Photographer Unknown
CONTRIBUTERS: (Concept) RD Armstrong, Dave Nordling, Lindsay Wilson, Don Wleklinski, Beth Wilson, Kathryn Formosa, G. Hagen Hill, Jan Young, Alan Catlin, Dave Church, Gerald Zipper, Lyn Lifshin, Thomas Robert Barnes, Frances LeMoine, Jo Scott Coe, Christopher Mulrooney, Anth Ginn, H. Lamar Thomas, Laura Stamps, Denis Robillard, Charles Ries, Chaya Grossberg, JJ Campbell, Paul McGlynn, Yuki Yoko Yoshimoto, John Thomas, Philomene Long, Mr. Morrison, Todd Moore, Axel, George Sparling, Nancy Shiffren, Billy Jones, Robert L. Penick, Estelle Gershgoren Novak, Alan Botsford Saitoh and Jack Foley.
(Locale) B. Z. Niditch, Joe Speer, Joy Buckley, Doug Draime, Gerald Locklin, Marc Olmsted, Nelson Gary, Angelo Verga, Linda Lerner, John Ian Marshall, Justin Barrett, Gary Mex Glazner, Brian Moreau, Adam Perry, Jonathon Hayes, Scott Gallaway, Debbie Kirk, Jack Brewer and Richard Kostelanetz.
(Morality) Patricia Wellingham-Jones, Éric Dejaeger, Farida Mihoub, Hosho McCreesh, Alex Migliore, Rick Smith, Robert Peters, Jamie O’Halloran, Dan Fante, Elleraine Lockie, Leonard J. Cirino, Lawrence Jaffe and Allen Cohen.
CONCEPT
A Place in the World
A sweet sounding idea:
someplace that
can’t be taken away
a room, a chair, a window
a tree, a hill, a patch of sandy beach,
a chunk of rock, a seat in the cab of a rusty truck,
the loving arms and lips of someone who cares
no matter what the crime,
eyes that light up whenever you visit,
a happy voice on the other end of the line,
a friend for life,
a vision of trees racing with clouds
over a stretch of dusky brown hills,
knowing that you are
home,
at last
a place in the world
yes
a place
in the
world
RD Armstrong
Long Beach, CA
INTRODUCTION
Was there really such a place?
Could it all be true?
The kind of place
With lawyer-vagrants,
Anonymous pundits,
Starry-eyed entertainers,
Colorful storytellers,
Societal architects and
Morality revisionists.
It was about the word.
It was about sanctuary
To speak it, to share it
To still the bottoms in the metal folding chairs
To open the mouths of men
To hold the eyes of women
In growing stagnant heat
From two hours of passion released.
The lawless order
The rigid format compressing the unruly mind
To focus, blaze bright
Five minutes to dance
To pour out in the backroom
What one week, one year or one life
Had meant to the penman.
The nervous, timid presenter
Navigating his heart and mind
With a roomful of spectators
With nothing in common
But the desire to listen
It was real.
It was home.
Dave Nordling
Parts Unknown
is it too early
to use that word
in the poems?
take the daisy’s then
that rise up
with the bucket
given to water,
take the view
from your kitchen window,
take my fingers then
as petals
and keep them
in an ashtray
near the window,
take the knife
on the counter
and run it’s
smooth tongue
over my thin skin,
when you bite my ear
make the cut
under my ribs,
my moans will move
you further,
step within.
you’ll find yourself alone
on an endless
wyoming prairie
as i form above you.
a flock of clouds
pouring upon you
a rain of petals,
i hand you all
the space
i can
on a broken palm,
you lay back
within me
as the bucket
gives back to water
and brings life
to these
mad
july fields
Lindsay Wilson
Laramie, WY
Earthman
made to burn
that last lucky
in the cell
before being
guided
to
the
no
smoking
area
where
his
flesh
would
burn
that
unlucky
smell
Don Wleklinski
Terre Haute, IN
The Porch
It’s just a spring storm,
after all, not having twister
activity or hurricane winds; but
now without electricity my house feels
emptier than usual. The plastic lawn
chairs we bought last summer
have blown away.
Gazing out the wet
window I wonder if the porch feels
lonely with the rain lashing
across it, like a raft
in an ocean storm—
the last man aboard has been
washed away. Were the waves
too strong? Or was he just tired
of trying to hang on? It matters
when you’re alone.
