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Issue # 49 Fall 2023
Poetry
Edited by Kevin Stein
Robert Gibb
History
The exegetic headshot in its numbered frame—
Zapruder’s home movie
Pasted across the pages of LIFE Magazine
In the fall of 1966,
Following the first drafts of history
And the collated dogmas
Of the Warren Report. Blown-up, forensic,
Cause and effect—history
Is what that elegant woman is trying to escape,
Scrambling frantically
On her hands and knees across the sunstruck
Trunk of the limo.
Her pink suit and pillbox hat. Period details.
As are the empty boots
And saddle in the president’s funeral cortège,
The troops straight out
Of bootcamp and heading for Vietnam,
The way they’ll be
In the spring of 1972 when that napalmed girl
Flees down her dirt road
Toward us in Nick Ut’s damning photograph,
Burning clothes torn off,
Arms held out on either side, away from where
History’s embraced her.
Widower and pensioner and landlord,
His house facing on an alley, the room
He rented to my friend a garret,
We joked, like in the 5th arrondissement,
Perfect fit for an art student. By 1966
The era that ended when Kennedy
Was killed had turned into The Sixties,
A decade the town detested—
Long hair, protest songs, the black ashes
Of draft cards wafting in the air—
Though Dan was always glad to see us.
Glad as well, as it turned out, to help
With our subversion of the dress code:
Coats and ties at dinner in the college
Dining hall. We were already out of
Uniform, showing up in whatever mufti
We happened to have on that day
(Work shirts mostly and flannel plaids),
Orthodoxy’s starched white oxford cloth
All around us. Manners were morals,
We’d read in The Scarlet Letter,
And that included manners of dress.
Then one evening, Dan broke out
The trove of neckties he’d stashed away
In his attic, letting us have our pick.
We snatched up birds of paradise
And hand-painted orchids, paisleys
Like enormous paramecia. A rag bag
Of glad rags, some of them more
Than five inches wide. Now, bibbed
With old Dan’s hand-me-downs,
We openly broke the spirit of the code,
Waiting for the dining hall to open.
A small revolt in an age of great ones.
“Fashion as the starting point for
Insurrection,” punk would later claim.
Then we went in to break bread together.
Tony Beyer
Festival
at the zine table
middle aged incels
proffer hand written
hand drawn pornography
all the nice girls
avoid that corner
and pick over
beaded accessories
it’s indoors so dogs
usually keen participants
at these events
are left at home
the fashion this year
as well as tattoos again
is for indefatigable
charm bracelets
wood carvings
identical and plentiful
resemble the croissants
in the hospitality room
a magician with a hat
upside down at his feet
tries to make
it all disappear
A wild night for it
the young in weather-resistant jackets
zipped to the throat
stand about wondering about
each other’s orientation
as always at a literary do
there are insiders and unknowns
as well as those known
to be outsiders at heart
there is wine white and red
but apparently no nibbles
which might end up
trodden into the carpet
the speakers when they appear
are refreshing but too modest
in stature to be seen
above the heads in the front
early leavers at the glass door
replenish their lipstick
don hats and hoods and scarves
to challenge the gale outside
the outstayers of their welcome
seem to be listening to catch
a whisper of the voice of Baudelaire
necessary and particular from his Paris tomb
Erin Wilson
Slash Pile
There are many kinds of fire,
mischief fire,
heart-blaze,
the bird between the legs fire;
there’s eyebrow fire (late night
through early morning, nonstop);
there’s portable fire stored in rocks;
there’s the fire we keep for our enemies
buried deep in the meat of our throats;
history is the lingering flame
kept far away
and then rushed suddenly at everyone’s faces;
there’s god’s elusive
fire
or is there? (is there?);
retribution is fake fire;
love is (of course) fire’s bellows;
clemency is perhaps the end of fire;
there’s white fire, cold, brutal,
my black-robed favourite;
green fire is my dearest friend
when others think I walk alone;
there’s the apple’s fire, the teacher’s,
the optometrist’s, the notebook’s;
there’s the wet fire of lame horses
coughing and wheezing in bed at night;
there’s the fire that cotes of pigeons shed (a glistening
spiderweb that binds small town folks together);
there’s the fire a dock cleaves to
right where the metal brackets lock onto wood;
death’s fire is soundless, feeds night’s sky
no embers;
there are disembodied floating fires
of who-knows-what
that one encounters with
dread, suspicion,
ecstasy;
fear filing cabinet fires, the fires of governors,
tax collectors and ledgers;
war is the antithesis of fire
(a general’s tiny-pricked paroxysm trying to light his credit card).
