The Saint of Voiceless Crowds – Shana Wolstein
Rural girls ride the bus to work in maquiladoras, and each factory dreams
its work is creation. The dust cloud from the battle for Ciudad
Juarez hasn’t settled yet, women go to work and leave families standing
in the fire. Dust devils and scrub brush. The desert swallows its breath.
And the locals still climb rooftops to watch their history. As they did
when the Mexican Revolution came to America, at El Paso, and bored
Americans sat atop hotels to watch Pancho Villa and his troops.
It was the beginning of Hollywood—Pancho Villa, a ready celebrity.
He, born Doroteo, gift of God, re-named himself: Robin Hood,
born again from his own perseverance and fire, revenge
for the brand cut into his sister. He burned his face into a name,
silver and celluloid, trust and fear. Years later, risen again,
streets get named Siete Leguas, his horse. Tombs to visit
in each city, on Dia de los Muertos, a meal every day
he has been gone. His steps across the border are traced by feet—
descendants, trying to create their own legend, each day a lifetime.
El Paso still watching, from a distance.
The gangs decide to quit fighting for a day to show
they still know how to pull the breath from our throats.
And women disappear like credits at the end of the street.
You, my Uighur Traveler – Shana Wolstein
—if I ever write in another language, it will be
yours. Sounds the color of camel hair
When my eyes are their bluest,
and they're not blue. Our shadows left
their footsteps in the sand as they followed
behind us. We could run without moving.
And I wonder if I will ever think of what
I forgot, because I'm sure I have. The time
when the Ferris wheel stopped turning, but
that can't be it— I remember.
The way the smell of oil hung in the air, the sand
shifting under my fingernails, how I could see up
the pant-leg of the man above me, how he rattled
his foot like an angry snake, how you batted
your eyes until they watered and my hands
held your face in response. How the breeze
made us all sway just enough that I thought
we could catch the racing clouds. The sun
made our knees turn pink. Our hands
tangled like bridled rope. The sand shone
at dusk. Our arms grew sore from reaching for
each other. How we raced like dunes, found
ourselves alone, could no longer find
the words to speak a few dry syllables.
Division -- Bojan Louis
una polvareda grande
snaps the weak
points of mesquite,
fells moth eggfilled saguaros —
divots across the desert
await gusts,
season’s last rainfall
*
esta ciudad slick
with engine oil
heated on asphalt
beneath las nubes
negras y cautelares
the city’s ashes
not of death
but movement
*
defying being bound
those who pray
para el norte
against shallow rooted
keepers of the gate
find reprieve in
jugs left out —
throats eased
*
brown shirt bruisers
and local locos
gun up to get-it-done
Grounding
Bojan Louis
Crespúculo,
una serpiente de polvo
—vans of la migra—
summoned by contratistas
cobardes who anticipate
a crack, irresolute
of its path.
Sin necesidad de herramientas
curb-plucked workers
walked barefoot
through cemento frió
and floated suave
the curing surface.
Now they sit encadenado
y se preguntan
if they’ll receive water
para lavar, la roca
hardening around their feet.
Hwéeldi [Place of Suffering]
A poem in Navajo & English
‘Aak’eed
takes the last
iinaa.
‘Ats’íís
crumpled on
nahasdzáán;
dineh bii kágí
wants off
ats’in.
Gather dii bali doo
bee’eldoo bik’a’—
leave łieshłibaha.
Na’zid doo do’oodłaa nahji’adiilil
with corpses—
dabii’izhi baadiyinah.
Place of Suffering [Hwéeldi]
Fall
takes the last
life.
Bodies
crumpled on
earth;
human skin
wants off its
bone.
Blankets and
bullets
leave dust.
Bury fear and doubt
with corpses—
forget those names.
Why the Cliché Thrives – Pamela Stewart
The white horse is Lady the black horse is Storm
The white sky is radiant black skies slam you indoors
The white iris, while sexy, is certainly bridal
The gentian, while literate, is downward sliding
How can you know where bright birds flying have dropped sunflower seeds?
People take apart their lives in springtime….
In Delhi there’s “Fair and Lovely” to lighten her face.
Here in the States, “Coppertone” for our pallid flesh.
In summer people lighten their hair,
darken the skin.
Yet you’re delighted at how last year’s birds have dropped enough
black seeds to thrust up the brightest of tall flowers —
Sudden all over your life!
If You Stay Here You’ll Be Trapped by God – Pamela Stewart
The rocking chair, like a boat cranky at its moorings,
holds me soft when I see how pretty she is, the 3rd wife, kind-eyed and smiling
with her fair tossed hair. And older!
I ‘m older too, but like the boat awkward, heavier than the other wives with my fat-ladened breasts pushing like a prow against
the chair’s embrace. Suddenly, so many faces I knew appeared in little squares on the screen: glamorous, stained, roughened,
textured by light and sometimes torn.
But there, the being-ness of the boy I loved at 13 is just as palpable.
And the boy I loved at 14 hasn’t changed much under Florida’s heat and dazzle except now I talk with him more than I
ever did leaning with my teen-age mooniness.
How elastic the soul that can catch up on 51 years with a few words and a profile of Nicky,
poetry’s most famous cockatoo! Now, in front of me, that lush, graceful girl
who made me bristle survives cancer and a son’s suicide.