I don’t know why,
but it matters.
Beth Wilson
Oklahoma City, OK
La Bailarina
Mexico City, September 17, 1925
Crowded with vendors and passers-by,
the corner of 5 de Mayo and Calzada de Tlalpan began to dry.
Her forgotten parasol rode alone on a bus to Coyoacan,
exchanged instead for a bright bolero in her lap.
Alejandro held her hand.
The day still gray, the streets slick,
she gazed out the windows of the bus
to the city she loathed and loved.
Dangling, dancing above the windshield was la Virgen,
in a thin ray of light just bursting from the black clouds.
Looking around at the people, arm to arm, face to face,
bumping, jostling against one another,
a simple hope filled her body.
A housepainter, carefully fingering a packet of powdered gold,
sat across from her with his stained smock.
Next to him, an Indian woman,
suckling her child beneath a blanket.
School children in uniforms with sweets in their mouths,
salesmen with straw-banded hats,
factory workers in dirty cover-alls,
farmers and their wives
had all abandoned the Old World laziness
of the brightly painted trolley cars
for the slick convenience of the New World bus.
Old, feeble Mexico rattled along empty, ghostlike,
while Modern Mexico, The New Mexico,
whizzed by, filled with passengers.
And she was the Modern Mexican Woman
who rode progress down la avenida,
jumping potholes with pride.
It was sudden.
Like miracle or tragedy,
the wooden Past pushed through the steel Present,
the meeting point, her body.
The bus bent and groaned, the trolley splintered.
People lunging and screaming were thrown through windows,
slashed by gleaming shards of glass.
It was said that the thud and crunch of bones beneath wheels
was heard four streets away.
And yet, in the roar and tangle, there was quiet.
A comical poof of gold dust billowed into the air,
fluttering down with chips of red paint into pools of blood.
A wood hand-rail had freed itself and searched
for its resistant lover, hungry for her skin.
She said later that all was confusion.
Figures in the silhouette of gold dust
moved in slow motion around her
and, at first, she heard nothing,
only saw quivering fingers reaching out
and gaping mouths miming screams.
La Bailarina! La Bailarina!
And her balero was lost somewhere,
she wanted to find where her balero had gone.
Such a small thing, buried under such a mess.
La Bailarina! La Bailarina!
And Alejandro’s face appeared before her,
gaunt with blood spattered across his linen shirt.
A word was forming on his lips,
the front teeth lightly biting into the lower lip.
Frida,
he said, he whispered, don’t move. You are pierced
Don ‘t move, just stay, we are going to free you.
The handrail had entered her abdomen,
and like a conquistador’s sword quivering in the flank of the bull,
it shook her body, exiting from between her legs.
La Bailarina! La Bailarina!
She was naked.
The force of impact had ripped
the ruffles and ribbons from her body.
The fine gold powder had settled, magnetically
adhering to her skin She was covered from head to toe.
They would never forget the sight, said the witnesses:
a gold woman, surrounded by ragged strips of shining ribbon,
impaled between her legs by a handrail.
They thought she was a dancer, a ballet dancer.
With all that gold dust and ribbon,
what else could she have been
but a young rising star in a Mexican
version of Swan Lake?
La Bailarina! La Bailarina!
She said that bits of sound returned to her
as the men began to pull the splintered wood from her body.
The miming mouths reclaimed their scream and
she heard the people crying for her loss of innocence.
Chunks of flesh clung to the pole as it slowly retracted.
She said she saw her own hymen, bloody and limp,
dripping from the split wood.
La Bailarina! La Bailarina!
They cried, the onlookers, when they saw
her young hips convulse with pain.
And a young man said it was like a monstrous birth.
And a school friend recalls running frantically,
at hearing the news, to the pool hail across the street
where she lay unconscious atop a billiard table.
And the friend recalls thinking of Leda,
as described by that famous Irish poet,
after her encounter with the Swan.
And the friend remembered the poem
and how the poem was about the birth of Western culture
and how this was very much like a poem
about the birth of something else.
Kathryn Formosa
Long Beach, CA
Incus
The mercury soul malcontent,
indigent..
Glassy wave crests frozen on the tip
of my tongue, words beckon
us to a horse stall full of rose petals
and manna.