Meanwhile, ravens carry the best matchbooks and cackle fire.
Friends, gather close.
Lynn Gilbert
The Sorrow Songs
“They that walked in darkness sang songs
in the olden days—Sorrow Songs—for they
were weary of heart.”
—W. E .B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
Sixth grade
is for learning:
fractions decimals
world history geography
and life science
but for Aretha it was a time
to be pregnant. Age twelve.
It must have been as if
one day she was
pencilling a book report
onto blue-lined paper,
and the next she was
whirled into labor’s
tunnel of fear and pain.
Today, announcing her death,
an anchorman wondered
where her songs’ sorrow
had come from. Aretha
Franklin, her songs.
Rochelle Robinson-Dukes
Senior Summer Siesta
You blew vibrations into me
like a flute,
like God did with dust.
Your magic tickled my spine
and crotch, so I suck pomegranate seeds
from your sweaty chest
like Armstrong sucked notes
from a trumpet, like life does daily
if you don’t slow down.
I dreamed sweet youth as the tv hums
in the next room. Tells of the paramedics
who couldn’t blow life back into a boy,
that out-of-town summer boy who fell
from a boat on Lake Michigan,
fell like Icarus, a deflated balloon,
into the dirty water
that sealed him in a wave
like an envelope,
only God to open: a note gone flat.
Only Octopi could hear,
as they squirt silent blackness into the deep blue,
like ships dumping mute African bodies
that sank down deep—
other inaudible sounds,
like rainbow-hued bubbles
children blew on windy days.
City
city beats on me with clicking traffic signals
& howling ambulances,
scratching the night like a prison’s search light,
city finds me with its intimidation:
violated visitors chasing glitzy good times,
shakes me with its audacity:
two-hour traffic tumbling through tunnels,
weighted under water
city pulls me like a quarter stitch
into its center for consumption,
as I seek shininess & covet color,
taste decadence in Junior’s cheesecake
or Katz corn beef
city makes me skip like stones on water,
through subway trains from boroughs or suburbs
climb through any city,
to smell its ambivalence,
to choke on funky fumes,
pawning my life to be placed in the best box seats
& the poshest dinner parties,
where plastic cups nosedive over balconies,
where stage bills sail through gutters
city stomps through my spine
like Puerto Rican parades
like St. Paddy’s Day marching bands,
city runs through my ribcage
for 26-mile medals in May and October
city pushes my health to harm
city wrings the world like a chicken’s neck,
buries bottles & twists tin
into the earth’s gut and clogs its arteries.
city’s plastic layers missing bodies
of water like deadly gossamer
city’s petrol poisons pelicans
for generations in the Bayou.
city pushes power up skyscrapers,
up cell towers,
through congressional lobbyists offices,
lines pockets like highways
city feigns humanity
with titles like “cage-free” and “organic”,
wears well-lit halo of metropolitan culture
enlists rusted green lions at the Art Institute
for dreamers to suckle its teats.
city makes forests weep in paper napkins,
makes clouds cough up tornadoes & hurricanes
like an old-world myth.
city kicks nature out & builds a rec room of beeps & blinks, a simulation.
city can copy happiness with a blinged-out horizon.
city is always working, churning out progress,
a death making machine
for which there is no deus ex
only internal combustion,
a future tabula rasa,
eliminating earth’s imprint,
city’s energy,
the universe won’t remember
city’s perfume,
I won’t forget.
Bruce McRae
Note Of Introduction
Hello, I’m God, and I think in abstracts
(I’m not God, my voice an interminable fluttering).
I’m a clear and present danger.
I’m drunk as a fiddler’s bitch.
My hero goes by day, goes by night.
I said it’s not what I’m saying but what I have said.
I’ll begin again, for the benefit of late arrivals.
I’m a former god, now superhero.
Cantor’s continuum hypothesis – I wrote that.
Actually, no, I didn’t write that. But I am
your last match in the wind and rain.
I exist upon the devil’s insistence.
Barry Seiler
Chapman’s Hand
John Jay Chapman, descendant
of the eminent American jurist,
progressive reformer,
believing his beloved Minna
had been trifled with by a Lowell
beat him about the head and shoulders
within an inch of his life.
On a lawn outside a party. Appalled,
he returned to his horrid little room,
removed his coat and waistcoat
and plunged his left hand in coalfire
until the hand was done and rode
a streetcar to Mass General,
the lost hand covered by his coat.
The doctor cut it off. How calm he felt
waking the next morning and finding it gone.
How right the crime and punishment.
