a Tree You invited me to come here.

You said, Come, sit with me.

Breathe the air with me, together

this magic carried on the wind.

The whole earth breathes with us

warmed by the autumn sun.

When the gold and red bleeds away the green

and we dress in formal attire, I ask if you are ready

for sweeping sunsets and dancing?

Yes Yes Yes Yes My back leans against your rough body.

You hold me in your lap

while I fall in love with your poetry.

Wordless poems that soak straight

to the heart.

In this moment, how can I feel lonely,

unloved, unloveable?

You say that love is this wordless embrace.

We breathe the same air as that

racy raven that slashes through

your boughs of light

coming and going in a flash

silver bright wings.

I say, This day will pass and you will undress.

Naked bones and bark clatter in the icy wind.

I will wonder where my handsome and sappy lover

has gone?

I will bundle myself in wool,

furry boots up to my knees.

A knitted cap pulled over my ears,

thick gloves cover these fragile fingers,

thin skin.

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I will come find you here hiding

deep inside yourself

asleep, your blood pooled in your roots.

You wait and I wait for your pulse to quicken

with the rising spring sun.

I will find you.

I will.

I will lie in your arms again

listening for your heartbeat to quicken.

We will laugh like the wind

and rollick in the springtime mud

and match wits with the goldfinch and robin.

Our faces tilted to the blue sky We dream of flying together,

adept as our old friend raven who never left this place all winter long and impatiently cawed away the days waiting for your return.

For now, I will dream here

wrapped in your autumn song.

Kate Booth Pueblo, CO

A Walk Is A Prayer a walk is a prayer if taken well, one foot in heaven, one in hell;

upon the earth where all have fallen, a walk is a prayer Matt Borkowski The Bardo

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The Blindest Date in the Universe There’s a slumber party going on In the pink room called the Ovary.

All the Ovum Girls are gathered To help the Ovum of the Month Get dressed and made up.

Now isn’t she pretty?

They put her before the mirror And admire her and she admires herself.

Then she says goodbye to them all and hugs them.

No matter what her fate, she won’t see her friends again.

She goes to the waiting hall Called the Womb.

It’s like a great ballroom.

It’s chilly and echoey.

There she waits.

Hell, how she does wait.

This may be only the beginning Of a lifetime of waiting for things.

Might as well get used to it now.

Then she feels the earthquake, The explosion of passion, And she sees the great wave, The white tsunami hurtling toward her.

When it recedes, There is only the trail of dead bodies In the corridor leading out, As far as the eye can see.

That’s it. She’s had her turn.

And like the Little Mermaid She must surrender to the foam, She must lie down and go on to the unknown.

Another month, another girl, And this time, she can’t even see her suitors For the rubber wall that keeps them out.

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Once again, another girl waits and hopes.

This time, the white wall crashes in, The tide goes out and –oh for joy— There is somebody to greet her.

He’s smaller than she thought he’d be, But he’s all hers. Her dream guy.

They embrace and there is no parting them.

They will honeymoon in the drafty hall, Their meeting happened with a flash of light And the hall will have light until they leave, Trading in their safe haven For a different kind of light In a world where there will be As I said, a lot more waiting.

But the girls who were stood up, The mermaids who turned to foam, No worries for them.

Nothing in the world is wasted.

Nothing is without purpose.

They drifted upstairs, To the gray room.

Each carried her own spark of light And became an idea, A word, A feeling, A concept.

The body feels birth Everywhere and there is conception In every cell.

Maybe this poem Was once an ovum.

Isn’t she pretty, You say.

Lynne Bronstein Van Nuys, CA

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BRAIN WASHING Today, women know they shouldn’t wash their body, their clothes: are assured they will be believed, but back then, she did what felt right--bathing, then showering, then bathing again (while her clothes soaked in the sink)--sure that getting rid of every trace: washing it all away, would help her forget.

What use alerting the campus cops her roommates argued. She’d been where she shouldn’t have been; had been drinking (under age); was (ohso-willingly) making out with him.

So what if he shoved her down onto a mattress, parted her thighs by pounding them with his fists (whispering as he did, that he had military training, could/ would kill her if she screamed.)

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Later, bruised, but squeaky clean, she remembers how she sat on her bed, mug of tea in hand, hair still dripping, hearing his voice in her mind saying what he’d said when he’d finished.

Hissing, “You weren’t worth the trouble, bitch--doing it alone would have been more fun!”

His words repeating again and again--that night and over the years.

Words that still leave her wondering what in God’s name she could have done, should do, to finally wash him out of her head.

Ronnie R. Brown Ottawa, Ont., Canada

Dream

scars I was back in my hometown and met a guy I knew in a bar I had not seen him in years he asked me how I got the scars on my face I did not know they were that noticeable I could have told him it was because I had lived a little but did not he would not have understood he had never left town, his face was as unmarked and smooth as it had been in High School where we had been children together.

Wayne F. Burke Barre, VT Published in Bold Monkey - online

As the climbing progressed, I felt a need to reassure myself that this was the difficult part. Way up I was maybe countless miles above the earth’s surface, but still valleys were shining from sunlight green, white and grey colors of grass, rocks, the earth below me; I followed the trail and giant cliffs surrounded me; the icy snow promised death. A station’s walls cracked from the earth’s movement, exposed a frozen human environment; Survivors, none. I saw equipment and felt that the emergency help messages were sent a generation past; the transmitter, radios, microphone all black, shiny and new, were silent.

I felt the cold fresh hospital-like air, knew the hopeless descent before me, and watched the mirrored mountain walls whiten.

Helmut C. Calabrese NJ, 1984

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RECONSTRUCTING HUMPTY On hottest day of hottest month of hottest year ever, overheated Humpty Dumpty who calls all this talk about human caused catastrophic climate change a hoax wobbles while on wall, topples and upon cement paved path falls His shell shatters Egg white and yolk solution splatter over concrete walk Neoliberal advisers assert their kingdom needs structural adjustment reforms which will boost needed growth to hire enough King’s men to put Humpty Dumpty back together again Market fundamentalist counselors on other hand counter

since country’s economy isn’t broken, it follows that it needs no fixing and so, if the monarchy will only cut taxes on commerce along with public expenditure for social services, free merchants from heavy burden of regulations and privatize commons, they can then release magic of market to create sufficient amount of jobs needed for king’s men to put Humpty Dumpty back together again On hottest day of hottest month of hottest year ever, while gas-guzzling SUV’s drive by, Humpty can’t or won’t believe scrambled remains are being charred to crisp on sizzling sidewalk Calokie Pasadena, CA

20 •

Number Six / 2017

Blue Ramblers There they are standing together next to the ’64 blue Rambler purchased with deputy sheriff salary

after that third operation ended with doctors shrugging shoulders leaving him to shrink to a wisp

They stand tall and thin as can be him in slacks and plaid shirt her capris and floral blouse

My mother simultaneously ballooned having tripped over a parked bicycle in the cluttered no car garage

in front of a tract home all brown and concrete drivewayed Little did they guess

bringing about a sedentary future where she sits watching shopping networks and remembers her

the chrome would disappear from their greatest generation lives because entropy rules being

beleaguered husband somewhat fondly except for his late night cable porn and retirement affair with another survivor

The house got older, as they did, only here at the age of 39 his cancer wouldn’t appear

She has finally inherited a piece of her mother’s second marriage electrical company stock fortune

until five years later My father would be gone in a mere 14 more system revolutions

Now she takes pills to stem arthritis Also for diabetes and irregular heart She’s in no hurry to join him in their stacked cemetery grave down the hill you can see so many dying flowers from here Don Kingfisher Campbell Alhambra, CA

number Six / 2017 •

21

Unheard Voices Never one for female conventions, I drew my line in the sand when young by slugging playground bullies, forging my way through a man’s work world with their state of the art authority clinging to the air like heavy cologne, but kept my legs and armpits shaved, wore make-up, letting no women define me, either.

Went braless but never burned one.

Examined myself, Our Bodies Our Selves on the floor in front of me.

Never minded that Steinem was gorgeous and still is or that men opened doors for me, yet my body has been groped, raped, molested by men in power, my silence over this abuse bought by that default reset button called ‘never did that’ and dismissed as the true seducer, as liar, like the women reporting Trump or Cosby, conspirators trying to drag them down.

Pris Campbell Lake Worth, FL

22 •

Number Six / 2017

Sympathy for the Devil

A PLACE FOR TEENAGE GIRLS I inherited old power and murdered my apathy by dragging it across the edge of my imagination, in bedrooms, in moving cars, places a girl could hear herself think against the trauma-shaped sky of her mother’s hometown.