She humbles me, as rocking, rocking I pray to do some mortal good
and wonder who is Nancy, a red-head
I don’t recognize? I could pace and circle this screen all day to re-love them all especially
the 3rd wife of my 2nd husband who smiles with the warmth of an old friend insisting, “But you look great! You’ve never
looked so good!”
The Executors – Pamela Stewart
his books her hair! their corgi’s name
the pearly fountain pen with aqua ink they shared
down the block, bar-music and rain punctuate
papers smoothed open in layers
large hands rummage a plate of almonds and cheese please
let me pour you another gin and please tell me again
that reliable anecdote of her soft red hair
Mosto Por Vino – Lucile Barker
The leaves turn straight
from yellow to brown.
There are no deep reds,
no burgundied drips
onto the sidewalk.
The leaves fall quickly,
as if to avoid the suffering
of staying on the parent trees.
The leaves lie in the gutter,
pave the streets with gold,
and my neighbors sacrifice,
building fires to send smoke signals
to the gods of winter,
telling them that all is prepared.
Yet through the smoke
comes another smell.
I smell purple on each side street,
and remember that winter
is made of smoky fireplaces
and bittersweet deep red wine,
the color stolen from autumn leaves.
CONFESSION – David Spicer
The napalm body bags fell out of copters
like horoscopes from homeless stars.
Limbs danced to jazz like tax collectors
on April 16th, and I shunned the war
to join the country club, drink champagne
in coffee shops, carry a masterpiece
of a checkbook. A vitamin demon, I ate
custard pie, vegetable soup, bread,
and dreamed of Tahitian concubines. Slept
in limousines under apple trees in October
dusk, took forty vows drunk in a monastery.
A blasé genius, all right: I soothed
my ego, sunbathed on magic
furniture. I had no guts, couldn’t kill slopes,
true, but I loved to paint wood with green lacquer,
anything to avoid target practice, a casket,
and daggers of the maimed. I finally
shacked up with an ugly duchess, sired a clan
of ingrates and misogynists. Like all people,
I divorced. Changed channels every
two minutes, hated my insane asylum job
and the pinky ring boss who ignored me.
I avoided one disaster to find shelter in another.
Older and syphilitic, I played Showdown
and bashed the nurse’s head with a doorknob
in an assault of erotic glee. No, I wait
for the suicide machine, my hope,
my consumer’s delight, my only asset.
PROPOSAL – David Spicer
Raoul: a lover’s name in the neo-disco age.
An amnesiac cartographer of the tabloid heart,
I adopt that champagne title, its existential karma.
Adele: you never frown, not in a raped Brazil
where we meet, not in your incest bikini,
your marmoreal thighs that whisper Sayonara
on the goateed shore every bleached midnight.
I love you, Adele, your equator soul and karate eyes.
Standing on the veranda, you nod like a stunned starling
in the coup d’état moonlight of the exterminated utopia.
Adele, that houseguest of the histrionic
Bahamas, wake with me on the rich brink of the wasted estate,
ignore the caskets of science, the urns of the world’s breakdown,
help me illustrate our bequeathed scenarios.
No, let us flee in a litany of scat songs,
the aroma of wintergreen gone behind promiscuous memories,
and ride away on the yacht through the river’s couture.
We’ll escape the rotten beach and aspire to be rude gods.
CHIMES – David Spicer
Stuffed animals and parakeets
left my bedroom long ago.
As a child I yearned to pray
like a priest but segued into
smart aleck comments before I wore
graduation gowns and embraced
the propaganda of cool in
a yellow Mustang convertible. Better
than horseback, I kidded the rest
of the pillheads at the receiving station.
Bartenders, waiters, construction workers,
we welcomed the government to ship us
to the Arabic war zone and landed
one autumn night with weapons
across our young backs. Beautiful lions,
we thought the reception a surgery waiting
room, an author’s book party, a puppet show
at the park. We shot and bombed the bastards
but didn’t bury them, their distant screams—
one extended slur of chimes.
The highlight, of course,
the end, no mistake: like celebrities
in a hit film, we followed the parade marshals
down Fifth Avenue. The traffic jam for
peace, the violent clerks of war, we arrived
home heroes, our price for kicking asses
of strangers one moment alive, the next
dead as a village of holy men with their throats cut.
ROMANCE – David Spicer
I once played guitar at a gas station
between accidents and hostile customers
to promote a career as a poet.
A refugee from reality, I sold my soul
to procreate words, wore cashmere cardigans
in barns and antique shops with linoleum
floors and savage geraniums. Ambitious,
I sported black sarongs, ate bonbons
and drank saltwater before each morphine audition.
One day it happened: a woman resembling
Marlene Dietrich appeared in a taxi
beside the unleaded pump. She preened,
painted toenails her only vice, said
she held me in awe, gave me a medieval penny.
Her eyes the color of seaweed, she said Goodbye
with a bravado I’ll never forget.
I responded by quitting the job and carried
my baggage to the airport. I never saw her again,
a trump card against claustrophobia.
Now I’m an émigré from my own persona,
I admire nobody, and want to escape this skin
to be a forester. After all, I hear she lives
in the deep woods where I can say Thank you
and return her Goodbye.
Requiem – Kristine Chalifoux
I have never found it much use to talk to the dead.
Though I have lit candles, you’ve never come
To look at what you left behind:
Granted, there’s no heavy guilt or pain
I must come to terms with, just the bitter ache
Of what could have been, but wasn’t.