Sweet sin swollen stallion breathe
at last upon our dinner plate.
My pallet grows dull and ochre...
release my worms upon an
unsuspecting world…They
are mute and harmless, lonely
and tired.
Somewhere in an incus forge
Tomorrow’s wordless plight.
G. Hagen Hill
San Pedro, CA
Blue Corn
sun burns
blue corn
at the edge of Hopi land
lost
to the coming of white chaos,
settling on tassels,
too deep even for
blue corn
blue corn
dies
in chaos
at the edge of white
Jan Young
Santa Rosa, CA
Still Life with Frigidaire, East Rockaway, N.Y.
Inspired by the static spaces
between channels, she learns
the message of white noise:
Magnetic fields are where old cars
gather among long grasses to rust,
as magnetic waves are what draws
land bound creatures to the sea.
That you will see the secrets of other
worlds comes from the currents
that are carried in wires and similar
transmitters revealed by test patterns
affixed to certain channels.
Seeing the soft electric glow
of snow that follows transmissions,
she is drawn to dark arctic wastes
contained by Frigidaire.
Staring inside, she feels the sudden
chill of absolute zero, numbing her
frost bitten eyes, closing inside
an endless night, this all enveloping
chill.
Alan Catlin
Schenectady, NY
AFTER A READING AT THE OLD GALLERY CAFÉ
A man with a long white beard introduced himself
to me
as a professor of creative writing
at a very prestigious university.
I swallowed a chunk of cheese,
drained my glass of wine,
poured another,
and shook his hand.
This guy loved my poetry – and my presentation.
He wanted to know if I would come and read
for his class someday.
I mentioned dollars and sense -- S E N S E.
He smiled -- nervously. Noted that the university
was, at the moment, without a budget
for such an event.
I swallowed another chunk of cheese,
drained my glass of wine,
poured another.
Drained that too!
Poured another!
Drained that too!
Wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
The professor looked at me with crossed eyes
and a funny grin
before sneaking off into the crowd.
Dave Church
Providence, RI
JUAN’S CORNER
This was Juan’s corner
Incan statuette waiting for his summons
brown eyes probing the wonders of affluence
locked on the streetcorner of winds and drenching downpour
hands thrust in chino pockets
staring at the miracle of this country
great cars sliding by
promenading of children with full bellies
strutting of homes and shiny glass
soft mattresses and packed refrigerators
waiting to be chosen to strain his tortured muscles
Mestizo wife reconciling long grueling days
slashing armies of cane
sleeping alone on fronds of dead palm
stashing Juan’s dollars in the dirt floor dugout
children wondering about the mysteries of schooling
Juan wrenching moldered walls for fast-talking Gringos
smashing doomed houses into rubbled carcasses
plastering endless stands of siding
--one day Juan’s corner stood empty
exposed to the keening wail of the wind
amigos stared in silence at the curb
fear hunched in their choked guts
Juan’s wallboards stacked like cards in a shuffled deck
collapsed in a chaotic jumble
crushing Juan’s small Indian body
vacating his corner
children never to know the mysteries of words and numbers
wife sleeping forever on her bare stash of cold Gringo cash
Gerald Zipper
New York, NY
ON TELEGRAPH HILL
Black roses, flattened
bougainvillea. Cappuccino,
baguettes of bread. Sun,
like a purple iceplant of
light sucked behind
Berkeley Hills.
Sidewalk vendors
pick up glass beads,
copper. One smoothes
a shirt lime and
blood is already faded
on. rice in pots for
men in long overcoats
you know they’ve slept
in. A thin dazed woman
in white cotton could
be heading for a safari,
arms blotched, tattooed,
all tracks. Night’s
thick as soupy rice
a young girl passes
out on corners. A gold
capped tooth glows
from an alley. Hashish,
tomato soup and vomit
slither of a man’s tweed
coat that has the shape of
his bones. He crosses the
street with a shopping cart
piled with geography books,
maps, quilts, some patches
are missing from as if
the holes were windows to
new shores he and his cat
look toward. The cat
regal on neatly folded
rags that in this light
could be a silk and
velvet thrown, its leash
rhine
stone studded. Both
maybe, heading toward a beach
of palms and coconut leaves
only sun and surf lick
perhaps in Maui if
the cart floats
Lyn Lifshin
Vienna, VA
Cissuses
It was jonquil. It was plum.