I kept a little notebook to cradle and to sing to, to document my neuroses and my unearthed validity via word, via confusion, via pride, via resilience, and to say in the morning that I felt all that I could of Earth before dreaming up an alternate to hold me in new orbit and smile.

Micah Card Los Angeles, CA

After an extended childhood spent watching MTV stoned on whatever he could score, he had the alt-rock look down: Doom Cult t-shirt, sleeveless and soiled washed from black to almost gray, beyond tight dragged out jeans, pointed shit kicker boots, all the facial hair he could grow beneath requisite medusa knot locks.

Told all the slumming, punked out, dive bar queens, pretenders to thrones of tough and hard, he was the lead singer in some heavy metal bar band that was about to make a quantum leap into the big time, were tuning up for mega gigs once the studio album was cut and released. In real life he was a wannabe roadie known for his skill at rolling perfect doobies and not much else. Even terminal losers have a skill. Kept him vaguely employed, made him known in all the fringe places make believe rock stars hung out waiting to overdoes, a moral’s charge, or a major drug bust. Getting lucky, for him, was a hit of not bad acid, some clean Poontang, and someone else’s demo tape he could pass off as his own. Had visions of dying, hitting perfect chords on a wired guitar, short circuiting waves of electricity instead of veins, his hair on fire.

Alan Catlin Schenectady, NY Published online in inbetweenhangovers.

number Six / 2017 •

23

Refugees At sunset they do not fold their tents like tourists in Aruba.

How shall we dress our children for their first fine day at school— The refuged do not worry about a dress, a suit, a fine day at school.

And look at the photos of the child dying in the camp with flies on his eyelids.

He has no wish for the teddy bear sent from UNICEF. So you dreamed last night about a baby that you forgot to feed.

It’s not a dream the refugees can afford to dream.

This is why you write a poem.

In fact, It’s all that you can do.

You cannot know more, unless you are that child with a broken arm, or, the Mother with a baby crying at her drying breasts.

If you are not with the exiled, captured, stripped and sold, then you are the one who must write this poem.

Grace Cavalieri Annapolis, MD

24 •

Number Six / 2017

Intermissions I dread the intermissions of life, when the senses slow to a dragging pace, when adrenaline is drained from the pilot of consciousness, sluggish interludes when time stretches out in a long yawn, like after lunch or dinner when the appetite is squelched, and the eyes go glassy, the belly distends, and the buzz of life fades, a heavy torpor overtaking consciousness, a nap beckoning, banter of the night still ringing in the ears, but in the cold hard empty hour of a dim afterglow, when space

seems hollow and thin, and time just hangs; all animation seems to suspend, but you know you are awake because it all just sits like a mute blob of formless ugly, and nothing vanishes like in a dream when vivid screams and grotesque creatures and endless chases and skyscraper skydives and all the allegories and metaphors of your life sweep under you and rapidly disappear and you are left in the blinding fugue of a story that has unfolded but with no grasp of what just happened.

Jonathon Church Alexandria, VA

number Six / 2017 •

25

The One With the Hay The first poem I wrote on the exhaust of rhyme ––coercion renounced for spontaneous orgasm–– wrought devastation.

He warned she was a friend––his choice, my call to join; one mind one iamb He rained warm words, seeded her chokeweed feet.

She writhed in metaphor.

The one with the hay, he said to me without thinking first of her, is the best poem I’ve ever read.

Regardless a 49 state buffer, I could smell how green he made the back of her throat.

He was the 36 thousand feet above, she was the forest unable to hide its trees.

Wanda Morrow Clevenger Hettick, IL Published in Enhance Magazine – April 6, 2014

26 •

Number Six / 2017

SHE’S HERE I KNOW EXACTLY WHERE SHE IS SHE IS IN MY HEAD SHE IS IN MY BED SHE SITS BESIDES ME AS WE GAZE OUT THE WINDOW FROM HER DESK VIEWING THE MYRTLE TREE ABLOOM IN ALL ITS GLORY AS I SIT AND HEAR THE CLICK OF OUR INEXPENSIVE WALL CLOCK SHE LISTENS ALSO I KNOW WHERE SHE IS SHE IS HERE BY MY SIDE IN MY HEAD IN MY BED. M. G. Cohen Seal Beach, CA

Does Donald Trump Have a Dog Sam on my lap I scratch his ear gaze into his sadly happy eyes wonder just what I’ve done to deserve him he who can also be the loud barking nuisance startling the hell out of me who in Vietnam daily heard both loud and more muffled blasts constantly reminding me mortality expends its time as explosion or terrier barking.

So to the question of whether or not our self-centered president-elect ever even pondered the company of a pup he would need to kibble-feed I only can attempt to imagine the starved and wanting puppy explosively reminding The Donald about food that one necessity required and craved, sustenance and attention withheld by President-elect in Scotland playing golf texting Kelly Anne Conway, “Is that greedy little mutt still around?

Feed its ass and name it anything except Ted or Jeb Ben Mike or Marco all losers And give my dog whatever you name it the blue ribbon for terrificness such a winner!

Huge!”

Ed Coletti Santa Rosa, CA

number Six / 2017 •

27

Today The day whispers from the canyon rim. Water beads on kiss-lipped buds that sing to the first rays of sun, drawing halos from the very source of their withering.

I want it all to myself, to hike the trail alone, pretend I’m the first to discover this place, though I’ll settle for the veil of virginity drawn by yesterday’s rain.

I cling to the now, after storm and deluge, before the recessional, while the ground is still unmarked by the footprints of others.

In the canyon behind me, a muffled conversation begins. It adds rhythm to my steps, and I am repentant for my greed, remind myself it is, above all, about the sharing and the passing on. One night, he shared a favorite song. I think it was Mozart – I can’t recall.

What I do remember is that we were so close when it started, his pupils wide in the moonlight that crept in between the blinds, until the music turned

and he looked away, with me quiet, still holding him as his arms loosened. It’s funny, the way you can hold on to a person and they can still leave you.

Sharyl Collin Lomita, CA

Hangover The morning after the election which changed the whole world the sun rose faintly.

I got out of bed pulled the cord to open the blinds.

I slowly made my way to the washroom checked my dry tongue in the mirror wobbled my way toward the kitchen stopped to pick up the paper.

Ignoring the news, I opened the sports page.

Read about the Leafs latest loss – boy did they lose put together the contents of my lunch laid out my clothes – better wear a sweater had peameal bacon and pancakes for breakfast – just like every Wednesday.

Patrick Conners Toronto, Ont., Canada

28 •

Number Six / 2017

Border Crossing Threading through the canyon, a narrow road streaked with shadows.

Mexican Jays noticeably blue even from a distance fly low, flit quickly between trees. Following the road to a dirt track branching off, we cross over the creek. In a quiet meadow where we’ve often been, we pitch our tent.

Bone-white sycamores grow nearby on the banks of the stream, branches intertwine overhead, protectively.

From a limb of an alligator-bark juniper, we hang our feeder for humming birds, wait for the Magnificent, Broad-billed, Rufus, Ruby-throated to appear.

In the early morning, jays dart back and forth over us, calling noisily while Acorn Woodpeckers puncture tree bark with drill holes. High in trees, cardinals and Black-headed Grosbeaks sing.

Later when the Arizona sun beats down, birds are quiet in the tree canopy.

At sunset, night jays begin an evening chant as Venus hangs above steep, jagged cliffs in the darkening sky.

When star sequins shine in the velvet sky, Pygmy-owls softly whistle a pair of notes over and over. Sitting alone outside the tent, I believe there’s no canyon more holy.

Today, border patrol trucks rumble up the main road; agents search for illegals from Mexico. In the sky, the clattering of helicopters drowns out bird song.

Just now, we found a man’s blue jeans in the creek bed. Where’s the man?

What became of him? Bear scat seen in camp earlier . . . now of little concern.

Blair Cooper Santa Fe, NM

number Six / 2017 •

29

Outward There never was another me, just I, different in declension, lifted from time like song birds, moving like thin water, shear, though clearly rising.

I do not look for solace.

I do not probe where love can question anything — framework or foundation; without time no formation happens, no consequence is reached.

I must rely on wit to defend me, on vision to stay clear of death by pining for things that could not happen, nor did, dreams I’ve not allowed myself to sleep.