Milosz, in those dark years after the war
Stood alone in a barren Polish graveyard
To ask the dead to visit him no more.
They replied to him in the screams
Of ravens flying low over the graves of those
Once loved. When I call to you from the wood’s
Edge, the wind brings nothing. Our small history
No more weighty than a translucent cicada
Shell still clinging to the bark of sweet gum.
In the Currents of the River of Love – Kristine Chalifoux
Surely we have piled the good deeds high enough
Surely they can’t ask any more of us than has already been asked
We have eaten shame and humility, a steady diet. Surely
When the sun skirts away behind the cloud and the cold
Wind blows straight down from the north this time
We will find ourselves a shelter, four strong walls
And a roof to hold back the worst the heavens can fling down.
But no.Yesterday lunching amid bric-a-brac
And the polite susurrus of “catching up,” a sudden
Dart, an unexpected knife thrust. She didn’t know,
How could she, yet how could I respond and shame filled
My mouth again like the ancient loam that clogs
The deltas of ancient rivers. All day I’ve lumbered
In that swampy marsh of anger, resentment and guilt.
When did I become a woman other woman might find
Pitiful? For love? For love? For love? And was it love
That rose up then dark and seething, the coiled serpent
Of hate and lashed out at you again and again?
What piece of this wide web we’re snared in
Needs to be cut to free us? Where are our wings of wax?
Imagine my surprise when I pulled out my life raft
So fragile, it can withstand nothing. What good
Is poetry that can’t save a drowning woman or pry the raft
Off the sand bar at the mouth of the river when the
Sun has beaten back the water and the wind has dried
The earth into hard baked clay and the boat is hopelessly mired.
Reading Simko
For Daniel Simko
We were all young then. It was
New York in the ‘80s, before
The crash, and though we had
Little money, there was always
A twenty for a couple of pints
Of McSorley’s or a bottle of red wine.
There were always books, too,
Overflowing the shelves
In your surprisingly chic Chelsea condo
Piled on tables, or stacked on the floor.
Books and poetry, always there was
Poetry. I remember watching you
One winter evening when the grey
Shroud of clouds folded over
The last winter light from the sky
And you, walking, your broad Slovak face
Resolutely set against the snow’s
Stinging crystals, half hidden
Beneath a huge striped umbrella!
Our own Fellini movie come to life.
That image, one of the photos
Memory took for me unbidden
Has stayed all these years through the long
Silence when we lost touch.
You went on to other people, other haunts
Yet it returns to me now, reading this slim volume.
You always did have the heart of one who suffers
A man who should have stood
In the midst of one of the twentieth
Century’s unfolding tragedies
But the irony was you didn’t
And you were forced to hew your poems
Out of the solitary mute granite of the self.
For all that, your book is good, even luminous,
And I —who have come so close to giving up
Despite all we talked about so fervently
And what you struggled for years to wrench
Out of the safe complacency of your life
To bear witness to something worthy of poetry—
Take heart from the black and white
This cool smooth book in my hands.
from Sisyphean S-curve – Phillip Barron
Amid black and yellow signs of traffic and bureaucracy stands a billboard, its creosote-soaked
legs rising from soggy floodplains to present a sales pitch to daily commuters. The purveyors of
a new tequila have branded their liquor with imagery evoking that of José Guadalupe Posada,
whose satirical sketches of skulls have been appropriated by Dia de los Muertos celebrants. The
skull has eyes rather than empty sockets, as if Dr. T.J. Eckleburg watches over us in his afterlife.
According to the billboard, the tequila is the taste of Mexico.
I remember a woman huddled under brightly colored rags against a wall outside
the Banamex ATM on Avenida Hidalgo in Oaxaca. I think about the thousands
of young women employed in the maquiladoras along the border and the hundreds
of maquiladeros killed in Ciudad Juárez since 1993, where no one is paying attention,
but where Bolaño’s secret of the world is hidden. I think about the escalating violence
of competing drug cartels spun out of control, Dante-esque descriptions of retribution after
retribution on the anarchic streets of Torreón, where police patrol the avenidas in body armor and
skull-painted masks. I think of Mexico and wonder what it might taste like.
Gladdy's Blues – Jim Cervantes
Gladdy Chromatic comes in lugging rubric
of mendacious ecology, doing rancid,
Barstow Eskimo blues. With banshee quickstep
and definite armpit augur, Gladdy's street pluck
roams swanlike beside an atheist anchovy.
I tell her to lay off Columbus gin mash,
Christlike schizophrenia, rheumatic greenery,
and to quit riding that lean needle surrey.
But then she goes into a flex Fargo crimp
and frog leitmotiv of augmented Mozart,
on and on about her affair with Cutaneous
Abram's janitorial ontogeny.
He's vertical immigrant proficient-reminds her of acrylic where Chomsky
Budapest meets congestive roughshod Emily.
It was, she says, an inaccessible inflammation.
Beneath amazon skyscrape, hairpin radar
catches them and writes out a chronicle ticket
in tubular Illinois. That's when the Viking
restaurateur pulls a pantry prank smooth
as veterinarian clockwork, his impeccable
wiggly furze doing a fragmentary
lease clank. Gladdy's motto derision
of his superior effluvium births
minimum haiku: "Eighty-do-Madonnabeyond-Bleeker," yells the Viking.
Gladdy's culvert gunman is witty
appointee with incumbent drink.
Gladdy and gunman climb aboard
an anthropogenic Packard omnibus,
skeedaddling like a sinister patch.
