Dear Reader— Tellling Stories is an anthology of poems written by members of the WCC Poetry Club, at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, MI. If you like what you see here and want to join the WCC Poetry Club (or think you can help us!), we’d love to have you. During Fall and Winter semesters, we meet every Friday at 5 pm in the Writing Center (LA 355). During Spring/Summer, we meet at 1 pm. —TZ Ann Arbor, September 2013 This book is an expanded electronic version of a hard-copy chapbook published in September 2013. The orginal was produced on a Dell PC using Microsoft Publisher. Fonts are Century Schoolbook and Calibri. Digital images and book design by Tom Zimmerman.
zetataurus press | ann arbor mi | zetataurus@comcast.net
WCC Poetry Club Fall and Winter Meetings Fridays, 5 pm, Writing Center — Spring/Summer Meetings Fridays, 1 pm, Writing Center — tzman@wccnet.edu http://wccpoetryclub.wordpress.com 2
Telling Stories A WCC Poetry Club Anthology Edited by Tom Zimmerman Contents Diane M. Laboda Adam Lowis Erica Morris Sarah Levin Simon Mermelstein ArkinKnight Winfree Sheldon Ferguson Radek Ozog Ayowole Oladeji Tom Zimmerman
Tell Me a Story Medication Hunger 100th Monkey Dumb Love Poem Alive Five Times Meaning of Life Tell Me Quickly Emancipation Tell Me a Story Fairies Love Chocolate Too Super Days Kiss of Seduction Love of Hope Tramping: Paris The Trampled Junction
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Copyright Š 2013 by the individual authors. Republication rights to the works herein are reverted to the creators of those works. The works herein have been chosen for their literary and artistic merit and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Washtenaw Community College, its Board of Trustees, its administration, or its faculty, staff, or students.
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Diane M. Laboda Tell Me a Story If you want to hear the top of my brain blow off tell me a story of soothing waters and gentle breezes. Rhyme a couple of words in the middle to make me think I’m safe. If you don’t want me to laugh you off the stage tell me a story that isn’t quite so comical, one where the heroine wants to kiss the villain on Saturday night in the dark. If you don’t want me to explore your uneventful past, tell me a story of your mother the day she met you, the moment she knew you were you and loved you just the same. If you don’t want me to carry you out into the vast river of souls when your heart opens too much, tell me a story of your father’s brave heart and how he held you up to God. If you don’t want me to travel away from you, tell me a story of building our home from logs and lath, from sweat and strength, from tears and dreams and madness. If you don’t want me to hide from your loving eyes, tell me a story about building a rocking horse for our sons and how sweet a new sun bonnet looks on our only daughter’s auburn locks, and how our future rides with them on roan ponies. If you don’t want me to want you, tell me a lie. 4
Diane M. Laboda Medication We drop the little round pills in coffee to sate our thirst for normalcy, we cry out in pain anyway. We coat our dreams with an alcohol rub, like wearing a hoodie against the driving winter snows. We plug into media and invest ourselves socially to convince an empty mirror we are not alone. We buy into others’ stories, fiction or not, so we can feel better about our tragic life. We pick up the pinks to elevate, the blues to slow the rat race that tries to swallow us whole. We save the green for Sunday when we can feel holy and chaste and absolved of our sinful ways. On Monday, when the money runs out, we take in the world cold turkey and decide that falling asleep forever might not be so bad after all.
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Diane M. Laboda Hunger I need salt for my palette, salty words for my page: I ingest the molecular structure of asparagus while painting the sharp green of it, blanched in boiling water. The fiber mellows, the pulp stands strong, the buds decline to flower. I sip the air now into my body, fragrant as the fern gully where tender stalks mix with Loosestrife and Mustard, condiments all to my savory broth of words, stirred a bit and simmered long. Nothing instant comes along— long rumination brings the fat to the surface, gives flavor and body, sticks to the ladle and runs off the journal’s edges. Cooling solidifies the stew and sets the words— letter by letter into the pulp. Reason balks a bit, plays the edges like a master chef’s blade, poetics snap, madness enters at the boil, lines strain to hold the power of wildness, of beauty chewed bare. My tastes magnify like words wanting waking, handed to me by grace, and I wait to be knocked over by the urgency. 6
Sustenance touches me as if I’m barely there, bewildered, looking for tongs to lay it down cautiously, glowing from root to tip, washed of the soil and grit of birth, giving up secrets at the end of every line.
