The Best American Poetry

Joanna Fuhrman: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Poetry Reading

 

The mustached cowboy-hatted thrice-divorced

old-man poet famous for sleeping with flaxen-haired

(or was it flax-seed eating) quote-unquote

nubile graduate students is at the podium

reading his poem personifying a wedding dress—

how sad it is, all alone in a dusty closet, how

it longs to be laid on a funeral pyre or set ablaze

next to the replica of Plath and Hughes’ robin’s-

egg-blue Terra Cruiser gas range, or was it     

the neglected moonlit member of the old man

poet “breaking into blossom” or recoiling

from the memory of time passing faster than

the dust can settle on his brand-new Honda

Civic LX or ranch-style remodeled sunroom?

The audience is trying to remember what

ingredients they need to pick up for tomorrow’s

paella, what that email said about the time

of that meeting with Suzanne about assessment.

They are alternately trying to remember

if they remembered to order that Minecraft book

for a nephew’s 8^th birthday party and worrying

if their Facebook-level “friends” notice that

their purple cat socks clash with their scuffed

burgundy clogs, and at a certain point, the poem

has gone on for so long no one can tell if

the old-man poet is still personifying that

wedding dress or if a headless wedding dress

has taken his place at the podium. We look up

from the cell phones we are hiding in our laps,

and there it stands—smoky and lacy

in front of the glowing microphone

in the corner of the basement bookstore,

104 miles from the nearest artist colony,

the flaming dress is burning like a 12-hour

candle, or like the lost poetry of an elderly

Rimbaud written on the slats of sunken ships,

and the dress itself has grown a mouth

and in the middle of its flames its lips

belt out a new poem, about fake

cowboy poets, how sad they are, how alone.

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Joanna Fuhrman is an assistant teaching professor in Creative Writing at Rutgers University, and the author of six books of poetry, most recently To a New Era. Her next book, Data Mind, a collection of surreal, darkly comic prose poems about the internet, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. After publishing with them since she was a teen, she recently became editor at Hanging Loose Press.

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                                          Lorette C. Luzajic, The Blood Jet Is Poetry---Sylvia Plath, acrylic, collage on canvas, 2022

Kit Robinson: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Eric Breitbard

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This Poem

 

This poem is incredible
You should immediately memorize it and tell it to all your friends
If you read this poem over and over
You will be better able to read and understand other poems
Any poem!
Life goes on and off
Death goes off and on
Shit happens
Just like in this poem
Which is like an elixir or vaccine

Sometimes this poem is like overhearing a conversation in the next yard
A moment of relaxation
In your otherwise busy day
Other times it’s more like thinking about something
Then thinking about something else
It never stops
Even when interrupted by a passing train
In that sense, this poem is immortal
In so far as it is always on the move
To no particular end

When you dream a poem
The poem is often odd
Weird, asyntactic or wild
This poem is totally normal
It teaches one how to live normally
Under the most abnormal of conditions
Put one foot in front of the other
Is how the ancestors put it
They even put it into this poem
So that anyone would be able to see what this poem of our life on earth is made of

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Kit Robinson is a Bay Area poet, writer, and musician. He is the author of Quarantina (Lavender Ink, 2022), Thought Balloon (Roof, 2019), Leaves of Class (Chax, 2017), Marine Layer (BlazeVOX, 2015), and 20 other books of poetry. His essays on poetics, art, travel, and music appear online at Jacket2, Open Space and Nowhere. He plays Cuban tres guitar in the charanga band Calle Ocho.

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                                                                Autobiography, collage by Ray DiPalma ca. 2015

A poem from Tony Hoagland on his birthday [ed. Terence Winch]

 

My Father’s Vocabulary

 

In the history of American speech,

he was born between “Dirty Commies” and “Nice tits.”

 

He worked for Uncle Sam,

and married a dizzy gal from Pittsburgh with a mouth on her.

 

I was conceived in the decade

between “Far out” and “Whatever”;

 

at the precise moment when “going all the way”

turned into “getting it on.”

 

Sometimes, I swear, I can feel the idioms flying around inside my head

like moths left over from the Age of Aquarius.

 

Or I hear myself speak and it feels like I am wearing

a no-longer-groovy cologne from the seventies.

 

In those days I was always trying to get a rap session going,

and he was always telling me how to clean out the garage.

 

Our last visit took place in the twilight zone of a clinic,

between “feeling no pain” and “catching a buzz.”

 

For that occasion I had carefully prepared

a suitcase full of small talk

 

—But he was already packed and going backwards,

with the nice tits and the dirty commies,

 

to the small town of his vocabulary,

somewhere outside of Pittsburgh.

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For more on Tony Hoagland (19 Nov 1953--23 Oct 2018):

Wikipedia

Poetry Foundation

 

 

Maureen McLane: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Laura M. Slatkin, 2016 Paris

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Belfast

 

Your velvet hills came to me

last night in the pool

how they hugged the fraught city

the pubs filled and buzzing

the Europa unbombed now for years.

Your political murals are kitsch

and history’s a ditch

for lying if we let                                                                   

the gravediggers

name us. Let’s bury

our pseudonyms                     

all undisclosed.