"Vanquish nutrition," they yell.
Fountain – Jim Cervantes
— for Harriet Green, sculptor
She wants sympathy for the bent spine
and the hollowed insides,
the desperation of nowhere to lay eggs
but in another dead space.
Today she made its baby
and wants to lay it in front
of the skull where the mother
laid her eggs in the eye sockets.
How else to display them?
Perhaps the skull is also the father.
The baby is already empty.
The sides of its hollow come together
at the end to form another channel.
Anything poured into this baby
will simply flow out again.
Update – Jim Cervantes
— for Obododimma Oha
Sheep dip by the numbers,
Alabama to Texarkana in sleep.
Rest stops include a narrow view,
sign monkeys, censorship providers.
Wind blows in the same direction
Wednesday through Friday,
then a mood of migration
wafts in through the slats.
Nobody knows what's going on.
from Carny Blues -- by DBD
Leakers of muddy oil, mare’s milk and elephant sweat, his eyes
await the sadder news of his love demised, printed in blood by buskins
of the armless juggler who wears his chum's now rust-spun, unlost locket
'round his neck, a leaden noose, a blamed wrecked wove of fat cotton boles extracted
from a Mississippi you and I can only conjure from redacted dream, as it
no longer exists 'cept in "Pony Blues," a Charlie Patton record, lit
from inside Sunflower County, Delta of Mound Bayou, hit down near Parchman
that don't play no mo,' 'cause that low tech scorched chrome don't work
good and the burnt lot, sans 10-in-1, is a closed smirk on the last
non-gazoonie who could fast fix a machine like that, drive a bent tent spike—
it be long gone, Jim —"Hello central, the matter with your line?"
like the cracked pitcher inside the clasped locket
'round the once hardassed kinker, now freak candy butcher's, throat—
in the widow's eye float glass flinders, mirrored oaths, small claws,
hooked to his dead daughter's tears, so why the armless glip wears it,
we won't guess— hocked and raw he's done sold that carny gentle whiskey,
off a punk show bally, a busted limbless gavioli, a cork juggled in the throat, nested
there against death, smuggled against scrutiny a dead lark, his last breath
a curse for the marks he says etched his mojo with stares, so came he a murderer
of girls, hopeless little starry mares, elfin pansies who withered at his touch,
ripe fruit with the hopelessness of thither Mississippis you and I can't see,
'cause we don't have eyes for such broken things as these.
For forty year his eyes came forty mile. Now a bare bulb like hard fruit hangs level
with his gaze across dirty sheets in a dump down Escatawpa. His hands were boiled
grease on ride metal, roiled in cheap slum prizes, horse heads, and circuses blown from gilly
glass, it spins slow midway winds filtered through his wife's dresses that were peach-colored
skins against her ripe peach-colored skin, these wrenches cast from the thin hot glow,
neon blazed and burnt and fabric sewn and forged from old metal spiders
in his clean blood, their maws toothed and conjured homages to his rusty angels,
splintered ride-borne wreckage on dead lots, rain for his carny days that flowered
like anvil burst hammers, 12 crying roans are new strings on a blues guitar, his thirst
for his murdered daughter’s laugh, a song written for steam pipe, band organ,
black fingers squashing boll weevils —his eyes fast like thrips at the bud,
stolen with roughie hewn shimmer, mud and tents, the music is sheaves of paper
torn from books scorched by eyen —“Just get in the saddle, tighten up on your reins."
They resist the tears, but the ground is gravel, his last few years cement,
as the green grass and dry lots are far from his Mississippi.
The juggler’s scrubbed toes are small birds that each have a flexible tail buried
deep in the meat of his foot —wingless animals, apparati of mirth, they've worried beads
of sweat from his brow as he’s tossed ivory balls stained red and gold, bloody worms
snapped in the beak, his feet hold books and sandwiches, but through weed
and clear whiskey he sees rage in the shape of his arms gone in the womb, stunted caterpillars
eaten by birth, useless threaded thoughts that haunt him with boas, pythons, rattlers, milk
and corn snakes: gold and silver limbless, venomless ropes wrapping his torso in diffracted
dream, elbows of flex as he schpiels his boxes of slum candy, each with "a prize inside,"
each sold with a curse, a poison for the kiddies, a pound o’ sweet daddy hate,
the murder already cooling in his muscled legs. He's been called freak, broke table,
crip, gimp, geek, gink. Carnage is the wake of his oarless dinghy, his Muti feeds a mojo
old as these hills: "Baby, saddle my pony, saddle up my black mare" through broken
static across 78s, it flickers across the dust of his eyes, flattens the pasteboard boxes,
the mouse of flesh between the small bones, a rotten pear high in a still flowering tree,
it shatters in the shellac, the slick grooves sing, skipping, skipping —“So strong
is these blues, so fragile the platter”— in a Mississippi river buried under scattered light,
another world, perfect for now, round —a beautiful head on a shining neck, nodding
as in orbit ‘round a different sun, warm for now, spinning slow in the clear water,
going cold as we close our eyes, years away, far from that Mississippi.
How Life Blooms Under the Weight of the Sea
Barb Perry
She is a hairdresser by night rearranging her
world hair by hair, sometimes fixing the up-do
with questions poised by new zoning laws.
