The Best American Poetry

Lines, November 2009 (by Mitch Sisskind)

 1.

Against all advice he opened 

A children’s furniture business;

He sold cribs, bassinettes, premium

Items such as car-shaped beds.

It was 1950. Ben Crane, Morrie Bayless,

None of them saw the bright future

For children’s furniture in the dawning

Baby boom. They said he was crazy,

But weathering the storm of expenses

That accompanies the start of a business

He began to make a very good living

And there came a night at Fritzl’s

When, having ordered finnan haddie,

He declared, ‘They said I was crazy

‘But I was crazy like a fox! Like a fox

‘I was crazy! In what manner of speaking

‘Was I crazy? Fox-like! Like a fox!

‘The craziness of the proverbial fox,

‘That was the type of my craziness.’

His name, by the way, was Leo Horwich.

 

2.

Against the prevailing winds, challenging

The conventional wisdom, he foresaw

The growth of orthodontia and financed

The construction of dental office buildings

In suburbs that, like mushrooms, sprang

Up overnight when the expressway

Opened in 1951. The truth was there

To see – for Ben Crane, for Morrie Bayless –

But only he saw the truth. Ben Crane

Smirked at him and Morrie Bayless joked

At his expense. But there came a night

At the Town & Country when he ordered

Finnan haddie and said, ‘They laughed

‘At me but now it is my turn to laugh.

‘Who’s laughing now? I’m laughing

‘All the way to the bank! It’s my turn

‘To laugh, and I’m laughing all the way

‘To the bank! All the way to the bank

‘I am laughing! To the bank! To the bank!’

His name, by the way, was Arnold Felsenfeld.

 

3.

What in life is more agreeable than

To proclaim, ‘They said I was crazy

But I was crazy like a fox’? When does

The old world seem quite so frolicsome

As at the moment a man says,

‘I laughed all the way to the bank’?

It’s sad how, in our era of diminished
Opportunity, children’s furniture stores

Exist in more-than-sufficient numbers,

And enough dental office buildings have

Already been built. Oh, very well! Not crazy

Like a fox nor laughing to the bank, I pin

My hopes on these (what shall I call them?)

Lines! Mock on, heirs of the late Ben Crane

And the late Morrie Bayless. Waiter,

I’ll have the finnan haddie if you please!

And by the way my name is Julius Jaffe.

Or perhaps my name is Lenore M. Kadison.

 

Sonnet: "He called himself Blatchford Sarnemington..." (by Mitch Sisskind)

He called himself Blatchford Sarnemington

That night they all ate pork rinds. Name from

‘The Scandal Detectives,’ Fitzgerald story

From Minnesota days. Yearning, yearning,

None better than Scott put yearning on a page

So he called himself Blatchford Sarnemington

That night they all ate pork rinds. See, he was

So frustrated craving the attention of Valkyria

As she called herself, young Cuban fem

Going to Northwestern. Later they married

But by then he called himself Lou Belmont,

$$$ was the object of desire, nay pussy,

Nay pork rinds, nay progress by any means,

And he read Scott’s last letter, to the IRS.

Poem: Lucky For Us (by Mitch Sisskind)

Lucky for us she's always love to get naked!

Watching her jog by canal, she gets butt naked,

Runs around, also giving peeks while stretching,

All the while people jogging by!  Home, she picks

A vibrator and then tries out the Vikbraking Toy! 

She’s horny again once more in the bathroom!

She loves it!  Very vocal about her experiences

And she shares it with us in energetic manner! 

Then in a little bikini she masturbates over again

Using the very same toy combination until she

Is too sore to continue!  At an Italian restaurant

She continues to have fun flashing her breasts

And licking cream off of them! Then she wears

A sexy black dress & heels and does a dance

To her favorite music! It turns into striptease

Until she is completely naked! Then she has

Amazing experience with the Vikbraking Toy

That puts her in a crazy multi-orgasmic state!

 

Lucky for us this petite girl at busy sports park

Practicing soccer, we notice she isn't shy at all,

Flashes her breasts right there!  As busy as it is,

She gives us peeks between her legs then juggles

The soccer ball topless! Then even more risky

She takes her shorts off and gives us perfect butt! 

Running around naked, she gets horny and uses

Two vibrators to masturbate her strong orgasms,

And even better she does it again on a glass table!

She's enthusiastic showing off her 'mature' side,

First giving her feet a nice massage with cream,

And teases us with her shoe heel!  At fancy resort

She poses for us in sexiest manner, masturbates

With her shoe heel right there!  Deep penetration

Leads to another masturbation which brings her

To three orgasms, then she tries a larger toy

That barely fits inside her! A little lunch break

And she's back home for masturbation to orgasm!

 

Lucky for us while sleeping naked on the covers,

Her man plays with her cute butt then uses vibrator

On her and gives her a very hard breast massage! 