It was too hot not to swim.
Before we entered,
before
we took off our clothes,
we floated
and leaned over the side
and looked
as if hands
cinched to gunwales
could ever keep us
from diving straight into
lake who held us up
two thousand feet above herself.
We are hovering specks.
We are sugar dissolving.
We are the first thought
who failed to recognize itself.
We are light waiting to fall
deeper and deeper in blue.
Thomas Robert Barnes
Tahoe Paradise, CA
The Third Perfect Day in 41 Years
I lie in the small, wooden bowl of my
sub-suburban townhouse deck
A perfect salad of trees
framed by a mimeo-blue sky
and I think this is something like peace.
I pinch myself.
No pain.
This is.
This is why my lungs still expand and contract.
This is why I am not so blind.
God's breath breezes through stifled chimes.
This is why I am not so deaf.
I despised summer before this.
Always too white, too large
now a splendid mass of arcs
and blurred angles,
absorbing gold heat,
uttering golden rays.
This is.
Not a dream.
Frances LeMoine
Merrimac, NH
plastic desert
He's the one who likes all the pretty songs,
and he likes to sing along,
and he likes to shoot his gun,
but he don't know what it means,
don't know what it means,
don't know what it means... --Kurt Cobain
Driving, I check my watch,
study the band, its interlocking metal teeth,
look at the fat veins over bones
in the back of my hand.
I am late today.
Under the freeway,
a man in rags sleeps, knees up
beside a shopping cart,
while streaks of wet drape fingers
down the wall behind him.
Dragging through the light,
I hit a puddle, hear the radio repeat:
about the revolver and the kid reloading
in the bathroom, how he smiled
while he tried to kill people.
To the right of me, cars sling by,
tire trails in steady lines pull puddles apart.
The trails intersect, match up too well:
women and men on their ways to work,
coffee mugs between their thighs,
cell phones like candy bars for breakfast,
fingers bat-batting steering wheels to a.m. tunes.
We pass Target's parking lot, the Deaf School,
a string of houses and palms, the triangle church,
not going together
together
and I think of the corners we give our children.
What, when they can't back out?
--Away from suburbia waterbottle menageries
mastications comm(p)uter play-date sex-bulimics
self-mutilators calorie-counting surgical acquirers
stair steppers wannabe tea drinkers drinking
mochas with teeth brightened soccer balls instead
the extra Saab (sobs) in the garage not sufficient
time to make time test scores huffing money
and hurt feelings sedated therapy shreds memory
brokenness no-fat hamburger trashbag recyclers?
--Away from plastic desert cabanas
without books or shoes,
without cellos playing,
without the smell of bacon
or naughty puppy footprints?
There's no one in the car to talk to, and
anyway, I can't say things precisely.
And who am I?
I flash to the afterschool-special-assembly-
farce--What Would Jesus Do With a Gun?
If you're going to shoot, use protection!
Here's a special balloon.
I turn, steer down the gantlet
of parked teacher vehicles, think-plod
Who's the angry young man get mad at?
I stop: What says it's 'he' ?
The righteous anger?
The fear?
I pull the car into its blank slot, usual,
lift my bag from the trunk.
There is clicking as I move across
the asphalt, and though my shoe-heels
sound suddenly foreign and far away,
I pass--like every third day of the week--
through the chain-link security gate.
Jo Scott Coe
Riverside, CA
a little town
out of the craters rises this
a congeries or nunnery
of hopeless delectation
out of this symbiosis
a wayward westness
Ansel Adams would have burned into this
a memory or dodged a certain blankness
Christopher Mulrooney
Los Angeles, CA
Etaples
The sun sits
smiling
in a tiny room
frozen tears upon the wall
children dancing by her bed.
I heard her laughter
saw her smile
felt her warmth beneath my face.
She showed me stories
of the sea
of love and pain
from years gone by
widows tears
at virgin's feet
when she broke their ships and took their men
of soldier sacks
cast in the mud
and fields of dragon's teeth in spring
mens' irony
Her tiny arthritic hand
held tight
my future
let go
my past.
I walk on the road
safe
for the gods have a joke too.
They love from the inside.