Soon she may need a road block to hold
her bangs in place. When city inspectors visit
she’ll place a velour couch in the crook
of her French twist, letting the frayed edges
clawed by the cat to tenderly hang like a spray
of dried puke. She dust-busts the loveseat, finds
cheese puffs from New Year’s where a crummy
swain had passed out. She sees she is still dragged down
by the lassos of seaweed thrown
by her ex; she notes her long neck that had stretched
in fear of being in deep water.
This phase was rough as she rolled back and forth
in her seabed strewn with hardbacks on faith
and zoning mandates. But even those days reach
their zenith, to simply turn inside-out. Sea becomes
sky; migration paths graft under skin as
outer becomes inner, and she begins to fly
instead of schlump around in lambskin slippers.
By now, notes on lawmen so well-cooked,
they split and show their fuzzy side, reads
as an alternate world. The only drawback is
her penmanship. All order is in a sense lost,
or at least fluffs up into enormous pillows
that can not stand up on their own but only
stay upright with another propped up beside it,
ad infinitum. Socks co-mingle with guidebooks
that open portals to sunken lifetimes,
but she reads them anyway, while languorous
peach underwear blossoms on bedposts.
Piss the Sky
I wish to plan the event you need
in order to truly bury
us; for all our therapy,
a “Burning Man” of balled-up
shrink bills, an Advil-studded
sheet cake, an open coffin.
It will not work to re-marry,
to become a trapeze artist
or move to a voodoo town.
To be done with this you must
rip open your box of childhood
disease, and take your father out
with strong pliers.
He may say that what he did
with your mother won’t help you
flourish with your spouse:
to treat her desires as yours
will lead her ‘round in circles,
and in your mother’s case, inspired
tipping the bottle nightly —
her back to you, dim
light on in the kitchen.
The intention of his good heart was offered
but your father, too good a man
to intrude. Such sweetness matures
perhaps like a honeydew,
then collapses completely in rot.
Four Minute Horizon
Driving the bliss ocean of butter and gold, where the fire-goats leap to the tops of cars, where the fish flashmonger on the sills, I forgo the old ways; the parsnips in the baggage claim, the self-rutilant fob for any kind
of self-serving stingray.
You lost your red plastic glasses, so fire-hose me I say. But I got a phone call instead and it was encrusted in
crawfish and tasted like a bob-o-link hashed through a dishwasher. So I washed my ink spot and now I am
puerile hoping to languish in the effervescing unbridled being of now.
How can one be anything but some of the effect and only from whence it was struck? Utter the primordial
red of red; these are words which only strike its surface. Disembodied hands, is this experience yours or
does it belong to the iodine that nourished health, the shellfish that ate the star of this in the first place?
Where do you start? Startled blue light. Seepage in a stream. Heat on the plains. No, but a small pearl for
all this in a string of more.
PO BIZ – CAMPBELL MCGRATH
It is all too true that jolly old A is a careerist hack
who couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag,
and that B’s emotional interior is a landscape
modeled upon William Blake’s etchings of Hell.
C is generally considered a gnomish charlatan,
while D is a charming woman whose work
nonetheless resembles a turkey carcass
picked at by raccoons the day after Thanksgiving.
E and F have come to detest each other so deeply
that the program they co-direct is a viper pit
of venomous epithets and flying paper weights,
while poor G spouts self-realization aphorisms
like some kind of Yeatsian scripture.
H is a backstabbing, megalomaniacal quisling.
I is a poseur. And J is openly derided as a stick-bug
tethered to the titanic parade float of his ego.
None of which merits the least consideration here
because it is the work alone that matters,
the coarse, oaten bread and nectar-swizzled fruit of poetry
that will sustain us long after the grant committee
has emailed its rejection (by the way, check out
who’s on that committee, yet again, no surprise).
So I will not pour forth the cheap wine of innuendo,
I will not dot the rumor-monger’s i’s
or cross the idle gossip’s t’s
by discussing what happened that infamous night
on the balcony at the AWP convention.
I will not recycle the tales of W’s institutionalization
or X’s adulterous escapades in Prague
(…and, ahem, Iowa City).
Why Y got fired is nobody’s business
and how she got rehired remains a head-scratcher,
but don’t eat spaghetti with your hands at Bread Loaf,
and never ask students to disrobe even partially
are rules we can all live by,
and will long remember, thanks to Z.
POEM THAT NEEDS NO INTRODUCTION – CAMPBELL MCGRATH
i.
Listen, I have endured so much bad art in my lifetime
that my brain actually throbs and pulses
in the manner of a 1960s comic book supervillain
and my skull threatens to burst at the seams like a lychee nut
at the mere thought of all those tuneless bands and lousy etchings
and earnest readings in coffee houses
smelling of clove cigarettes,
pretentious photos of phallomorphic icebergs,
the opening at the gallery hung with stillborn elephants—
what could you say?— and one unforgettable night
a conceptual dance performance akin to a ritual sacrifice
with the audience as victims— as if art
might prove the literal death of me—all this,
all this and so much more,
only to find myself here, in Bratislava,
at the Ars Poetica poetry festival,
yet again drinking red wine from a plastic cup
while the poets declaim in languages
dense and indecipherable as knotted silk, thinking, well,
what could be better than this?
ii.