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Adam Lowis 100th Monkey History will tell that warp-drive was invented in a guarded hollow nestled between railroad tracks and a river, and that Format's Last Theorem was puzzled out in the daffodil-colored house amid the marshy bank daffodils and dandelions bearing a standard while un-mowed Timothy grass waved in hails to the front porch lords of intellectual consternation, the tattooed jester and the tall minstrel. Scorching pipe-heels were the censor and blue tobacco whisps of spectre were offered to the ubiquitous force of rage holding hostage all of us who can't sell out and are reluctant to buy in, when no share returns for us upon what we have already paid. When the most calculating minds are met with the realization that the Cosmos will do as it will—that it never needed our inter-vention; all is aggregate. All is passing. Then shall we see that the steam of thoughts born of fear condense as toxic hurricanes for which the furrows of our brows were only ever marks upon the birth of ignorance, and that will can move through any lens that is chosen. Thus... Place it upon spoils of wars and profit; On the inward path that plants your ass upon a mountain of solipsism and wreaks of moldy asshole, collecting the admiring and drollest of vapid cunts, along with many shades of the masculine monsters of credulity;
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On the outward lens that crazes a sullen heart to plaster one's walls and opaque one's windows with the weighty shades of paranoia. Amid the fields I find, I would rather unlock demon riddles in rocky soil who would serve the will of men and women. I'd rather venerate invention than your complacent deity. I'd rather build the gossamer circuits that will transmute mind to fields of pure creation. I'd rather build a canoe to the island of stability. I'd rather anull the mystery marriage of the church for the promised marriage of thought-to-energy-to-intent-to-implementation-to-creation, all in the temple of the nanosecond, in the cosm of the Plank-length, and where origin has no meaning, for the endless summation of all possibilities of being yet unknown, around the twenty-fold cosmic sexes forever bending gender around the equation. I'd rather polish this pale blue pearl; even as she cooks in the skillet of heavy elements that will be material for ages beyond dreams. For now...sitting on a porch, fields alight in the dynamo of conversation stolen by peasants from the guilded initiation; and charged with electrostatic impartation, bringing the sudden knowledge that you and your friend have just become the hundredth monkey.
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Adam Lowis Dumb Love Poem don't need to know why you embrace the burn upon the fiery pillars of Hell. I only want to lift you up, because you bent to help. I wish the fire from this dragon's eyes could burn away the tar of grief buried in your chest in layers of sighs. There is no toll for which what you've already given can be metered, and I want to summon the hottest star to evaporate your tired tears into electric ether. I want to summon the dynamo of fire hitting wind and hold it to slow-burn intensity, to expand it in elastic moments stretching to sustained ecstasy; now that I have seen how your height sometimes swells to dance alight; and I have seen how the spectral charge of your hair dances the scattering powder shards of crystal, Earthshine moonlight here, where the air is on fire at the end of the world... With you I want to build a palace from seizing onto a single pearl. I want to arrive at vision, looking out from a mountain-top with you. And I want so much, that I can only put it all down at the temple gate..
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Erica Morris Alive Five Times Broken fly wing the bug is wobbling around Lying on its back so vulnerable The bottom of the food chain is so disgusting The ugly surrounds us and places its veil over our eyes I’m alive It’s alive We’re all alive And awake When I refuse to marry vanity the veil shrinks and withers away The agony has its purpose and must show itself to others in order to be saved In the casket we wear make-up and fake eyes In the dirt it all adds up to be the ground the fly must land on While I’m alive my hand can be a statue of tree giving the fly a temporary home Being alive every minute wading in the air with one broken wing Is just one more thing to be grateful for.
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Sarah Levin Meaning of Life What are you up to, my little tyke? Your momma’s panties—the ones with the lacy straps The ones that smell of papaya You reach in and pull out black beads Soused and smarmy You roll one in your mouth Like getting to the
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Simon Mermelstein Tell Me Quickly Tell me quickly. Get me off your chest with a fiery lungful, in the heat of the moment, make me sprint, not beginning middle and neverending sigh but a sharp shriek in the ears. //a furnace belch? Echo me off of halls and the backs of walls. Microphone me, make me crackling electric but never static, always moving, always flowing, always changing. Please, stumble over my words if I choke you up, but enunciate clearly. Try not to memorize, keep me in between the top of your head and the tip of your tongue, and exaggerate, it’s the only way to grow. Spin me in narrative circles. Forget my ending and maybe I will never end. Tell me, a story, as only you can.