Anth Ginn
London, England
THOSE DAYS
Through fog and smoke a long ash crooks
at my cigarettes end.
It feels like a Hopper diner,
stark, sad eyes, a conversation stalls,
she sits steady, pieta-like in blue light.
I stare through the steam of my coffee.
Is this it, I ask, damn, is this all?
I know the smile and talk
are slight and transitory,
I know it¹s the still life that holds me,
holds me inside the frame
of another moment frozen,
frozen tight in the soft eternity
of roadsides and orange afternoons.
H. Lamar Thomas
Athens, GA
NOCTURNE
Early evening, and a bright gaggle
of thunderstorms squirms across the state,
seeding the house with rain-beads,
while I practice sweeping my mind
of all thoughts, as if mopping a dusty floor.
Suddenly, a jet pleats the silk of the night;
I open my eyes and notice my youngest cat
perched on the arm of a chair, his head
fallen forward, sleeping peacefully on his face.
Again, words and thoughts stumble in,
cluttering the clean tile of my mind
with leafy chatter and paw prints.
No need to search the moon-swizzle
of the night for luminous metaphors,
when life will deliver the perfect image
in the middle of my living room.
Laura Stamps
Columbia, SC
JUST TREKKING THROUGH
I’m sitting in my car at a pull over stop outside of Ti, NY.
The view is of the Green Mountains in the distance.
(A Blondie song playing on the radio).
Listen up folks,
None of these trees,
not a speck of this photosynthesis machine
nor these flowers were even here in 1777.
The year my German ancestor trekked across this same place
on foot.
NO tree, NO flower, NO blade of grass
not even the same blueness of sky my witness NOW.
These are mere copies of copies of copies
handed down through nature’s escalator of time
Copies of cousins and cousins and cousins
whose blood makes this soil mix into NOW.
That’s all we are,
cousins of this sky
and cousins of this single blade of grass for the next trekkers
coming through,
Years from now they’ll build a new park here
and grind our ancestral bones into pavement
Denis Robillard
Ontario, Canada
THE MYSTERY OF WATERS
The Black River moved east to the Red Sea
As August crept in on soft hands
All before a lost tribe of clowns
Carrying cartoons and sacred images
High above their heads
close to the blue sky
close to their desire.
Calliope music beckoned them enter the
Cathedral that nestled under a grand mustard tree,
As Mary Magdalen flew high above the center ring
Saint Agnes recited the seven truths
And Lucifer blew fire and ice
Ending the world as predicted by Frost.
Alice, their queen, kept watch -
Alice who knew the secret of grinning cats and wise caterpillars
Smoking dope high above the cathedral on tree limbs,
Purring to perfection in sitting meditation
dreaming of dancing mice
one minded mischief makers.
I remained silent and floated on to the Dead Sea,
where blood drops become rose buds in bleeding hearts.
Watching ash fall from the hand of an avatar
snow flakes in August
Dusting me white as talcum after baptism.
These wandering mysteries
These puzzlements of mind
Meditations on the nature of rivers and seas
Breezes that dapple my mind in sunlight at midnight.
Will you float with me?
On this river of grace,
Belly button pointing toward heaven,
Umbilical eye staring into the mysteries of love.
Charles Ries
Milwaukee, WI
Language
I've been traveling and it seems now I am somewhere.
It seems I am in a womb.
Look inside my feet and you'll find time, blood veins
and bones.
Listen to my heart and you'll hear it beating as it
did some countries and rivers ago.
In trying to speak, it speaks.
The first few countries, I was amazed,
people seemed amazed.
I was learning new languages seemingly all on my own.
Somehow, language worked.
I said, "I write," in many tongues.
I felt I could communicate with natives of any
country.
And now I'm back in the womb, not yet a citizen,
but my feet hold time.
Chaya Grossberg
Northampton, MA
the geriatric circus
my stepdad's father
passed away last week
and at his viewing
were signs of things to
come for me
canes, walkers, liver spots,
portable oxygen tanks,
creaking joints, and suits bought
years before with eyes
full of cataracts
the geriatric circus
as i told my stepbrother
but all my friends seem
to believe that i will be
one of the few to beat the odds
that i will drink, smoke,
and eat fast food until
the day i die
what a lovely thought
that must be
cheating death
but i have no such delusions
i will most likely die as
painfully as i live
hopefully, sooner than any of
my friends ever expected
JJ Campbell
Brookville, OH
WAITING AT LUCKY'S
At Lucky's, while back,
This kid played the juke box,
Bunch of rock and roll.