Perhaps it would be better if the air conditioning worked
and the keg of Zlaty Bazant had not run dry
but the local wine is unexpectedly delicious, hearty as wild boar’s blood,
and the very existence of such an exuberantly cacophonous conclave
in this diminutive and innocuous backwater of Mittel Europa
makes me yearn to do something hearty and wine-soaked and boarish—
no, not boorish—to shout spontaneous bebop musings
like the hipster Beatnik poet Fred from Paris
or crack wise like the balding Frank O’Hara imitator from Vienna
or sing like the yodeling, pop-eyed jokester from Prague
or simply intone with great seriousness like the well-mannered poets
from Warsaw and Wroclaw, Berlin and Budapest and Brno.
iii.
o river sand,
sink deeper and fling yourself
into my whirlpool!
blue sunflower gas-ring octopus—
what brings you
to the rainforest, amigo?
iv.
Well, that came out a bit like Basho imitating Corso
but the thought is what counts when it is 10:45 and you are drunk
enough to believe a poem scribbled on a festival program
could change the world
and when someone says time is an invisible marauder
I shout Fuck you! and everybody smiles.
v.
This poem will change the world.
This poem is a revolutionary anthem to global insurrection.
This poem is an international pop sensation, over twenty million sold.
This poem saved the baby from the burning building.
This poem knows how to howl, to hoot like an owl.
This poem refuses to throw in the towel.
This poem is an imposter, down with this poem!
This poem has been weaponized.
I am breathing its evil fumes, its paralytic murk.
This poem twists my arm until I cry uncle.
This poem will never help me no matter how much I beg.
Help me, please, somebody help me!
This poem wants to kick some ass.
This poem is going to mess you up so bad.
This poem will bury you, my friend.
vi.
But this poem really digs your sister, with her pigtails
and her songs about polar bears and fast rides to immortality,
your sister is someone to run away with to live
in a castle in a dark Teutonic forest or a cheap apartment
with no furniture but a futon and typewriter in the city
underneath the city that is underneath this city.
vii.
Take a swig of wine and it is 12:15.
Another and it is ten past two.
Fuck you!
But where was I?
Ah yes, Bratislava.
viii.
At the Mayor’s Palace we are instructed to visit the Apple Festival,
a “new tradition” created by the Ministry of Culture
modeled upon the actual traditions of the Slovak country folk
who feel, one can only assume, quite strongly about their apples.
Try as we might we cannot find any sign of the festival
and when we return to the Ministry of Culture
the woman at the desk denies any knowledge of it.
Not to worry, she says, next week begins the Cabbage Festival.
ix.
And tonight is the big national soccer match
and the exuberant crowd watching on jumbo screens in the square
is drinking Coca-Cola from miniscule aluminum cans provided by girls
in red jumpsuits and afro wigs as a promotion but where was I?
Ah yes, art—art is what we came for and what we got
was a reminder that this is how it begins, no, not in fright wigs
but a communion of scars and charms and midnight plunder,
a reminder that even our most profound individual suffering
amounts to little more than ashes on the grate of a city
engulfed in eternal flames, which is certainly not this charming
metropolis of beer gardens and long-haired Slavic angels
whose golden swords glitter madly above the Danube at dawn.
x.
Ladies and gentlemen, the bar is now closed.
You’ve been a wonderful audience
and I want to thank you all
for coming tonight
and to leave you with one last piece,
if I can find the right page, ah yes, here we go.
This is a poem that needs no introduction.
CHICKEN HAWKS IN PARADISE by A. D. Martinez
Even though I thought I had it all figured out, my first English teacher in the United States taught
me a very important lesson regarding truth and fact. Soon after arriving on the shores of Miami, I was asked
to describe my hometown of Havana in a well-structured, five-paragraph essay. If my English teacher, Mrs.
Sánchez-Medina, and the principal, Dr. Méndez-Delgado, gave it a thumbs-up, I would have the privilege of
reading it at Noche de Orientación.
It would be a good melodramatic opening for the meeting that would honor Dr. Vázquez-Díaz,
Miami-Dade County Public Schools Superintendent who was trying to clean up his image after the
embezzlement charges that showed up in that morning’s El Nuevo Herald. Like Mrs. Sánchez-Medina, Dr.
Vázquez-Díaz believed that fact and truth were dissimilar.
“What would be better than having an immigrant, newly-arrived to the Diaspora, saluting the
American flag, perhaps shedding a tear of joy, and reading an essay in broken English?” they both explained
in their best Spanish possible. My reading would be preceded by the modern dance class’s “Dances of Cuba.”
I was told that the Public Relations firm of Ferrer & Associates was aiding in promoting this event
around the community for free, and they would need me to do a voiceover so they could provide the media
with effective sound bites. I also heard that el maestro, Cachao – the real Mambo King – would stop by, if he
had time, to surprise the modern dance class. What a night they had planned!
Then, parents would be asked to join the PTA and contribute as much as they could to help poor
refugee balseros like me. Even though my accent has always been pretty good, better than many of my English
teachers in Miami I might add, I would play it up for the crowd when necessary, leaving out a few articles,
making H’s guttural, or pronouncing I’s like double E’s. After all, everyone’s heart was set on what I
personified. I was the tired and the poor that the Statue of Liberty asked for.
Everyone looked forward to the catharsis that would surge over the Miami Springs Senior High
auditorium.
My part was easy, they assured me. Mrs. Sánchez-Medina and the rest of the audience members,
those who remembered a bright and vibrant city, a city that had only become blinding in its splendor when
filtered through their memories, wanted to hear that modern-day Havana had been plunged into dark and
dust, smelling of dead carcasses and inequities. Perhaps some of them even pictured turkey vultures soaring
ominously over the pestilence, while the wind whistled with the moans of the dearly departed that would
never set foot on the island again.