It remains an open question, no decision has been reached, no new start diverged. In the back of the day, no effort can ever recompense for connections closed, nothing flowing, just reflection, a study of my own eye red-veined and empty, vexed by mourning.

Chance - that is the news read forever in the daily papers, whether true; and I edit words, parse verbs, choose to fly, lifted by sea-cliff winds, watching breakers roll riding the noise of forgetfulness that I might be forgiven.

Kit Courter Torrance, CA

30 •

Number Six / 2017

Tyler Ferr

Every Morning, Maddie we meet for coffee diner windows flush with dawn she comes in from the street we share a plate of bacon strips my once vegetarian child never this old

almost 90 mornings clean her shiny black hair unwinding all tight skin and darting eyes her thin knees clutching the seat somewhere between urgency and nonchalance

I’m driving her to the methadone clinic these rain damp streets a maze of traffic cones and sideways signs we go right at the railroad crossing I don’t ask where she’s living anymore

I’ve come to know this place people milling around the clinic there’s a Chinese take-out a burned-out doughnut shop a storefront church and then a space comes free and I let her out

nowadays its NPR in the car neither of us listening I’d like to know her favorite song as if she could hand me a burned CD as if we could just waltz it all back she has no phone

Henry Crawford Washington, D.C. Every Morning, Maddie was published on the website Mother’s Always Write in 2016. number Six / 2017 •

31

Redwood State and National Park Children play on the stumps of the fallen giants, mocked in death by the glitter of disco lights and the raucous cheers of drunks.

Asphalt long melted round their dead roots where once they hovered over what is today the RV dump station, the lit restrooms, and every car and truck that ever was.

They stood tall and strong and bright in the sun.

Ancient even long ago.

Relics of bygone time.

Even so long ago.

The Ranger will tell you some nights, around a warm fire, on wooden stools, all about it.

Once there were giant trees even here.

They were alive.

Then men came.

Charged with building a civilization.

Powered by smoky manifest destiny they toppled the great giants to build banks, message parlors, and prisons.

In their guilt and because of the rage of others, people cordoned off parks where the giants are to be left alone to entertain the children of their enemies.

We drive to them in our shiny cars and carve our lover’s names in them.

We record their many moods unknowingly in the digital memories of our smart phones, and share these images in our favorite social medium.

We buy t-shirts at the Visitor Center and listen to advice on which of the many paved roads we might travel to see them best from our car windows as we drive by on our way to lunch.

Back at camp the smoke of many fires makes it difficult to breathe.

The noises of auto camping drown our memories of ancient majesty and remind us it’s time to cook a real campers dinner and have some wine before bed.

Bill Craychee Joshua Tree, CA

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Number Six / 2017

EVENINGS ON THE BEACH Feel the filtered sun on your face under palm trees, warm sand tickling between your toes.

The smell of salt air on a fragrant breeze, bliss on the beach, as your eyes close.

Tensions now spent in the tiny cove no one sees, a symphony of soothing sea songs, as the moon slowly rose.

The smell of salt air on a fragrant breeze, bliss on the beach, as your eyes close.

Let your senses float, as on the open seas, hear the rustling of the palm trees as a gentle breeze blows.

Tensions now spent in the tiny cove no one sees, a symphony of soothing sea songs, as the moon slowly rose.

Let your senses float, as on the open seas, hear the rustling of the palms, as a gentle breeze blows.

In this pleasure time, I do as I please, time to hear the rhythm of the sea as the moon glows.

Tensions now spent in the tiny cove no one sees, a symphony of soothing sea songs, as the moon slowly rose.

In this pleasure time, I do as I please.

Time to hear the rhythm of the sea as it flows, spending my time in the moods of the seas, enjoying how peacefully for me time slows.

Tensions now spent in the tiny cove no one sees, a symphony of soothing sea songs, as the moon slowly rose.

Sue Crisp Shingle Springs, CA

number Six / 2017 •

33

“i want to escape...”

(Robert Frank Exhibit @ Scalo Gallery) - for Gregory Corso good bye hope unclear nuclear

hope

good bye volcanoes

fish

experts UFO’s

good bye

& foreign lands

elections & election fraud

good bye

fantastic operations & sandwiches 5 cent penny candy motel rooms with windows

good bye palm trees daisies & ideas dark silence music & the past good bye ode pretty girls calendars

birthdays good bye

hrs. minutes monthes years seconds

ruins photographs of ruins coffee cups coffee tea cake table spoon good bye gesturing

space within emptiness emptiness within space

good bye blooming concrete

acanthuspaperchristmas

good bye daddy blitzgrieg truth shadows

& dark silent music

good bye crowded rolls of film hanging like fly paper in a room occupied only by your ghost

34 •

Number Six / 2017

the image of winter perched upon the sill

of my eye

good bye you

streets that i know

of my youth middle age & my demise

good bye you that i have never known good bye

BELIEF

will never know & have forgotten

medicines

& painful conditions

good bye weather

postcards

differences travelling

& visitations

good bye inventions adversaries & inventory hello good bye

preparedness distance deception & necessity small talk big talk people who are gone

good bye good bye

to nothing

to

tributes

images bullfights speed blinking images & unbreachable entanglements good bye vocabularies purple potatoes

& holes good bye good bye to you

therapy

exercise

visitors disaster & you

to how i look at you

i want to escape

have to escape

need to escape to escape

escape.

steve dalachinsky ny, ny 9/27/28/00

number Six / 2017 •

35

After The Final Picture Show A patina of snow covers the grass like Death’s hand caressing the brow of an ill child.

Cars inch along the interstates heading from Detroit into a directionless dusk.

Soon a crescent moon might rise should dense clouds part, soon the city’s fires could be extinguished, their hearthstones covered in moss.

Women in white gowns wait on corners while streetlights dim.

What will you relinquish as night takes the temple down?

Below Erie, the land of Harding opens out, cold and agrarian.

Junkmen of the heart scavenge small towns, their cinder alleys.

Voices will claim it didn’t have to end this way, but what human hand could have altered the script? So the snow continues almost invisible outside the shuttered movie palace.

James Deahl Sarnia, Ont., Canada

36 •

Number Six / 2017

TOO DOPE SICK TO PAY ATTENTION If this is really you tell me how we met Copping dope at the Burger King on Broad Street With Sleazy Dave who even Andre Didn’t want to run with anymore Tell me how you met Sleazy Dave At NA and that you were His sponsor until this relapse Tell me about The time we copped At the McDonald’s on Elmwood Ave How while we were waiting for the man I looked into your eyes And told you the whole story Of how I’d left my husband For a guy who said he longed for me Every moment of every day for four years Then dropped me After 11 days How I ended up on the street Sucking cock for dope And hoping these bags would kill me Tell me how You came back with my share And I was so thankful you didn’t burn me

We went into the bathroom together And shot up And I didn’t use your needle that time Because I had my own A few days later We did it again In passing I mentioned the guy who broke my heart And sent me to the streets Tell me how you looked at me In utter confusion Not remembering a Fragment of that conversation Because you were too dope sick To pay attention Jen Dunford Island Heights, NJ

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37

The Bus I couldn’t say where the melons came from, they appeared on our laps open like doors, and sweet smelling.

Dozen surveying eyes, not Comanche Scouts but mostly Afghani farmers, smiled warming the space within the walls of the glassless windows of a bus from Kandahar to Kabul.

They delighted on their cleverness as much as our surprise.

Questions, in non existing English, were clear to me and I answered every single one, in Spanish.

Somehow every smile, every nod of the head fashioned circles of parchment, harmonic tablas of oneness sprouting from black beards, an American man’s jeans, a European woman’s cotton blouse, open hands of unknown friends.

We rode the same bus to the same destination, their capital.

Eat the same savory pilaus, theirs, communicating in the universal language, of our humanity.

When the sun rolled its sleeves down below the toothless window, the bus stopped.

Dozens of blazing black eyes descended the bus’ two steps accompanied by rubber sandals, shalwar kameez, and flowing turbans.

Men gathered prayer rugs out of wind and dust spreading them on the desert sand.

They stood up, the sun turned the sky pink.

They kneeled, the sky turned bright orange, then, deep red, as they prostrated themselves.

Stillness entered the open shrine, like a bird my breath flew away.

Alicia Viguer-Espert Los Angeles, CA Previously published in Zzyzy Writer Z (2017)

38 •

Number Six / 2017

Falling Off A warm, roomy desert night, a parade of hay trucks roll by.

Love is a world that embraces you, the once blue day, now black.