He had stolen fire from the gods.
Now the fire burned in him, alive,
a second anguished man,
who would touch what he loved best
with his wasted hand.
John Repp
Allen Ginsberg Had a Heart Attack
Allen Ginsberg had a heart attack, so we couldn’t go hear him,
but we did eat Ethiopian food, tearing swaths from the yard-broad
disk of flatbread to grab mouthfuls of shredded who-knew-what
from the dozen aromatic mounds many citizens of Ethiopia
& who knows where else would’ve killed for, but we loved
our greasy fingers & the table we scooched under, each settling
without pain into half-lotus. At the Korean place in Central Square,
Nina asked for chopsticks, so the waiter glared, saying “chopsticks
are Chinese, not Korean,” stabbing his finger at the silverware
we’d thought ourselves beyond. Kim chi convinced us not to mention
Japanese chopsticks, so there’s that. I miss thinking myself worldly.
Easy to say who’d kill for what, but I finally know what I’d kill for,
I think. During many centuries, the cost of the spices my wife
just added to the lentils would feed who knows how many serfs
for who knows how many months. Yesterday, Frederick Douglass
reminded me slaves could live on cornmeal for the ludicrously long time
he did, squatting near the fire in nothing but his flour-sack blouse.
He could show the stripes the whippings left any time he wanted.
One father I know made his son write “i will be good or daddy
will belt me” on a blank sales slip, but nothing stopped & yupper,
that’s apples & oranges, pyramids of perfect fruit
in markets by the thousand, priced right as rain in Egypt.
George Moore
The Body of Genghis Khan
When a body goes there is nothing there but the memory of movements
through a narrow history, widening if we are lucky into a noble frame.
The earth absorbs all fame and the river under which they buried you
moves away routing itself across a different plain without intention or respect.
So the road the workers were digging lay straight across your forehead,
the forehead of the great Khan. That forehead springs from history full
of wonder and rage at the lives lost before it and the little kingdoms gone.
Then that forehead stared at the stars contemplating when the world would fine it.
And the silence of the centuries was bought with the lives of a dozen diggers
buried above you, a dozen nameless men who kept your secret but would have
perhaps anyway for you were not just emperor but underworld king.
No one would ever find the Great Khan, no one, but when they do here under
a river that no longer bends toward heaven when they do you are like all
an earth shell, a pocket full of gold coins, and the river runs elsewhere.
Bone Museum
Here, children, is the skull of a duck. Not so hollow as that dinosaur egg
and an easy millennium beyond their catastrophic moment. See how it reflects
the glass in a long display beneath the flying Teradactyl hanging in hall air.
The duck waddled into history, the bubble of consciousness coming later,
charged with the atmosphere. Over here we have the Queen’s favorite wasp
brought back from the hidden rainforests where only the brave would venture.
Her cohorts scavenged the New World all to sustain the Old. And here, children,
is the skull of a man, hollow as that egg and brittle with age. Died you can see
from an arrowpoint in this frontal lobe. Notice the sheen from the hands
that have passed this one through the generations.
J.R. Solonche
Dialogue with a Dead Beaver
I did not know what you were
in the tall weeds until I saw
the incisors in your jaw and what
remained of your paddle of tail.
Black, all black, even your bones.
In my weeds by the road I am black.
I wanted to believe that a hundred
yards down the road from the spot
where you were hit, a car swerved
straight into a deep ditch,
felled by a gash in one of the tires.
You want to believe I kill what kills me.
I wanted to say that your smell
was the smell of rich, black earth
from which a miraculous tree
would grow someday, a tree that
would grow again and again
endlessly as it was endlessly felled.
My smell is black. My flies are black.
Mary Dean Lee
First Morning, Early Spring
After making love, I reach
to disentangle tiny legs caught
in the bamboo shade above the couch,
wonder how it got trapped inside,
feathers burnished brown and gold,
dusty rose. I creak open the window
to set it free, barely graze—powder
rains, my insides jelly.
I swerve around to face the kitchen—
shelves full of mouse turds and dust
high above the sink. A family in an
Easter basket chirps brightly, same
hues, and a pair at the table look
out the big picture window, another
swings on David’s camp sculpture
hanging from fishline, a wooden
spiral staircase spinning.
I tuck my fingers in a drawer,
turn up the volume.