It leads to this girl masturbating again, then going

For fun skinny dip in the pool, then she puts on

Some cute panties and stuffs deep inside her

And then slowly pulls them out! She discovers

The powerful Vikbraking Toy, she masturbates

With the Toy to another super-strong orgasm!

She goes out with only her lingerie and heels,

Poses for us at a resort, risking getting caught

In the beautiful locale! She visits another park

For more of her teasing and finds herself teasing

Another guy who gets real pleasure out of it! 

Then at nearby tourist area she's teasing again,

And going to adult toy store she picks out a toy,

Has a bubble bath with hard toy penetration and

More masturbation on a bed in cute red nightie!

 

Lucky for us the Girl Next Door returns, we see

Her in the cute hairdo then watch her try on new

Summer dresses! Finding open area by a resort

She takes out her pink vibrator and masturbates

To a nice, strong, natural orgasm, walks topless,

Then takes her dress off to parade nude at resort

And back home wears the cutest lingerie & heels,

Finds the Vikbraking Toy and uses it like a toy

And vibrator at the same time to have an orgasm!

Some flashing at restaurant and back to the house

For the two vibrators she used before to become

A double-stuffing experiment!  Getting horny from

The experiment she goes to the full length mirror

Then watching herself masturbate to orgasm,

And that evening she's doing one last experiment!

At the restaurant she talks about her education,

Speaks some Turkish and flashes her breasts,  

Taking three vibrators inside her shocks even she!

 

Lucky for us we see the cute blonde in purple dress

walk by! She smiles for us and flashes breasts and

Risking it further she fingers herself on the steps

Of this place and shows off her butt! Going in store,

She flashes again and then videotapes herself

Trying on several outfits in tiny changing rooms!

Going home, she has a very special silver wand

She uses to masturbate to nice long strong orgasm!

However, not enough the first time, she masturbates

Again to her second even bigger stronger orgasm! 

Goes to the park and tries to masturbate but is caught

By a female shopper nearby!  Another spot she finally

gets to strip down in a sexy way, fully naked outdoors!

Indoors, putting hair in pigtails, she gives bubble butt

A nice hard massage and then moves to her breasts!

She gets intimate with us and with the introduction

Of the Vikbraking Toy she walks into a full elevator

And we watch an orgasm! Lucky for us! Good wishes!

 

Three Sonnets (by Mitch Sisskind)

1.
I'll drive you to the airport.
Get in the car and I'll
Drive you to the airport.
I'll drive you to the airport.
You want to go someplace?
I'll drive you to the airport.
Come on, let's take a ride,
Pack your bags and
I'll drive you to the airport.
I don't care where you go,
I'll buy the ticket. Seriously,
Because I've had it up to here.
I'll drive you to the airport.
Just don't come back.

2.
Do me a favor. Shut your mouth.
Do us both a favor. Keep your
Mouth shut for twenty minutes.
See if you can accomplish that.
Do me a favor and do yourself
A favor. Twenty minutes is all
I'm asking. Shut your mouth
For twenty minutes. Ten minutes!
Five minutes! Is that too much
To ask? Five minutes of silence.
Is that an impossibility? A fish
On the wall -- you never see
A fish on the wall with its mouth
Shut. Which tells you what?

3.
I'm sick and tired of it.
I've had it. I've had enough
Of it. It's gone on too long,
It’s taken on a life of its own..
It never stops. I literally
Can't take another minute of it.
I'm going to lose my mind if
I have to listen to it again.
Jesus Christ, it never stops
From morning til night,
Day after day year after year.
Do I deserve this? Have I done
Something to bring this on myself?
Oh my God! Dear God help me!

Mitch Sisskind at the Hammer Museum in LA - November 4 at 7:00 PM - Free

Mitch Sisskind is the author of two books of short fiction, Visitations and Dog Man Stories. He edited The Stud Duck, a literary magazine. Like Ludwig Wittgenstein, he does not care what he eats as long as it's the same thing every day. Like the late Robert Irsay, who made a fortune in the air conditioning business and owned the Indianapolis Colts, he tries to address everyone as "tiger." Like Rocky Balboa, he knows what's important is not how hard you can hit but how hard you can get hit and still keep going. But he does not know how hard he can get hit, yet. His poem "Like a Monkey" is included in The Best American Poetry 2009. The Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd, Westwood, CA Details here.

Gerry Spence, poet and lawyer: "Is there anyone I wouldn't take as a client? Well, I'd never represent a banker."

Wyoming attorney Gerry Spence (b. 1929) never lost a criminal case in more than fifty years. Though he's no Hoss Cartwright John Ashbery, you can read some of his poems and other work on his blog: http://gerryspence.wordpress.com.