Any number of old country-western songs have addressed this, before they skip in the grooves at the end of the record.

Nothing is as relaxing—as comforting—as a broken record player, an open window, the hypnotic entertainment of dancing lace curtains; the sound of a bedeviled wind swirling through yesterday’s clinking, unwashed dishes; a day winding down.

I miss you | Skip | Scratch.

I am waiting | Skip | Scratch As I fall off, chin meets chest: dreamland.

M.T. Evans Joshua Tree, CA

Found by Raindog

number Six / 2017 •

39

Menage a Trois

“Trembling, like Paris, on the brink of an obscure and formidable revolution.” —Victor Hugo It feels like a competition. I lay between the two of them, sweltering, like Paris in August. Gene’s lanky six foot four inches hangs off the foot of the bed, Brett’s dancer-body liquid, compact, is curled into mine, his hard need pressed against my thigh. I’m not sure how I ended up here, in love with a man who wants me to fuck his best friend while he watches. Now the three of us crowd in my too-small bed. I stare at a black and white photo of Montmartre on the ceiling. Brett trembles like needle to the pole. Van Morrison’s on the radio, having sex in the green grass with the brown-eyed girl. The ceiling fan rotates counterclockwise, but we’re all sweating. I should have moved the beds together when my roommate moved out, but it’s too late, now Gene’s spread my thighs, and pinned his best friend against the wall, and now he says nothing while Brett watches him slam into me. I need him to scream I love you! again and again like he did before. But Gene’s eyes are locked with Brett’s. I see what I’m not meant to see; I am disposable, nothing more than a deep hole. A hot rain pelts the bedroom window. Gene pours into me like runoff. His tears look like raindrops on glass. I turn his face so he can see what he is losing. I want him to watch his best friend as he arches his dancer’s back and comes in my mouth, his spasms an arabesque. I pull back my hair and dip my head, trembling, like Paris, on the brink of an obscure and formidable revolution.

Alexis Rhone Fancher San Pedro, CA First published in HOBART 2015

40 •

Number Six / 2017

The Real Boogeyman

VILLAGE DREAM SONGS

It’s never really about the monster, those drooling, flesh-starved zombies, or staggering Frankenstein, who learns first words like an infant from a blind hermit.

Sometimes Joan Baez would rap on my screen-door wanting a cup of sugar & asking if I

It’s about the way townspeople sneer and threaten what has green skin or once looked like them, has the same hunger.

made it home okay without being overcharged by the cabby

It’s always about restoring order, sending the monster to an abyss, freezing it out in space, burying it until the next sequel.

Today, we don’t other some gill-necked freak, who crawls out of a murky lagoon, flips over cars with his webbed hands, sends beachgoers fleeing, but glare at someone at the restaurant seated across from us, who chews his food while his brown-skinned son pulls at this sleeve. We scowl at his beard and accent like villagers shrieking at Frankenstein.

We’d sit at the kitchen table & drink sangria Sometimes we’d dance right there to some soft jazz & I’d hold her tight while the sun gathered strength against our brown backs She always asked if my feelings were hurt because she’d found someone new & she always left leaving her cup of sugar & the scent of lilac water

It’s never really about the monster, who would rather be left alone to escape the crowd that always comes, first with pitchforks, now with promises of deportation.

Mike Faran Ventura, CA

Brian Fanelli Dunmore, PA

number Six / 2017 •

41

rio 2016

Jerk being a jerk is what I am best at, no lessons needed, naturally a son of a bitch. now all my toys are broken, and all that I loved has gone cursing my name. maybe now it will start to sink in, all those lectures I received on my parents’ knees. maybe I will finally learn how to be nice and good, and treat people like I should. maybe that will happen, but I doubt it. it is easier to stay with what you are good at, and this nasty mongrel dog is too old to learn new tricks.

Joseph Farley Philadelphia, PA Previously appeared in Whole Beast Rag

beneath the arms of an art deco christ at the summit of corcavado. the girls from ipanema go walking, covered, in fear of zika copacabana beaches afloat, in jetsam, flotsam and body parts. undulating to the samba beat and bossa nova rhythm brazilian nights lit by olympic rings photo op for tourists among feathered dancers on streets cleansed of hungry homeless indigenous amazonions under shrinking rainforest umbrellas of brilliant green segregated from olympic hyperbole their basin plundered their canopy torn fear of health and safety suppressed, immersed in postcard spin of cool jet set seas and sugarloaf panoramas, their fate in the protection of armed soldiers at the feet of christ Joseph Farina Sarnia, Ont., Canada

42 •

Number Six / 2017

Dad Feb. 18, 2014.

If you had lived today you would be one hundred.

I would wait on you offer hot tea tuck a blanket around you as you sit in favorite green rocker on back porch.

For just a few minutes I might stand beside you.

You always preferred the company of your own thoughts to conversation.

I am ashamed.

I never visited you in the psychiatric ward.

A complicated grief reaction doctors said.

You loved your dead son more than a living daughter.

Your sudden death prevented physical decline witnessing the melting of my frosted heart.

Venera Fazio Brooke, Ont., Canada Previously published in The Fabric of My Soul by Venera Fazio. Longbridge Books: Montreal 2015.

Aflame Her temper flares, a falling sycamore that wakes the newly dead.

As she flies through tornado-torn towns, she relishes the pain she feels.

She is an aficionado to disaster, a hex on a bent-up roller coaster.

In the cave where she lives, love is an afterthought, hate her life’s afflicted derivative.

Claire T. Feild Auburn, AL

number Six / 2017 •

43

a new normal I listened from the next room to another Chautauqua of hate the only time you ever sound sincere instead of smarmy, smug, and muddle-headed drunk upon some kind of Dunning-Kruger by proxy but your participation trophies paid for by someone else’s dollars don’t mean diddly-squat

‘cause the real laws of this universe just don’t care when you double-down on prejudice and “common sense” because the Internet can’t forget and you can’t buy forgiveness like indulgences Mark A. Fisher Tehachapi, CA

i like your body

between the lines of e e cummings

your body is leaner now the young way it was with a newness of thin o fragile things that were once solid I know these soft sinews I can feel your whisper in my ear you are less to embrace yet more yes to the new touch and the yes-making under that tender waning moon of fifty years

44 •

Number Six / 2017

resilient slender branch no longer sapling o fifty times fifty yeses and kisses as we settle lighter on our moonlit bench a lean perch from which we gaze a place to rest and leave and come back to o Kate Marshall Flaherty Toronto, Ont., Canada

Above the Niagara Escarpment Raucous crows at dusk alight on bare oak branches rising gibbous moon Jennifer L. Foster Hamilton, Ont., CAN

The 18-Year Wait Last night, as I brought in the empty recycling bin from the curb, I noticed that the first hibiscus of the season had just unraveled her petals.

I planted the bush last year, nourished her with the ashes of my parents, my aunt, my cousin in the hopes that she would greet me at the front of the driveway each day with cheerful dilations of my favorite color.

I looked to her for proof of life.

Until last night, she had been reluctant to reveal herself.

Now she is outstretched to the elements, her aureole wild and unapologetic and it is so good to be alive.

AmĂŠlie Frank Van Nuys, CA

number Six / 2017 •

45

NOLA – Sings to me

for Maddie Levy

Sing to me point a finger sip a cold drink and smile.

Christ somedays the gods are good even to old men.

Somedays.

So somebody told you I like Tom Waits.

Yeah, we hung out some him on the radio me in the corner booth drank a little bourbon smoked a few cigarettes talked quiet like.

You know how you do when you’re drinking bourbon talk – quiet like.

I think you were mentioned – you didn’t have a name then you were just somebody I needed to know.

Maybe me and you can do that sometime.

You can sing to me the way you do soft like.

I’ll listen.

That’s what I’ll do listen.

Maybe you can lean in my way – just a little?

I like that.

Close.

You know.

So, thanks for dropping by sharing the tune waving.

I’ll sleep good tonight kid

dream big all about you.

Did they tell you I fall in love – a lot.

Can’t help it it’s another thing I do fall in love – a lot.

A soft voice a teasing smile a finger bent just right – Christ – I’m hooked.

That’s why I keep a list – the women I’ll love forever.

You’re on it.

Sleep good kid.

Thanks for the song.

You sing it better than Tom ever did.

William S. Gainer Grass Valley, CA

46 •

Number Six / 2017

ALEPH The Aleph was about two to three centimeters in diameter, but all of cosmic space was there, with no diminution in size. Each thing was infinite, because I could clearly see it from every point on the universe.

-- Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph The dead star’s light still illuminates night.

The moment that was, is and will be connected, Time bats an eye. The first kiss warm on the lips meets the last breath escaping the body. Past lives, future visions collapse in the moment. I stand by the sea as the tides change, as I stand on the mountain, snow at my feet, as I stand before a stele in Rome or feel the dew of Erin’s grass wet between my toes. My mother’s blood flows through my body, my father’s lungs pump air in and out. I am a babe in arms, a child on the verge of language, a man strong in his prime, a weathered elder, at what instant does one

become another? We are dancers in a cosmic circle, attuned to spherical music and those we loved remain with us, the space dust of cells in a soul.

William Scott Galasso Laguna Woods, CA

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AMERICA America, today your skies are amber, and your humble children crowd the streets calling out for justice and democracy that’s being snatched away.

America, sweet land of liberty though the masses don’t find the sweet, their hopes now threatened, they march from sea to sea.

America, today your children aren’t free; they shout for unity across the land, but oppressors drown their voices, yet spirits bellow heavenward.

America, freedom no longer rings, but the masses remain brave putting their safety on the line to make their country truly greater.

America, take a look at the starry flags whose innocence is marred, but valor is the thriving force that unifies the fragile nation trying to stay free.

Martina R. Gallegos Oxnard, CA

Once We Were I conjure the ancestors from the furry-faced curious-eyed recently tail-less to the fair-visaged, large-brained gifted and endowed peoples who rule all far-flung arcs of a round and shrinking world, now at the end of our predominance... air, land and water more hostile than before.

We left oceans, trees and caves, rampaged and ransacked, justified the spoil with new versions of god, forgetting veneration of the feminine force of nature, the fertile and nourishing, now demeaned, suppressed.

Because we arrogantly turn from lessons of harmony we are doomed to disappear, supplanted by robotic versions of our once promising yet vulnerable human being.

Katherine L. Gordon Rockwood, Ont., Canada

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Steve Dalachinsky

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OLD I am too old to be lopsided -still unable to be me, to figure out my facial undertones.

Mama said they were yellow with hints of raspberry.

RASPBERRY? Colored girls don’t come in raspberry!

They border on hues of sorrow, deep purples with faded dreams, half-steps in black and blue.

I am too old to piroutte -still craving unabashed romance, out of synchronization with any man, nappy hair, blonde hair, no hair ‘cause my hair is dry, brittle, tired of being straightened.

I need a veil for cosmetic neurosis Nefertiti never experienced.

I am too old to watch the trapeze artist -still worried my stomach will go left, when he flies right, and there I will be with popcorn, cold tears, an $8.00 program and all my fantasies on a sawdust floor.

I am too old to seek redemption -still sticking to the protest begun as Nixon said he was not a crook with a wink, but now I’m careful of arthritic knees, my objections are sent with a forever stamp.

I am too old to interfere -still hypercritical of cupcake collusions when everyone wants chocolate frosting, but I crave strawberry almond butter cream and agree to butter scotch.

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I am too old to pick grapes -still unsure the clothespins will hold the fruit to the vine or the moon in its place, just long enough to taste Chardonnay, estate bubbles and Pinot Noir all at once.

I am just old. Passé.

Oh shit!

Still bingo is on Wednesday...

Lorraine Gow Laguna Woods, CA

Stone Dance Great polished rocks for a new development – stone-shadows in moonlight, black on snow, I dreamed those stones dancing around a koi pond, over an arched bridge; dancing their long history of elsewhere.

Not native here; born of a different geology; wise in their own place. Do they

Bulldozed, trucked here as backdrop for a koi pond; as landscaping over landscape that used to be, before the leveling of dirt.

Do they dance by their own ghost-light?

And our native stones – plain, mottled, hauled away – where do they dance while I sleep?

Stone-shadows black in moonlight of yesterday’s snow.

sing messages across miles to that lost land?

Taylor Graham Placerville, CA

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2017 poetry prize winners FIRST PLACE Mary McGinnis Photo by Jane Lipman

No Father !! Â Nights you sat up drawing On ice on a window thinking how he Flung his big shoulders out the door after you were born And hit the bars and hit the freights; you longed for his Touch and became a father, so in the Evening you could hold a squirming daughter bundle and Rock her in strong arms you never knew.

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For Langston Hughes

I thought you were mild, Because your rhymes were tidy, Your hatred polite;

Then you explained it wasn’t hatred but frustration; You wanted whites to understand; You even tried to understand them,

Climbing the hill to Harlem College, You walked straight as a model, Carrying your books proudly.

The man who performs your work tonight focuses on characters, Spins truths with lies, Shucks and jives;

Even as I laugh, I know you meant business.

You might have a little Aztec in you—

I’ll never know. That’s all for now, Langston.

I want to read you some more, imagine your ironic, Cheerful, staccato laugh in my ear if you return.

For Robert Bolano

Sweaty and fierce Chilean poet, You wandered the rainy, dusty streets through Mexico,

The note in the back of the magazine Says you’re dead. How can that be?

Any advice for me?

Your shadow emerges from these poems,

Like a dish cloth stiff with dirt.

Still I’d like to meet you at your favorite bar.

Even if you say I forfeit One day of my life, I’ll take my chances,

And lean next to you At a black and silver rail.

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SECOND PLACE Ellen S. Jaffe

Photo by Roger V. Gilbert

My Mother’s Cream Pitcher: Bainbridge, Maryland See, it says “cream” on the side, brown letters on creamy-white glaze above a picture of a coffee grinder and coffee pot enclosed in a wreath of pink roses, bought at Woolworth’s in Bainbridge, Maryland, during World War Two (my father stationed there, before the Pacific).

How easily I remember the name of the town when writing, hearing my mother’s voice, though I couldn’t have told you five minutes ago, if you’d asked.

Sugar bowl long gone, like my mother, like my father only this small rounded pitcher, slightly older than me, snug in my hand – still useful, serving its purpose – and her casual comment as I clear her shelves when she moves to assisted living, sorting, keeping, pitching out.

We got that during the war, she tells me.

After me, who will hold this memory?

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THIRD PLACE

Dr. Bruce Meyer Photo by Doug Crawford

The Beautiful Neanderthals They never knew that they were different from sunlight at the open mouth of a smoky cave or the fragile flames of flowers they gave the dead to remind themselves that summer grows from winter days when even the sky is tired of life.

They never saw any difference between the sand they walked on and their footprints, or or the waves that carried their marks away, or the trees that tried to catch the wind and spoke of it as being hurried when it would not stay to share its stories.

for none knew they were any different from the long chins who came to love them, passing from gene to gene their tiny secrets of a world so hard to love it failed – and they loved it still. Winter came. The oceans froze.

And they wept for all the starry blossoms,

They loved each other as they loved the stars when they lay on beaches of ancient seas and took comfort from their own forevers that fed them legends of small tomorrows where game was plentiful and every eye measured the dance of shadows as life.

for the frozen bodies of the birds they knew, for the ibexes and swift-hind gazelles that made life worth the pain of beauty, never knowing that each living thing was something different from their beating hearts: they loved greatly the greatness in all love,

They knew how to solve eternal questions, but never asked them for fear the answers might be different if the moon was full.

The seas rose. Their forests vanished.

They owned an afterlife as they owned their lives, and what was left they grew to love

and vanished quietly in the silence of flowers opening their blossoms like hearts to truths to find the secrets that embrace all things, the whisper of wind that speaks one name, the waves of oceans that are one sea, the mountains in every grain of sand.

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interview—from the vault

Your Mind at the Moment of Death Allen Ginsberg & Philomene Long: A Conversation AG: Really?

PL: Yes. He wanted to see his own image while he died. Yes. Asked for a mirror to be held up.

AG: No kidding? Very conscious guy. Do you know his writing?

PL: Yes. THE poet.

PHILOMENE LONG: What do you think would be your last words?

ALLEN GINSBERG: I wouldn’t even… I haven’t thought of it. There is a very interesting poem by Antler called “Last Words” in which he quotes the most interesting last words of everybody. Do you know the poem?

PL: It’s a preoccupation with me— people’s last words.

AG: Really? Look up this poem. It’s this great poem which is a great collection of last words like “It is cooked already” said somebody, or “Oops!” or “Is this happening to me?” or “Is it really me?”

(Laughter) PL: Huidobro wanted to see his own image…

AG: Vicente Huidobro?

PL: Yes.