No one's played it since.
At Lucky's
You can see yourself,
Mirror behind the bottles--
Seagram's, Club, Black Label,
Gilbey's gin.
But at Lucky's
No one looks;
It's dark, you sip,
You sit there quiet,
Wait for the call:
Good news,
Pardon from the Governor.
Paul McGlynn
Ann Arbor, MI
His Blood So Sweet
for Alex Adams
How do you breathe
when trees are falling
and your dreams have walked away
I listened to the dead man
tell me it’s going to be okay
please, baby, please
but I don’t listen to that
dead man …
no
He’s already yesterday
and how do you
breathe
when trees
are falling
and your dreams have walked away
Come closer, come here, let me touch you
whisper something soft
before you leave
Tell me a secret
tell me something to believe
How do you breathe
when trees are falling
and your dreams have walked away
You’re drifting, boy
out of this sacred place
kiss me with your memory
and try not to forget my face
How do you breathe
when trees
are falling
and tell me secret
tell me something to believe
How do you breathe
how do you breathe
how do you
when trees
are falling.
Yuki Yoko Yoshimoto
Sacramento, CA
IN THE IBERIAN MANNER, FOR PHILOMENE
I am the flower always out of season,
the tree grimly holding the sun's last light.
Long pale staff
ending in smoke and voice.
Uninvented flesh
at the edge of your dream.
But I am he who will always
find you, in any of your clouds,
plunging upward on heavy wings
against the law of rain.
John Thomas
Heaven
PALACES AND COLONNADES, FOR JOHN THOMAS
Palaces, and colonnades, cities
Neither wholly real nor
Wholly in the mind
But I am she who will always find you
Tracing the elusive future;
Tracing the path left in the air
By tomorrow's butterfly
Through the ten thousand seasons
Of sand
Philomene Long
Heaven
Exploring Graffito
Clack clack
Aztec track
BEWARE!
Sacajawea Willamette Valley
Lewis & Clark northwest territory
80 mile inland SEASIDE turnaround
General CHAPMAN GRADE SCHOOL.
MONTECZUMA
on the handball court brick wall
RAIN RAIN SINK RISE AGAIN!
Thunderbird swamp fill
fertile heaven precise
Toltec pyramid harvest metaphysisity
sunshine debtors
annointing armour plate
wading Catholics ashore.
Swan Island Shipyard
yellow nigger trash browns!
LINCOLN HIGH Alexander Aristotle goy!
Guide & flag stake
your pincer straits kin
north star totem
over your ancestors
parrot feather gold place card
but don't tread on me!
Clack clack clackity click clack blue silver red black
PACHUCO PHOENIX!
spray paints all it was
Z crypt glyphic zorro
nexus manhole calendar bloody temple time
over the subway.
MEHEEKO!
Kllroy was here.
Ah. Some respect please.
Virgin bloody pyramid sun sacrificer
San Diego missionaries
surging with the rapids upstream.
Buena vista.
Bill Morrison
Los Angeles, CA
the dead
coyote in the
middle
of the road
tells me
it's al
buquer
que route
66 cen
tral ave
fake in
dian art
ifacts &
plenty of
real sand
the day
of the
dead dum
my w/a
cigar in
its mouth
sitting on
the old
spanish
bench in
cowboys
& indians
waits for
a street
hustler
to de
liver his
night chant
for a buck
Todd Moore
ABQ, NM
Old Houses
Occasionally we pass an empty house
With a broken stone wall;
Dry, tan bushes
Or naked wormwood visible
Through chipped old paint on gables
And I think about living there:
Canning fruit in blue bell jars;
Reading Jayne Cortez by kerosene lamp.
You say, "a coat of latex paint
(or better still, vinyl siding)
Might help a little, but Christ,
Even after a summer or work
It would still be an eyesore."
I am not thinking plastic
Or anything sold at Walmart:
I like the weathered and distressed look–
You look weathered and distressed
But I don't like being the cause.
You tell me I'm not realistic or practical.
I like my computer and VCR and
Shitzu massager an on,
Old houses like those
Never have enough outlets.