Jennifer Dotson
Listening to gospel music while I mop the floor
I can crank up the volume
I can hear it over the vacuum
I can sing along and sing loudly
I can sing and no one is listening
I’m singing with the choir
the music lifts me up while I’m looking down
at the crumbs and the dirt and spots on the kitchen floor
I think of other things than my mop and my bucket
and my rinse water getting dark and grimy
I’ve kicked everyone out of the house
I’m in the house all alone
with the 5 blind boys from Alabama
and Sam Cooke
and the south side choir my coworker belongs to
I clean the floors and I listen to whatever I want
without worrying or wondering
if it’s okay and if other people like it, too
Stephen C. Middleton
Black Hole (Which is Worse?)
Nothing rings true except interruptions
The Doctor on his ward rounds
Hunger…starved before the…
Shadow on the scan
Breathing difficulty
After workhorse dues, perhaps
Incorrectly flued, maybe
Short of breath
Asbestos; fibreglass lungs collapse
Short of feeling
Which is worse?
End stopped
Or; edit the blockage
Notate anomie (the lights flash across the void)
Conjugate the Black Hole
Or serrated, shredded X-Ray view
Or; mop up the mess
Shrink away from vile sounds
Nothing rings true except interruptions
The Doctor on his ward rounds.
Priscilla Atkins
The sky just CANNOT be sadYoutuber comment on Fernando Pessoa’s
“The Terrible Paradox of Self-Awareness”
Tuesday, a high schooler with a cross builds me
a medium sundae
in a small cup
(nice!)
(wonder if God told her to treat me extra—
my hair’s white).
And all that whipped cream.
(That I wasn’t going to mention.)
Outside in flickering shade, I spoon up the tipsy top
and the rest rides with me to Graafschap Cemetery
where I share it with the Botzens. Two of the girls
died in their teens. And Father, eight weeks
before daughter Dora. 1904. Spring.
Top contenders are Diphtheria and Typhoid Fever.
(Whatever, you can bet it passed between them.)
For now, we’re chill. Vanilla beaned.
Reprieve of delight before we return to our ends.
It’s July, and not a soul knows everything.
Cordelia Hanemann
Two Sides of a Butterfly Wing
Zhuangzi dreamed of being a butterfly
and the butterfly on waking became Zhuangzi
each body so easily becoming the other
who can tell of the end of the endless changes of things
Li Po
In my small garden a world
full of dew and spring
I wander.
Over there a momentary hovering
stillness the singular splash
of a fritillary
its orange glow and scalloped wing
riddled with eyes begging
to be seen.
The butterfly becomes the flower
merges then emerges a blazon
of delight,
lifts its wing to flash the underside
a radiance of scarlet/ orange/ sienna
black and white--
formerly the worm that crunched
my pieris japonica/ passionflower/
& rhododendron.
Its striped and hairy spiked ugliness
transformed into fiery crimson
flight
flitting here and here sampling /
engaging / disengaging lured
by a romance of blooms.
A second appears from nowhere
flashing his seductive beauty
an urgent flapping
ritual nuptial dance of fire wings
his wing-clap rite inviting his lady
to lend him her antennae.
Their together-dance a cipher
whisper wind two conspire
a seamless merging.
They linger four wings suspended
a magical ornament on a single bloom
a pair of linked jewels.
James Owens
Madeleine
For time, think loamy handfuls,
not the watery stuff that drops from clocks,
good only for measurements and math.
Remember the window spilling moted sun
on the mismatched and dented ordinary,
that occasion when I was reading Proust,
and you came in from a walk to tell me
about the eagle: “It flew into my chest.
My lungs turned so sky-blue they ached.”
Think morning, the mulberry tree,
the sidewalk smeared thick with broken
fruit, their aroma woven into the air,
a marrowy noise of congregating bees,
like fever in our bodies, like desire.
Eugene Datta
Herzogsweg
We’re two to three meters apart, give or take, a barbed-
wire fence between us, a human and a cow,
one with an ear tag reading 44 254, both having paused
our respective acts: I my walk down Herzogsweg
and she her grazing, the pasture
rolling off the side of the road down to the shoelace-
shaped village of Seffent. I stand unmoving, held
in her slow, gentle gaze, her jaw working
in soundless mastication, her breath backlit by the winter
sunlight, an opulent udder straining to touch
the ground. We keep standing like that, looking
at each other, as moments pass. Two herons
and then another fly from left to right behind her,
and a man walks past me, also from left
to right. What is it like to be her, I think to myself,
standing there at this moment, intently observing
and being observed by another living being, one
that she’s known all her life? What response
does my image (and what is that like? I wonder) trigger
in her head? What feeling-sensation-memory-
percept-thought, if any, beyond what
is already chosen, in some form, from the three-item
inventory of fight, flight or freeze? She bats her lids
and lowers her head, then raises it again. There’s another
cow at some distance, seated, where the field slopes
down, and a few more grazing further behind. In the back-
ground, trees, farmland and the undulating hills,
and a few wisps of chimney smoke rising in the mist-
laced sunlight, and the turret-like towers of the hospital
jutting out like those of a medieval castle.