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AG: I spent many months with his ex-girlfriend in Chile.

PL: You mean Rachel?

AG: Raquel. She was a great friend and protectress when I was in Chile for several months.

She’s alive in Chile. I’m still in touch with her… look her up…

PL: I will. You know, my husband John Thomas was in a car with Neal Cassidy…

AG: I know John Thomas. The big guy. How is he? Say hello.

PL: I will. Yes. He is my love, my millennium. Well, he was in the car with Neal Cassidy and Neal Cassidy had made a wrong turn and decided to go backwards on a one-way street.

AG: Uh oh.

PL: He drove (seemingly 50 miles-per-hour), looking solely through the rear-view mirror, weaving through car after car, and carrying on four simultaneous conversations.

AG: Sounds a little exaggerated PL: (Laughter) AG: …but not too much.

PL: John Thomas also said, if you see Phillip Whalen, to give his regards.

AG: You know Phillip Whalen is now the abbot of the Hartford Street Zen Center?

PL: Oh, he is… Ah! (Pause) AG: I know so many lamas have hypoglycemia or high blood pressure from lack of exercise— because they have long periods of sitting, even in one room for three years… Did you know that?

PL: No, I didn’t know that. But I do know about six Zen monks that are fat.

(Pause) PL: In the light of Buddhism, how do you look at death?

AG: Well, I am really interested in what do you do with your mind at the moment of death, particularly after you stop breathing. I understand that if you are drowning, there is still about eight minutes without breath in which you can still be brought back. So there still must be some life. Obviously on your deathbed all the struggle and pain is over by the time you stop breathing. You are out, things have stopped, and there is nothing you can do anymore, but you are still conscious on some level. I am always interested in what consciousness is there.

What recourse is there?

There is the traditional Buddhist view that at the time of death, Dharma will be my only refuge. Because I create karma, I must abandon evil deeds and always devote my life to virtuous action. Therefore, everyday I will examine myself so that it’s a continuous selfexamination to make sure I’m not building up and indissoluble barrio that will make me panic because I didn’t get things right. Then the question is, what do you remember at the point of death? So many Buddhist practices are preparations for taking off— not panicking, to being bound to look back and trying to rearrange your bookshelf— but going out with a clean slate.

PL: Yes. AG: Did anybody— I wonder if anybody taped yesterday?

PL: Did somebody?

AG: They never think of it. Not realizing the words of wisdom.

PL: Right!

This Interview/Conversation originally ran in the July 2003 issue of LUMMOX Journal

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essays/rants

Enter The Big Man

by James Deahl

F

ollowing a thunderous hammering on our apartment door, a loud voice slurred, “So, Milt, whad yeh drinkin’ dese days?” On entering the living room I thought, “Who the Hell has Milton dragged home now?” Before me stood a tall man dressed in expensive, but completely mismatched, clothes. Although it was somewhat early in the day, this fellow had obviously been drinking, and he clearly was unaware that Milton had been on the wagon.

Milton turned to me and said, “Jim, I want you to meet an old pal of mine, Al Purdy.” And so I finally met Big Al, the Voice of the Land, as his headstone would later proclaim.

For a two-and-a-half-year period on the cusp of the 1970s-‘80s, Milton Acorn and I shared an apartment just off Bloor Street in Toronto. Although no longer drinking, Milton would hang out in taverns and bring home the most unlikely people. But on this day, Al Purdy had come to Toronto from his A-frame home in Ameliasburg to interview Acorn for a study he was writing for Twayne Publishers as part of their Canadian authors’ series. Of course, Milton and Al had been best buddies since they met in Montréal during the 1950s. But Al wanted to check some dates and details to ensure his monograph would be accurate. Or as accurate as any writing on Milton Acorn could ever be.

I was delighted to finally meet Al Purdy, whose poetry I’d read and enjoyed for years.

It’s just I expected someone a lot less rough around the edges. From that day until his death in 2000, Big Al and I were friends, or pals, to use his term. Following his death, it was an honour to be asked to contribute both prose and poetry to his tribute anthology.1 Not only was Al Purdy important for his own writing, he and Milton were key members of the Great Generation of Canadian poets2 who established

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People’s Poetry on the foundations set during the 19th century by Archibald Lampman, Isabella Valancy Crawford, and Bliss Carman.

What perhaps set Purdy apart from the other poets of his generation was his admiration for the poetry of Charles Bukowski. Purdy was a great correspondent, and he and Bukowski exchanged letters for many years.3 So maybe his “rough around the edges” personality and appearance were not to be unexpected after all. Like Bukowski, Purdy was a big drinker, a notorious womanizer, and a man absolutely devoted to writing. Oh, and did I mention that Purdy enjoyed, at least in his younger days, barroom brawls. Could seldom pass one up.

Purdy was of United Empire Loyalist stock.4 This explains his interest in Canadian history as well as the history of his family and the early settlement of Ontario. And, always an honest man, he often called himself adegenerate Loyalist. But despite chasing, and quite often catching, women, as well as his bouts of excessive drinking, one cannot write almost thirty collections of original, high-quality poetry, ten book-length prose works, a novel, and edit a half-dozen major anthologies without extreme devotion to The Word.

Like Bukowski, Purdy shunned the academic community. He wrote for the people, not for the professors or the elites. In Canada, this often results in a poet being marginalized.

His books pass from sight unreviewed; there are no professional critical studies; the literary establishment ignores his work. Big Al was one of the few “street poets” (as Ted Plantos would say) to break through this wall. In fact, he shattered it. Breakthrough indeed, a oneand-a-half-times-life-size statue of Al has been erected in Queen’s Park, the capital of Ontario.

He is the only poet so honoured.

Like all good poets, Purdy wrote on many…

On Writing and Dreaming

by Venaro Fazio

W

hen someone asks me how or why I became a writer, I hesitate before answering. Should I tell the truth or should I reply with a superficial but socially acceptable answer?

I never wanted or planned to be a writer.

In the 50s and 60s when I attended elementary and high school, I dreaded the subject “Composition.” Year after year, we were drilled in spelling, grammar rules, and the three elements of essay writing: introduction, body/ main points and conclusions. Our teachers chose the subject matter. Whenever I needed to commit words to the page, my imagination ether presented me with too many alternatives or I drew a blank. Usually I produced short, terse paragraphs. I rarely received a failing grade, but came close with marks that hovered in the “C” range. My essays were returned to me with numerous red circles indicating spelling and grammar errors. Typically, my teachers passed back marked essays starting with the pupil receiving the highest mark. I felt embarrassed my classmates also knew about my below average grades.

When I attended university, my essay grades improved, mainly because of my detailed research. Research appealed to me because I loved reading. When I was a child, we did not have books at home. At age seven, I discovered the Dundas Carnegie Library.

There, the librarian enforced a “No Talking” rule. The silence soothed me. Initially, I read in the library to escape the loud voices at home. Our house on Hatt Street, a half duplex of not more than 1200 square feet, vibrated with conversations, usually more than one at the same time. These voices included my parents, two brothers and for a number of years, a second family of aunt, uncle and cousins.

Throughout the 1950s, my parents generously

sponsored relatives from Sicily. These families lived with us until they were able to afford their own housing.

During those years of living with extended family, it was my Saturday afternoon habit to read in the library for several hours. Eventually, I also took home an armful of books. When a book engaged my imagination, I discovered I could ignore voices around me and experience a quiet, peacefulness within. I escaped into the fantasy world created by Enid Blyton in her Noddy books and then later, I devoured her Famous Five adventure novels. I also liked to read biographies. Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton were my heroines.

Fast forward to my early forties: I am married, a stay-at-home mom, caring for two young children. I am thinking ahead to when my children will be in school full time. I did not become a nurse like my childhood idols but I had worked as a social worker for nearly twenty years. My career included counseling sexual assault victims, runaway children and shift work in a 24-hour psychiatric crisis centre. I seldom read for pleasure. The voices of troubled clients filled what was once my inner quiet space. I was ready for a career change.

Instead of consulting a career counselor, I sought the answer of “what should I do next?” from within. I asked for direction from my dreaming mind.

While some individuals go to sleep wondering, if in the morning, they will remember a dream, I go to bed curious as to how many vivid dramas my unconscious will present.