In a house like that, I tell her,
I won't need them.
Axel
Parts Unknown
All That Hitchhikin
I’m standing in the Texas panhandle in Matador on Highway 70,
thirty-one miles east of Floydada and thirty-two miles west of Paducah.
The highway is under construction, sort of busted up and I’m hitchin’
either to Albuquerque or Houston. I can’t say which city is my real home
because my entrails are touched with pain, I’m gut drunk, sad, wasteland
dead, and for some reason I feel a Lightning Hopkins blues song in my blasted
intestines ( Or is that too Texan? ). I know that nihilism has two faces: one
telling me to break things apart and the other one breaks me into pieces. All
this as the fast cars and trucks blur past. I’m dressed in jeans and a dirty
sweatshirt, and I barely can stand up as the sun melts my brain, and there
seems to be a cowl covering my eyes. I smell the shank of burning skunk
or is it burning rubber up ahead? If I could, I’d caress this highway I stand
on, or better, straddling. I think how little faith I have in America, but then
I remember On The Road and back off negative thoughts. And I ask does
some mystery grind God apart? If so, will I get ground up in the pleasure
of this action? Can I ever get enough of mysticism or amor? I want to write on
a cardboard sign, “Benares” but that would be going too far. I think of the life I left
behind, how her life and mine were vast American holes out of an Edward Hopper
painting with nothing but darkness between a marked map of both our strange
bodies. Or is it she and I were long strands of wet hair entangled in teeth at opposite
ends of a turquoise comb? Still, I don’t know which direction to go, and it takes a few
moments to think how old I am because I’m thirsty, needing at least a couple of beers
mixed with a pint of rum to make me unclouded. I stand dumbstruck, not knowing to
head east or west, but then a few sparrows fly overhead. That gives me the courage to
take 70 to Paducah, picking up 83 to Abilene, then south to Junction, hitchin’ from there
on 10 to San Antonio, then 10 all the way east to Houston. Why not Albuquerque? It’s
because Houston is farther away from her.
George Sparling
Arcata, CA
NATURE WAS
Sea-garbage vomited up to shore by a hurricance,
kelp to snap with my fingernails, jellyfish spines
in my feet, shards of beer-bottle weathered
to soft transluent copper, sometimes a human corpse;
skating around tall buildings, behind parked cars,
two older girls holding my hands until
I put each foot down sure; tag, hide and seek,
until dark, until legs purpled with cold.
The igloo I read about, tried to paint.
I though the sun must turn those huge ice blocks
some dark, oceanic blue.
"Carmine muddies cobalt," Teacher advised.
Here on the trail, bees drown the low moaning sound
of distant traffic, rusty orange fungus webs sage.
I glance up at the hawk, stop for a tiny red flower.
A man photgraphs buttercups, crouched, intent.
(from THE HOLY LETTERS copyright 2001)
Nancy Shifrin
Santa Monica, CA
FOR OSCAR
we drink at the same pub
him in the lounge
me in the beergarden
for years we never
spoke to each other
just nodded hello & goodbye
he was there all day everyday
me 2 or 3 times a week
for a few mid-morning beers
as I knocked off a letter
& maybe a poem
after a mutual friend introduced us
I began buying Oscar beers
“BILL” he’d yell
soon as I walked in
“BILL BILL” pointing to his half empty glass
& I’d buy him one
sometimes two
never expecting anything back
he was 72
he drank 25 or 30 beers a day
beer was all he had
& he lived in the nearby War Vets Home
today he wasn’t at his back corner table again
in fact I haven’t seen him for a week
which is very unusual
I ask the barmaid if she knows
what’s happened to Oscar
she says he’s in the hospital
the terminal cancer ward
she doesn’t know his last name
but she’ll try & find out
I want to write him
a goodbye letter
I can’t stop thinking about Oscar
dying of cancer as I stare
at the vacant back corner
table where he drank
daily for 26 years
I’ll miss buying him
those hard luck beers
Billy Jones
Cabooltur, Australia
Home In Bed
You are a perfect shape beside me,
each of us dozing, snoring,
snuffling through our common cold.
I drape my arm around your waist
and try to smell your hair.
It's time for more medication:
Aspirin, cough syrup, decongestant.
Propped up on an elbow
you'd surely take your pills.