Everyone at Miami Springs Senior High wanted me to tell them how lucky they were to have made
the wise decision to leave decades earlier so their progeny wouldn’t have to witness the blight and
destruction Castro inflicted on our people. They wanted me, a 14-year old cubanito, to assure them that
there was no need to feel any guilt over having left their homeland decades ago.
Even though at this point in my life I couldn’t imagine living in any other country besides the USA,
my Havana was mesmerizing. Moreover, I didn’t see a reason to choose between my two loves, my two
countries that I straddled on a daily basis.
How could I express this without causing a cataclysmic effect on the young urban Cuban-Americans
– or YUCAs as they were known in the city – who would be listening to my oral presentation on the edge of
their seats, their starched handkerchiefs waiting to sop up any tears that overflowed?
I could just imagine the principal, counselors, and the rest of the YUCAs applauding with tears
streaming down their faces as I told them what they wanted to hear, and this was quite motivating, just as
motivating as the good grade I was sure to receive.
I wanted to tell them that the streets cried with their childhood memories while peanut venders
sang out ¡Maní, maní caliente! as they passed out warm peanuts in day-old Granmá newspaper cones to
children who hadn’t eaten a good meal in weeks.
They would surely want to hear that their homeland no longer looked like the pictures at Restaurante
Versailles in Little Havana on Miami’s Calle Ocho, those pictures taken so many lifetimes ago. Actually, the
streets did look like those pictures because nothing had changed. Buildings, streets, signs, and even the
occasional Fords and Chevys still lined the streets like an abandoned set of an old fifties’ flick, paint flaked a
bit on the walls, with a brick or two missing here and there.
I wanted to tell Mrs. Sánchez-Medina that modern-day Havana was the worst place on Earth. I
really, truly did since that would have made her day. But none of that was true. It wasn’t the worst place on
Earth, even though it no longer felt like what a home should feel like. I was willing to perform to their
expectations, even willing to act as melodramatically as I could – I’m pretty good at that – but I couldn’t
just lie for the sake of it.
During my teacher’s mandatory brainstorming activity worth 15 points, all I could think of were
the stories my grandmother used to tell me as a kid, of the parties before the Revolution, with American
movie stars and diplomats wearing their expensive furs – although it rarely dropped below 22°C.
Cuba reminded me not so much of those legendary parties as much as the morning after when
everything’s a mess.You know, furniture’s chipped, perhaps a cigarette burn on the carpet. That wasn’t
destruction; it was merely a vivid memory that something fun, alive took place, no matter how indulgent. It
was like Mardi Gras – one last hoopla before solemnity struck midnight.
Walls of buildings in Havana yellowed. The Fifth Avenue sidewalks acquired a look of melancholy
with their cracked memories of foreigners who would never return to help clean up the mess. The Royal
Palm trees withered a bit and went to sleep only to dream of the mythical Havana of the fifties. That’s how
my neighborhood in El Vedado looked when I left in ‘92. One giant hangover!
Neither politics nor economics popped into my head after completing my next 10-point prewriting
activity for Mrs. Sánchez-Medina’s essay. The image that continued possessing my hand as I wrote was that of
a silent ballroom just after a celebration, the deep silence that follows a shattering wine glass, the kind of
silence that makes you hold your breath while your heart beats out of your chest for what seems like an
eternity. But I guess I didn’t convey that too well. Apparently, although it was not on the rubric, politics and
failed economics were the key points to be made in my assignment.
I got a ‘C’ for writing only four paragraphs.You see, “a fifth concluding paragraph would brace my
story,” and, consequently, I was not invited to read my essay at the school’s Noche de Orientación. Instead,
Arturito read his poem, a poem that didn’t even rhyme!
My teacher derided me, said that I shouldn’t be afraid of speaking the truth. That admitting how
much I despised my communist country wouldn’t ensue in militantes knocking down my door. I was in
America now, and everyone knew how horrible it was back home, and how we were brainwashed into
turning in our relatives who spoke against the State just for a few erasure marks on our ration cards.
The principal called me into his office and told me I needn’t write Castrista propaganda like that at
his school, but his scolding was soon interrupted by his cell phone ringing, letting him know his reservations
at The Strand were confirmed. He was quite relieved and forgot about me altogether. After all, Pilar was
performing her one-woman keyboard act by the bar. Her version of “Yellow Mango” always put everyone in
a jubilant mood.
It was amazing to me that my critics in Miami were judging my experience even though they
themselves had never been on the island! Then it clicked. Genetic memory.
Back in Havana, I heard of this experiment with baby chicks. The chicks were allowed to roam, just
pecking and shitting. Shadows were projected overhead – shadows of jays, airplanes, cardinals, you get the
picture.
The chicks just went along with their lives like nothing. But when shadows of chicken hawks panned
across the wall, the baby chicks reacted. They’re little heads popped up and they ran in circles, completely
panic-stricken; some even died of the fright.
Yet, the chicks had never seen a chicken hawk before. There weren’t even any adult chickens in their
small scientific pens with them to teach them they should be scared to death of the predator scoping out a
meal from far above. The chicks knew to be afraid because it was written in their DNA. Survival was part of
their very makeup, their building blocks, passed from mother hen and father rooster to chick.