The poet Mary Oliver in her poem “Dreams” (from her collection Dream Work ) compares dreams to buds on a tree opening during the night. In the centre of each petal of the blossoms, there is a letter, Oliver writes. If …

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Essays/R ants

ONE WORD, A WORLD: Remembering K athleen Marshall

by Susan Ioannou

“E

xquisite.” That is the word by which I remember Kathleen Marshall. It was her word of highest approval and delight, a word I longed to hear bestowed on my efforts, to validate what I had done and written—a word fiery and transparent in my imagination, like a lead crystal bowl dancing with lights as the syllables turned on her tongue.

How many others remember her, a woman with short brown hair and deep-set, thoughtful eyes? She was never famous in the Toronto sense of the word. In fact, to many in her small home town, two years away in New York had given her far more cachet and glamour than a career as a local writer.

To a child of eight, fame is meaningless. I remember Kay best over forty years ago, when she lived a quiet, art-filled life in Paris, Ontario. I loved her old house, where the living room opened its tall front windows flush with beds of yellow and red tulips. We could swing the pane wide, reach out, and gather a bouquet to brighten the polished dining room table. She loved flowers. As she wrote in an essay, “Epitaph”: …every day that the newspaper or radio warn of possible frost, I ravish my garden of almost every possible flower.

Because they will be gone so soon, I give the arrangement of the flowers more thought than ever before. When summer tossed flowers broadcast, I gathered them in great baskets and put them in big jugs. Now, I carefully put my flowers in deep water while I look over my cupboard of vases. . . .

An old pottery jug that my grandmother made her hop-yeast in takes with grace any long-stemmed vivid flower. A great bubble

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of crystal, my great-grandmother’s wine decanter that is at least a century old, holds the fragile green and white of nicotiana, while a little cruet of equal age is reserved for only one flower, a thin-stemmed tiny rose.1 Through the living room’s two side windows, along the outer edge of the cedar-lined drive, a millrace trickled. When I stayed weekends, up to my hips in an outsized pair of old rubber boots I splashed through the millrace shallows, trying to catch its small silver fish in a rusty sieve. Once I even found “real gold”—the filigreed corner broken from an antique picture frame.

Standing in the centre of the living room, I could still hear the millrace’s steady chatter.

Was it carrying on a long conversation with the large cream and rose nudes leaning from high on the opposite wall? Those soft, dreaming women, painted in oil on canvas by Kay’s artist-husband Norm, were my first lesson in art appreciation. Never before had I had seen flesh bared so openly, and admired, without snickers, as beautiful too.

The house at that time had no children, only Kay and Norm, and up the front hall’s big white staircase, two elderly ladies who lived on the second floor. The main floor’s high-ceilinged rooms felt airy by day, cosy at night, elegant compared to the too-familiar plainness of my suburban home. By the millrace windows stood a Victorian settee upholstered in silky mustard and cream stripes, which I sat on, stiffly, only once. My favourite seat nestled under the nudes in the front corner, a generously pillowed beige divan flanked by shelves thick with books. I remember one evening especially. Hunching happily beside Norm, and in the most …

Is Poetry Relevant in This Twenty-first Century?

by Laura Munoz-Larbig

I

n this millennia of electronic entertainment, low attention spans, and media’s use of short, “sound bite” messages, is poetry still a relevant mode of expression? Does poetry live on as an emotional language that speaks to everyone?

The obsession with media has created a culture of readers with limited literacy. Few people read for pleasure. Emails have replaced letters.

Letter writing itself is now a lost art. Most reading is done online, where the articles are short, revealing few details. Any other reading is job related—dry, technical prose meant to instruct or to relay factual information. There is no poetry in that type of reading.

People are rarely exposed to poetry online, unless the reader knows about online poetry anthologies. As a result, few people are inspired to write poetry. The fresh voices of new poets are published more often in e-book anthologies such as this Lummox Press, but the days of spontaneously picking up a small press poetry magazine that catches our interest are gone. We have to search the Internet to find these “e-gems.”

Poetry and prose both communicate ideas.

Both can express intellectual, spiritual, funny, sad, or political topics. So, why do people gravitate to prose over poetry? Why write or read an opinion editorial rather than write or read a poem about social or political issues?

When I was a teenager in the 1960’s, it was not prose I turned to for comfort; it was poetry. Any prose I read for pleasure was poetic in nature, such as the works of Kahlil Gibran, Hermann Hesse, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, to name a few. All three also wrote poetry.

Gibran and Hesse were also considered to be mystics, evidence that both poetry and prose can communicate from the depths of the soul.

Poetry reaches that spiritual level more easily.

I did not emotionally respond to a piece of literature if it did not speak to my heart. With a few exceptions, the genre that most stirred me was poetry. Prose was usually for school reading. I read poetry for school assignments, also, but my emotional connection to poetry was more intense than to a work of prose. So deeply did the poetry of others stir me that I wanted to write with that power, myself. I felt that the power of writing poetry went deeper than when I wrote prose. By the time I was eleven, I was moved to write poetry, not because a teacher assigned me to write poetry, but because writing a poem gave me a voice for feelings that I could not communicate in prose. An essay or a short story did not quite express the emotions I felt when describing my feelings about life, nature, and the events around me. I wanted to write from my heart and soul. Poetry offered me that deeper level of release.

In centuries past, poetry was the talent of the educated upper class who had the leisure time to turn their craft into art. The Romantic movement in poetry, for example, dated from the end of the eighteenth century until about the mid-nineteenth century, was mostly populated by the noblemen of western Europe. Leisure time was and still is a requirement for writing and its subsequent task of rewriting. Higher education was also a requirement, because the rules of grammar and the styles of poetry was usually learned after an eighth grade education, the highest level of education that individuals, mostly men, were able to attain during the Romantic era of poets. Poets.org considers the influence of the Romantics to have extended into the twentieth century, but I see some of its …

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Essays/R ants

Acetylene Sunsets Edward Dorn’s Gran Apacheria

by John Macker

“In the internal resistance of his thought, Dorn has been able to understand the American Indian more deeply perhaps than any recent writer, scholarly or poetic, who is not himself an Indian. In these works, as in the larger body of his writing, Dorn makes marginal figures, as they resist external authority with an indivisible spirit of self, land and history, morally central to the inner life of American Culture.”

Paul Dresman I dug Ed Dorn because he wd rather Make you his enemy Than lie Amiri Baraka

I

first encountered Ed Dorn at a reading I did with him and Linda Hogan in Denver in the spring of 1983, at Muddy’s Coffee House in the Slightly Off Center Theatre on 15th street.

I was a young, green poet and it was my first major reading with a theatre full of people, most of whom I didn’t know. I remember being anxious, pacing as I read, almost stalking the words as they came from my mouth. In contrast, Dorn was seated for his reading and read from Hello, La Jolla, or, possibly, Yellow Lola, late 1970’s works that, in contrast to the wildcrafted, rhythmic surrealism of his Gunslinger series of books, seemed arrestingly aphoristic. I knew of Ed Dorn — he was teaching at the University of Colorado — but it would be some years before I began reading all of his works and concluding, along with many others, that his was a distinctive, uncompromising and wildly original American voice and, as his friend the late Amiri Baraka described him, “Thin straight blonde Cowboy/movie looking white guy with the mind/of a saw.”

Fact is, I didn’t appreciate him as much in those days. And that was as much due to my

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immaturity and insecurity as it was my inability to recognize great writing character when I was in the same room with it. He was particularly generous to my wife and I and after the reading we spent some time together talking about Denver — he was interested in it as a collection of characters in a landscape, its roots as well as its contemporaneous presence as a major metropolis. He was intrigued by its straight, cosmopolitan, newly corporate cow town development vibe verses the academic/counterculture exoticism of post-hippie mountain town Boulder. At that time, Naropa Institute was sucking much of the literary air out of the room. Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman had conceived the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics there, and Trungpa Rimpoche’s hijinks were becoming legend. (I attended the summer poetics program in 1978, so, guilty.)

After a brief summer teaching stint there in 1977, Dorn evidently wanted no further part of it. In fact, he eschewed the authoritarian implication of all labels and categories: definitions, belonging to a particular school or group of writers. He disdained being classified as Beat…

ON REJECTION

by Naushena

H

ave you recently been rejected by a publication? It’s OK, me too! I had submitted a few poems and short fiction to various magazines six months back but much to my chagrin, instead of acceptances I got a SPATE of rejection emails consecutively totaling fortyfive and I am anticipating more!

My mind was bombarded with many thoughts and I was literally hit by a heavy writer’s block. Though there were few incomplete pieces and I had new ideas I simply could not compose. I felt that I was jinxed and my work was not worth publishing so I stopped submitting. I kept on thinking why my work got rejected? This question takes a toll on every writer and as a result, one starts questioning one’s writing.