I cannot will myself up from
this nest where I lay.
Your sleep is too sound.
I don't want to wake. Ever.
Robert L. Penick
Louisville, KY
The Shape of a Pear
The shape of a pear is too much
like a woman’s torso
to be eaten in public
and in summer when it’s ripe
it is so sweet
though it may leave your tongue
dry at its tip
the juice drips on your palate.
Silence is kept where secrets are
apples blushing in their native green
grow ripe and round.
peaches have a young man’s beard
and cherries bleed where
they are cut by the stone.
These silent forms keep secrets
And are eaten.
Only you who have tasted
the private form of pears
been stained by red cherries
kissed the peach
been caught between
the sweet and sour
can keep the secret.
(from Poets of the Non-Existent City –
Los Angeles in the McCarty Era, 2002, UNM Press)
Estelle Gershgoren Novak
Beverly Hills, CA
a mamaist meditation
a perfect world, etymologically speaking,
would already be extinct before our uttering
it , what, into existence? thus is beyond
our Imagining (such spectacular displays
of non-imagining notwithstanding).
but note: were it not for this imperfect world,
uncalled for yet hereby claimed—
from the as-yet-to-be grasped colossal havoc of
the winged mind to the as-yet-to-be-released
quiet calm of the grounded body—
how else blooms the ineffable?
Alan Botsford Saitoh
Kanagawa-ken, Japan
LOST IN PLACE
lost in place
(In a time)
lost where there
(Of crisis)
should be
(People must)
comfort not
(band together)
loss
(And hope)
lost
(To better)
where
(Their state)
"ignorant
(By communal)
armies"
(Action)
lost
(Without such)
neither
(Action)
here
(There is a tendency)
nor
(To sense)
there
(The self as)
lost
(Lost)
where I am mis-
(The individual)
placed
(Can do nothing)
where I do not
(But there is no)
thrive
(Guarantee)
learning
(That the group)
to live
(Will not be)
lost
(...Lost)
Jack Foley
Oakland, CA
ABOUT THE GUY WHO MAKES THIS HAPPEN
Editor and poet,RD Armstrong writes poetry and fiction when he can find the time. Mostly, he's either working on his many Lummox projects (the Lummox Journal, a monthly magazine; the Little Red Book series which is published by the Lummox Press; the LSW Newsletter, a specialized "poets market" type of newsletter) or he's repairing / painting somebody's home. His most recent books are The San Pedro Poems; Paper Heart #4 and ROADKILL.
Special thanks to the Lummox Patrons: Georgia Cox, Greg Shield & Colleen Cunningham, Anonymous, Bonnie Bechtol, John Forsha, Back In The Saddle, Leslie Yeseta and Larry Jaffe. You can become a patron too. Contact RD at the email address below.
For more information please check the links listed below.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
To submit to DUFUS read on. Themes: there are no themes (or are there?). I'm looking for poetry that is well-written. Deadlines: There are no deadlines. Isn't that convenient? Just email three poems, of 40 lines or less to lumoxraindog@earthlink.net and please no attachments. Also include a brief bio.
The Little Red Book poetry series is published by Lummox Press in the handy, pocket-sized format (48 - 56 pages) for reading on the go! Just $6 ppd (USA) or $8 ppd (Foreign) from LUMMOX (PO Box 5301, San Pedro, CA 90733-5301, USA).
On The Record is an expanding library of Poets on CDs - buy a CD and get their book for FREE! CDs are $10 USD + $1.50 postage (US & Canada) or $10 USD + $2.50 postage (world). So far: Leonard J. Cirino reading Poems of The Royal Courtesan Li Xi; RD Armstrong reading from The San Pedro Poems and ROADKILL; Mark Weber's Bombed In New Mexico; Alan Catlin reading from Death and Transfiguration Cocktail and Rick Smith reading from Lost Highway and playing some kickass harmonica, too.
 Links To Some Of The Poets Published In Present And Past Issues Of DUFUS.
 Eskimo Pie Girl
Larry Jaffe
Gerry Locklin
Christopher Mulrooney
Scott Wannberg
other Lummox poets
Cesar Chavez Tribute
The San Pedro Poems
DUFUS #3
DUFUS #4
DUFUS #5
Comments welcome
This site updated March 27, 2003
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