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ArkinKnight Winfree Emancipation One night we overheard My mother and a vulture bird Singing of our damned fate With us children in the make Of a life without our mom Splitting us up, soon be gone To take our leave and will away To stay together another day Sister sister oh so dear Comes to hold me out of fear Guilty, evil, oh so cold I sent her off, we too old To understand her wits end Playing over and over again. One night a vulture bird Flew us away without a word
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ArkinKnight Winfree Tell Me a Story Tell me a story of manipulated waves Of burning heat and lovers dreams Of wasteful idle free days When cowardly courage lost to brave fear When he got her heart but lost everything he held dear Tell me what she said to entrance him What cruel scent took over his mind With no hopes of fast forward, pause, or rewind Only to live life twice as slow And not knowing what’s going on above or below Just a straight arrow path of love that won’t last Tell me that tale and where it died When he realized he had been flown too high With eyes like smoke and words of fire Engulfing his world with lust and desire How when she left, so he did fall Accelerating towards the ground from a tower too tall Into his mind and past his soul Into a comatose of blissful woe
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Sheldon Ferguson Fairies Love Chocolate Too Inside that door on the side of a building downtown lives a fairy. Collecting the pennies people leave on her door step. She saves them up until there’s enough to go across the street to the chocolate shop. The fairy transforms into a human to disguise herself as a woman dressed in a Kelly green skirt and top with thigh length curly dark brown locks of hair. She walks over to the chocolate shop across the street and buys a big chunk of chocolate. Returns back to her little home and enjoys every morsel of the chocolate.
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Radek Ozog Super Days I’d like tell you a story of a man who lived of the moon glory he was addicted to nightlife a life of after-hour bars and drinks we liked cars and shiny rings we was around all gamblers who only fought for money for drinks drakes sandwich club was across the street and when an alarm from bars repeat then they had some skulls to crush
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Ayowole Oladeji Kiss of Seduction He stands by the train station waiting for his bus pass to uptown. As he waits sipping on his Frappuccino, suddenly he sees this pretty woman. She’s sitting alone waiting to board a bus, so he slowly walks up to her. “Hi, my name is Donatello Da Vinci.” She replies, “I’m Olivia Maraschino.” All of a sudden he tells her, “The first time I saw you, my heart began racing like a 200 mile 2 x 4 Ninja bike.” Finally they both chapped their lips and cuddled each other, kissing each other. . . . That tasted like blueberries mixed with red berries.
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Ayowole Oladeji Love of Hope Love is used in so many dialects Can’t describe how it feels Saying those four letters Makes you feel like you are drowning in quicksand Suddenly you break the chain That tied you down relieving yourself from distress As the clock strikes past midnight Glooming mist of clouds arises from the sky above Observing miles ahead you see This blonde lady wearing a see-through dress Heading toward your way hair blowing in the wind She then pulls up in this 2014 hyper-electric Corvette And speeds across from the ocean shore
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Tom Zimmerman Tramping: Paris We tramped along, across the Seine, got sprayed by Paris Plages’ mist, cut through the Louvre. Remember beef tartare and Belgian ale, the blue-gray gargoyle shade at Notre Dame, Shakespeare and Company (I bought two books by Arab poets). Street stalls crammed with bagged and yellowed posters, postcards, magazines, and photographs (Deneuve, Bardot, The Stones, Jim Morrison, The Clash). The grip of fin de siècle strong on streetlamps, bridges, signs, and garrets, but the Eiffel Tower lit at night with us inside was like a spaceship set for lift-off. Met a coed fresh from Indiana, traded tales until we got her to her store-front hostel. Then I started wanting you so badly, sweet familiar ache that’s old as pyramids of Giza, new as pyramids designed by Pei. Our swank hotel was steps away.
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Tom Zimmerman The Trampled Junction The trampled junction, where the pilgrims’ feet have scuffed the dust to bone, glows ghostly green in soft red moonlight. Only in your head, of course: where numbers, images, and words, those revenants of recent brainwork, haunt but feel a curse as well, a frost of sense, of order, overlaid on dreaming’s lush terrain. A pulse alone is nonsense, though: dull beats to fill a line, a form, a hull, a shell, a skull. This junction is a Y, a why of forking paths. You’ve dragged your life, you’ve had it pushed and pulled, to just this spot. The paths are not the same, but similar: unknown. So choose with what you love in mind.
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