It is not always the piece that is bad. I think it’s rather the taste of an editor that inclines him

towards certain writing. It’s their right to accept or pass. A magazine has to keep the readership in mind too. Then there is a demand for the well-known authors as their names help sell the magazines. Obviously, a lesser known or an emerging writer, like me, has little chance.

These days, free style poetry or blank verse is noticeably in vogue. Most of my poems, written in my youth, were rhyming because I tried to follow Robert Frost, S.T Coleridge, Wordsworth and the like. Consequently, they were rejected as one editor notably remarked that they ‘Do not want rhyming poetry!’ Does it mean that the subject matter, tone, language and literary elements have no value?

I agree that rejections are necessary for a writer to scrutinize his work and write better. It also keeps one’s feet on the ground because if every piece is accepted, the room for improvement shrinks.

But why are rejections so upsetting? The moment a writer clicks ‘submit’ his wait starts and hope lingers like a dark cloud ready to burst any time. Whenever a notification pops up from a publication, one hopes to get a positive response. On the contrary, one’s heart sinks like the Titanic on getting a diplomatically worded rejection like this: ‘We appreciate the chance to read your work but unfortunately, the piece is not a right fit for us.’

The first half of the response lets the wings of hope take flight but the second half instantaneously clips them. I wonder what exactly is ‘right’ for a magazine?

Does a writer need official validation for writing credentials in the form of acceptances?

I guess not but a writer yearns to be read and appreciated. One’s work should not be restricted to one’s personal journal, it should be shared with the world. It boosts one’s confidence to see one’s name in print even if it’s unpaid.

Submission involves a great deal of time…

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Essays/R ants

If Trump is the Answer, What the Hell is the Question?

by Charles Plymell

P

am [Charlie’s wife] found an old poem in which I mentioned Trump. I had no idea that governance would turn into IDIOCRACY so quickly and really as seen in that bad, great, prophetic movie. If there is urgency, it is now. I turn off the TV just when North Korea has shot off some missiles , another war thing beyond alarm, two retarded men still trying to show which one has the longer missile. The next news story was about punishing thousands of male soldiers for posting naughty pictures of female soldiers. Something that seemed to have roots in the historical consciousness since time begun. What was the line from the McCarthy hearings” “Have you no decency?” Maybe all armies should march naked. The bouncing North Korean Insect Army would indeed be a sight! “The cartoon of Kill”... our true racial consciousness?

We have gone insane along with our leader and Commander-In- Chief in a military jacket & stripped tie.. “We” meaning almost half the country which has not progressed mentally or even held onto rational thinking and intelligence. I’m at a loss to know what to do unless those with great …

Yazoota

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MUSIC & MEMORY

by G. Murray Thomas

I’m going to talk about memory. And Blondie.

I can remember the very first time I heard them.

It was spring of 1977. I was browsing in a record store, and they played the first album over their sound system. “A Shark in Jet’s Clothing” grabbed my ear. That song is a retelling of West Side Story, with a punkish take of the Phil Spector sound.

Phil Spector was a guilty pleasure of mine.

Why a guilty pleasure? Because I was generally into hard rock, and saccharine sweet pop songs about simple love are the antithesis of that. (Of course, nowadays he is a guilty pleasure of another sort.) So when I heard that song, that version of Phil Spector, I had to have the album. And then it didn’t leave my turntable for a month.

Blondie is a bit of a guilty pleasure too. For similar reasons, complicated by the fact that, even though they came out of the New York punk scene (in the early days, they were regulars at CBGBs), their instincts, and desires, were always more towards pop. So even the punks, at least the ones I hung out with, didn’t trust them.

And then they released the disco hit “Heart of Glass” and their punk credibility was gone forever.

Which brings me to a Blondie memory at least as solid as that day in the record store, again a single song which evokes a clear moment of memory.

I’m sure you have songs which evoke very specific memories. I further bet they are songs you only hear occasionally, which enables them to maintain a connection to a very specific moment of your life.

For example, I started listening to the radio

in 1967, one of the greatest years in the history of rock music. But of all the songs I remember from that year, the one song that does the best job of evoking the experience of listening to the radio at ten is “Groovin’”, by the Young Rascals.

Which is not one of my favorite songs from that year; in fact, at the time I didn’t like it at all.

But the songs that were my favorites -- “Happy Together,” “Incense and Peppermints” --- I have played and overplayed over the years, so many times in so many different contexts that they have lost their ability to connect with any single context, any single moment of my life.

But “Groovin’,” I’m only exposed to it occasionally, and every time I hear it, there I am, sitting on my bed, listening to my parents’ radio (a bulky monster which pulled in three bands of shortwave, as well as AM and FM).

I’m going to attempt to explain why I think this is, but I’m only a casual student of brain mechanics, so I may screw it all up. But here goes anyway.

When we file an event away in our memory, it is recorded as a whole. Every memory consists of various components, ranging from where you were and who you were with to the weather and what the event meant to you. And what song was playing. One way to record the memory might be to break it down into these separate components, and record them each in their own file (so to speak). Instead, the brain records the memory as a whole, and then provides links between the various components and their appearance in other memories. In this way, any single component of a memory is capable of evoking the entire thing. The song that was playing the moment you first met …

number Six / 2017 •

65

Number Six • 2017 In this issue…

RD Armstrong Rosemary Aubert Brenton Booth Kate Booth Matt Borokowski Lynne Bronstein Ronnie R. Brown Wayne F. Burke Helmut C. Calabrese Calokie Don Kingfisher Campbell Pris Campbell Micah Card Alan Catlin Grace Cavalieri Jonathon Church Wanda Morrow Clevenger Mitch Cohen Sharyl Collin Ed Coletti Pat Connors Blair Cooper Kit Courter Henry Crawford Bill Craychee Sue Crisp Steve Dalachinsky James Deahl Steven Deeble Jen Dunford Alicia Viguer-Espert Mark T. Evans Alexis Rhone Fancher Brian Fanelli Mike Faran Joseph Farley Joseph Farina Venera Fazio Claire T. Feild Tyler Ferr

Mark A. Fisher Kate Marshall Flaherty Jennifer L. Foster Michael Foti Amélie Frank Bill Gainer William Scott Galasso Martina Gallegos Katherin L. Gordon Lorraine Gow Taylor Graham Ken Greenley John Grey Kenneth P. Gurney Vijali Hamilton Mark Hartenbach Debbie Okun Hill Gil Hagen Hill Eryn Hiscock Yuan Hongri Susan Ioannou Todd Jackson Gary Jacobelly Ellen S. Jaffe Ed Jamieson, Jr. Alex Johnston Ted Kane Frank Kearns lalo kikiriki Diane Klammer klipschutz Ronald Koertge Raundi Moore Kondo Donna Langevin Laura Munoz-Larbig Hiram Larew Kyle Laws Marie Lecrivain John B. Lee Linda Lerner

Bernice Lever Norma West Linder Jane Lipman Jeffrey Lipsky Ellaraine Lockie Philomene Long Ron Lucas Cynthia Lukas Argos MacCallum John Macker Adrian Manning Georgia Santa Maria Denny Marshall Wayne Mason Ellyn Maybe Daniel McGinn Mary McGinnis Michael McInnis Rhonda Melanson Micheal D. Meloan Dr. Bruce Meyer Basia Miller Joseph Milosch Elaine Mintzer Tony Moffeit Deborah Morrison Evan Myquest Naushena Linda Neal Robbi Nester Ben Newell normal Toti O’Brien Norman J. Olson Scott Thomas Outlar John Pappas Lorine Parks Simon Perchik Richard King Perkins II Jeannine M. Pitas

Charles Plymell Charles Rammelkamp Thelma T. Reyna Kevin Ridgeway C. C. Russell Judith R. Robinson David Roskos Kat Sawyer Robin Scofield Patricia L. Scruggs Michael Seeger Linda Singer Apryl Skies Dr. Rick Smith Clifton Snider Donna Snyder t. kilgore splake Winnie Star Kevin Patrick Sullivan Patti Sullivan John Sweet Lynn Tait Tim Tipton G. Murray Thomas H. L. Thomas John Thomas Maja Trochimczyk AJ Urquidi Rolland Vasin Richard Vidan Grace Vermeer Jade Wallace Kari Wergeland Lavonne Westbrooks Linda Whittenberg Charles Wilkinson Pamela Williams Scott Wozniak Chris Yeseta

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