Perhaps Cubans in the Diaspora had developed some sort of genetic memory that they passed down
to their descendants in the same way. This adopted nostalgia must have been completely biological. It
allowed third- and fourth-generation Cuban-Americans to remember passionately what Cuba was like –
how velvety mantecado ice cream melted on their tongues, the rich pungent odor of pre-Castro coffee, how
sweet the fried plantains were and how the caramelized, burnt edges stuck to their teeth – and yet their
families had lived in other countries for generations and the only Spanish they could muster was to ask
abuelita for more café con leche and toast.
Perhaps our people developed this genetic memory to allow us to know the moment we’re born,
before we even open our eyes, before our first feeding, where home truly was and how cruel life was for
exiling us from paradise, a paradise once devoid of shadows, devoid of chicken hawks.
Contributors (in order of appearance)
Shana Wolstein is currently studying toward an MFA at Western Michigan University in
Kalamazoo. Her work has appeared previously on-line at La Fovea and is forthcoming in Third
Coast Magazine. She blogs regularly at www.theredspeechballoon.wordpress.com.
Bojan Louis’ poems have been published in The Kenyon Review and The Platte Valley Review;
his short story, "As Meaningless as the Origin," appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review.
Pamela (Jody) Stewart has written six books of poems and several chapbooks. Her most recent
book is Ghost Farm (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2010) from which “A Tibetan Man in Hawley,
Massachusetts” has been selected for inclusion in The Pushcart Prize XXXVI: Best of the Small
Presses, forthcoming in 2012. She lives on a farm in western Massachusetts.
Lucile Barker is a Toronto poet, writer and activist. Since 1993, she has been the co-ordinator of
the Joy of Writing, at the Ralph Thornton Centre. “The Golden Age,” the first place short story
winner in the Creative Keyboards contest, a project of the Hamilton Arts Council, will be
published in an anthology in June 2011. Poetry and short stories are also forthcoming in
Nashwaak Review, Lost in Thought, and Menacing Hedge.
David Spicer’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review,
Ploughshares, The Santa Clara Review, Gargoyle, Used Furniture, and others. He is the author
of one full-length collection, Everybody Has a Story, and four chapbooks. The poems published
here are included in a manuscript titled Tender Brutalities.
Kristine Chalifoux is the author of In This Light, winner of the West Town Poetry Chapbook
competition. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, among them Antioch Review,
The Brooklyn Review, Janus Head and Clockwatch Review. She currently resides in North
Carolina with her darling husband and daughter, and Trudy,
an irascible blue tick coon hound.
James Cervantes was the editor of The Salt River Review for thirteen years. His latest book,
Temporary Meaning, is available from Hamilton Stone Editions. Other books include The
Headlong Future, The Year Is Approaching Snow, and Changing the Subject, a dialogue in
poems with Halvard Johnson. Beginning with its July issue, he will be editing poetry for Sol, an
online literary magazine based in San Miguel de Allende.
Phillip Barron’s first book, The Outspokin’ Cyclist, is a collection of newspaper columns written
over a four-year period and will be published in June 2011. His poems and short stories have
appeared in The Blotter, The Raleigh Hatchet, and Urban Velo. He’s taught philosophy at the
Chapel Hill and Greensboro campuses of the University of North Carolina as well as Duke
University, and currently lives in Davis, California where he works in the digital humanities at
the University of California.
DBD is a lapsed poet. His useless MFA from an Ivy League university sits in a box under a
broken pinball machine in his garage. He is currently finishing a book on the history of armless
knife-throwers. This is his first on-line publication
Barbara Perry is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Poetry Fellowship and is the founder of
Fresh Squeezed Poetry where she also performs. She has been a featured reader for The Printer's
Row Book Fair held in Chicago, where she resides. Her poetry manuscript, “The Olive Pit in My
Wind Pipe,” was a finalist in The Lena-Miles Wever Todd Competition, sponsored by Pleaides
Press, and The Tupelo Press Award. She is working on two poetry manuscripts, one on commonday oracular signs called “The Affordable Oracle,” and the other, her personal response to The
Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Campbell McGrath’s ninth book of poetry, from which “Po Biz” and “Poem That Needs No
Introduction Are Taken,” is forthcoming from Ecco Press in 2012. He is the Phillip and Patricia
Frost Professor of Creative Writing at Florida International University.
Agustin Martinez, a former high school principal, English teacher, and translator lives in the DC
metro area. He served as translator and managing editor on The Multicultural Spanish
Dictionary, How Everyday Spanish Differs from Country to Country, currently available in its
2nd edition. His short stories have appeared in Arcadia Literary Journal, The Binnacle, and The
34th Parallel Magazine. He is currently working on a first novel, The Mares of Lenin Park.
Ambiorix Santos was born in Santiago, Dominican Republic. His career in art began in 1988,
when he worked in the visual arts department of the Santiago Cultural Center. He considers
himself self taught, and has participated in various exhibits in the Dominican Republic, Italy and
New York City. His most recent show, Tiempo y Palabras, was staged at the Blake Street Studios
in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he now resides. Visit his website at www.ambiorixsantos.com.
Jennifer Therieau is a graphic designer and photographer living in San Diego, California.
You can visit her website at www.bigreddotdesigns.com
Brian Hawley, currently living in Sacramento, California, is a student of Philosophy,
Photography, and Design. He has yet to visit William Vollmann’s house.