Daniel Romo
Imposter Syndrome
I’m not feeling like myself today, but the forecast
calls for faking it until I make it and I wonder if
the horizon ever wants to phone it in by cloning
the day before because it also feels like a knockoff.
Last year’s Superbowl winner is the odds-on favorite
again, and is it wrong I find it so easy to root against
perennials and pull for the weeds? I recently told
my wife I hadn’t changed a tire in twenty years and
confess I don’t know if I still could but assume it’s
like riding a bike, yet what happens if it’s a unicycle
with a flat of its own? This is the summer Maui’s
on fire and much of the country experiences record
highs and call this coincidence or Mother Nature’s
way of saying, I’ve been trying to tell you meteorological
numbers don’t lie to those who deny global warming?
It takes a village to cultivate the land and the wave
of coordinated L.A. mall robberies show even
Southern California and the Pacific Ocean don’t
always provide enough water and sunlight, but
lack of upbringing and morals isn’t regional
because the former president and his circle now
being indicted is just another form of a flash mob
smash and grab. Sometimes we belong and other
times we truly don’t and to recognize the difference
is to possess the wherewithal to declare a state of
emergency or doubt while residing on an island all
your own, holding a fruity, tropical drink in one
hand, waving a flaming white flag with the other.
V.P. Loggins
Artichoke
When God began to make a man
he turned to dust
and spat to make it clay.
Then he formed the man and let him bake
in the brutal sun.
But God didn’t like
what he had made. He didn’t know
how empty a man could be,
how like wineskins
without the wine.
And so God began
to consider
how best to correct his mistake.
Let us tell it like a story, he said,
and it shall be recorded thus:
Once upon an ancient time,
God turned to earth,
to make a man in his own image.
Gathering the dust
he spat to make it clay
and formed the man
like an artichoke,
beginning with the base
(what now we call the heart), covering him
with layer on layer of scales,
like an armor of green diamonds,
to protect him from the appetite
that grew in the seat of love.
When the tale had been spoken
and later written down,
God tore the tongue
out of his own mouth.
And that is why, he added with a coda,
all prayers are answered
in silence.
Leonore Hildebrandt
Lessons in Love’s Grammar
My mother believed in virginal weddings
and kept love’s rules and deviations under wraps.
The nudists were of little help. At sand pits, lakes, and beaches,
men with large bellies sat on camping chairs
and women donning straw-hats and sunglasses
kept an eye on children squirming in shallow water.
At school, we read of wars and conquests–Latin,
it was thought, would ground us. Word-columns–
tenses, verbs–amo, amas. Love’s grammar spells out
who owns whom, who’s active, who passive.
(In ancient Rome, a man’s desire to penetrate a boy
was fine if the teen was slave, former slave, or prostitute.)
I was a girl who knew of gender. Nouns and pronouns
are inflected along with the words that go with them–
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik rolls off the tongue.
My mother was not inclined to cuddle her young children–
later I would dread our hellos and farewells,
the awkward embraces.
Love’s grammar is slippery. (When to use “they”?)
As conquests drag on and wars flare up
while amo/amas bends to new rules of correctness,
I think of nudities on wind-swept beaches
before we learned how the light ravishes
our beautiful, love-caressed, non-binary skin.
Joel Allegretti
The Birthday Boy
With his morning tea, no sugar,
he swallows metoprolol tartrate
to countervail the hypertension.
With his lemon-basil chicken
he takes a dose of simvastatin
to tame the LDL cholesterol.
With his three o’clock espresso,
decaffeinated, he has finasteride,
for benign prostatic hyperplasia.
With his vanilla cupcake, with
hazelnut frosting, he listens to
“Within You Without You”
And tries to recall the colors
he saw when he dropped acid
for the first time at Berkeley.
Rizwan Akhtar
Things far off
have you seen that plover landing on
the grass without any reason its tail
twirls seeking attention. I watch sitting
something that is not close, real things
are far, not this bird’s instant vanity
which will wipe out from memory
the chair on which I transfer weight
is made of wicker, its seat cushion is
already disintegrating, what else
a pendulous clock keeps the hierarchy
of hours, a punctuation in a moment,
a quick phrase, a dictionary of voids
you need to look to avoid the nearby.