Origins: a poem by Shaindel Beers

My parents were lonely geniuses.
Their letters to each other—heartbreaking.
I found them in a plastic bag in a closet,
my twentieth year, when my mom was in jail,
and I was trying to sort out the life they’d given
my siblings and me. You were the smartest person
I’d ever met they’d each written to the other.
But they couldn’t function like other parents.
It was all yelling and name-calling
and eventually knives and guns. And I grew up,
wondering where smart would get you.
But it always seemed better than the alternative—
my friends, whose parents had plenty of love
but no books, no imagination, a limited vocabulary
with which to rip out the heart of the beloved.

 

This was written for April's National Poetry Month “Poem-A-Day Challenge.” Shaindel Beers' most recent book is “A Brief History of Time.” She lives in eastern Oregon.

Handsome Movie Men (by Mitch Sisskind)

It was suggested to me that, as a sort of continuation of Mark Strand's posting about beautiful women in Hollywood, I could write something about attractive men. It's an interesting opportunity. For one thing, I think of myself as a male lesbian -- with that identity's idiosyncratic response to men. I'm not turned on by them either as objects of desire or of identification. But maybe that gives me a useful objectivity about what makes men attractive to other people, especially to women. And I do wonder about how that works.

To get our feet wet in this vast topic, I will consider the film Giant -- in my opinion a gigantic masterpiece that deserves much fuller discussion than it can get here. In this film we meet a number of actors whom I believe most people would consider attractive in their different ways: Rock Hudson, James Dean, Dennis Hopper, and even Sal Mineo. But I'll speak only of the two male leads, Rock Hudson and James Dean.

Rock Hudson initially presents as an old fashioned "hunk," though without the grudgingly suppressed violence that's apparent in the hunk of hunks, John Wayne. Hudson is big and strong, rich, good looking, and doesn't seem burdened by too much intelligence. He's a fairly conventional handsome man. I believe audiences of all eras would have recognized him as such, whether on stage or screen.

But James Dean is something very different. He's not physically strong. He looks down at the floor. He sometimes has a kind of stammer. He seems brittle, breakable.

In these two characters, appearing in the 1950s, we have avatars of both the past and future attractive man. True, James Dean-style characters have always been around. Rimbaud was a good one: "I've lost my life though sensitivity." But they were rarely official leading players. The years after Giant saw the ascendancy in pop culture of the skinny, sometimes even flaccid attractive and sensitive male. It really went into orbit with Lennon and McCartney. Meanwhile, the bulky hunk a la Rock Hudson has been devalued in the heterosexual marketplace.

You have to understand that for men in the 1950s the hunk seemed like what you had to be or at least had to want to be. In the famous "Charles Atlas" ad on the back of comic books, the skinny guy got sand kicked in his face by the muscle man -- so he had to become a muscle man to win back the girl. After James Dean, the skinny guy gets sand kicked in his face and then he gets laid. 

There's a lot to say about Giant, and we all know that Rock was gay and James Dean was "everything." In fact, the film is much more in touch with these ambiguities than I may have suggested above. In one of the final scenes, Rock the hunk gets in a fistfight with a bully -- and he loses! He gets sand kicked in his face! "Quel étonnement!" (Flaubert) What's more, Elizabeth Taylor loves him now more than ever, or maybe loves him for the first time. She says something like, "I've never seen you so strong as when you got punched by that gorilla." It's a wonderful scene, and a forward-looking one, though maybe we're now in a retro Don Draper era. Whatever, dudes. Onward.

"The Burning of Los Angeles" -- view from my street (by Mitch Sisskind)

Per the focus of this site, i always try to give a literary slant to things. So let's recall the painting from "Day of the Locust" ---->>

Mitch Sisskind presents a poem by Erika Moya

A Trail Leading Back  

an old sage once told me that when you find someone you like, you take them by the ankles and you shake them. all their good qualities, the things you fell in love with them for, will come out of their pockets and fall onto the floor. you grab these things, he said spreading his arms wide, grab them and you take them to the bank. you get yourself one of those fancy safety deposit boxes they have way in the back, and you take these good qualities of theirs, lock them up, and hide the key. hide the key, he whispered, because there will be dark times. times when you don't exactly recall why you are with this person, this stranger. you will wake in the middle of the night, confused because you don't remember the person you are sleeping next to. days will pass when neither of you have uttered one word to the other. when this happens you are going to have to find the key to the safety deposit box. once you find the key, you are going to have to get to the bank, and unlock that box. look inside it and remember. it won't make sense at first, because remember you two are strangers. but once it does it will be like a baby’s song, a string of vowels, devoid of all consonants, like bubbles rising up into the sky and leaving a trail. a trail leading back.

###

Erika Moya is a painter and writer. Her work has appeared in Qaartsiluni, the Smoking Poet, the Holly Rose Review, SN Review, the Toronto Quarterly, and Mosaic: Art and Literary journal of the University of California, Riverside. She attends the MFA program of the University of North Carolina Wilmington.