Was Scarlett O’Hara’s father

a blustering Ulsterman

or was he a peasant                                       

like granddad from Wicklow

tender and fond amidst the riot                    

and kind to his slaves

but for the obvious?               

White people are weird

with their vitamin D

and sunravaged skin.

So far from an equator

it’s hard to walk the line        

in a cleaved world.                                        

Orange, green, navy blue

the colors are weapons

as were some horses                                     

in the 19^th century.                             

Freed by machines

see how they race

on fragile ankles—

beauty a late flower

of disuse. Your storefronts

were boarded, your university

Victorian, the linen quarter

defunct. The solid brick

that shelters us unmortared

smashed a window.

Your sky hung low your beer

rode high your visiting Masons

sober and punctual.

A Days Inn here

is a Days Inn anywhere

but for the marchers gathering

their ribbons’ gaud at odds                                        

with their drawn gaunt faces

shut like a purse

around an old watch

that still keeps time

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Maureen N. McLane is a poet, memoirist, critic, and educator. She has published seven books of poetry, including This Blue, Finalist for the National Book Award. She is also the author of an experimental hybrid of memoir and criticism (My Poets), two monographs on British romantic poetics, and numerous essays on romantic-era and contemporary literature and culture. Her poems have been translated into Italian, French, Greek, Spanish, and Czech. Her most recent book is More Anon: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021); her next book, What You Want: poems, will be out in spring 2023 from FSG. She is the Henry James Professor in English and American Letters at New York University.  [“Belfast” is from This Blue, FSG 2014]

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     Belfast mural

Richie Hofmann: Pick of the Week [ed.Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Male Beauty

 

I bought a bag of hard green pears today.

I came home and sat in our room

listening to music for hours,

solo piano, things from France, from the beginning

of the century.

When we were very young, your forgiveness

humiliated me. I knew

you would be asleep when I got back.

It is night outside

and raining. It is the same night

that fills the ruins.

You are naked, drowsy, lost. Stay like that.

In my favorite recordings,

you can hear the pianist breathing.

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Richie Hofmann’s new book of poems is A Hundred Lovers, published by Alfred A. Knopf. He is the author of Second Empire (2015), and his poetry appears recently in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and The Yale Review. The recipient of Ruth Lilly and Wallace Stegner fellowships, he teaches at Stanford University.

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                                                Troy Caperton, Sleeping Endymion. 2016

"Band Practice" [by Terence Winch]

                Band Practice

We have three bottles on the kitchen table.

One is filled with the music of a hundred old hornpipes

in the key of D that no one plays anymore. We drink

and play. Pretty soon they’re no longer hornpipes,

but tricky little reels from long-dead masters

remembered by no one but us. We play them

and they are like nothing anyone has ever heard

before now. Oh, the ins and outs and ups and downs

of them, like an old song the jolly ploughman

sings to the fair maiden at midnight under her

window, enticing her out for a forbidden fling

that will change her life forever. But pretty soon

all that’s left is an old waltz that we drag along

the living room floor by one foot till it falls apart 

before we even figure out the second half of it.

We never even get to the other two bottles.

"An Irish Halloween Blessing": On Terence Winch's Birthday

 

On Terence Winch's Birthday

 

Isn't it beautiful? Johann Zoffany's painting

of a production of Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, 1770,

and Terence sent me the image to accompany

the note he writes each Sunday to introduce

his pick of the week to a select circle of smart

and sophisticated readers, a different note 

each Sunday with a different image, each

as compelling as this one, so I start with it

in anticipation of November 1st, his birthday,

(and that of Glen Terence Hartley, agent of Astrophil and Stella).

 

Anticipation can blend celebration and collaboration

so I ask the man himself for ideas such as Samhain,

which, he explains, is pronounced "sow [rhymes with "now"]

 

OK, Terence. Take it away.  -- DL

 

What is Samhain?
The ancient Celts believed the year was divided into two parts, the lighter half in the summer and the darker half in the winter. Samhain was the division between these halves – the end of the Harvest, and the time when the veil between our world of the living and the world of the dead was at its thinnest.

Oíche Shamhna (October 31) is Halloween and Lá na Marbh (November 1) is the Day of the Dead, or All Saints Day when those who have passed away are remembered.

An Irish Halloween Blessing

At All Hallow's Tide, may God keep you safe
From goblin and pooka and black-hearted stranger,
From harm of the water and hurt of the fire,
From thorns of the bramble, from all other danger,
From Will O' The Wisp haunting the mire;
From stumbles and tumbles and tricksters to vex you,
May God in His mercy, this week protect you.

 

For Annie Finch's 1997 poem "Samhain," which she defines as "the Celtic Halloween," click here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53066/samhain

 

KC Trommer: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Off the Roosie

    after O'Hara

I get off the 7 and head home, past the Chase and the Jackson Heights penguin

            that, last week, someone dressed as a bunny, and I’m thinking

of Frankie’s I-do-this-I-do-that poems, and my phone is dead again and

            I can’t afford to replace it. All I want to hear is Spoon

singing got no regard for the thing you don’t understand

            but maybe, as Lorna said, it’s a gift and there’s a poem across the street

waving Yoo hoo! Over here! and trying very hard to get

            my attention. I get onto 37th, near what’s left of the Brunson Building

after the fire on Easter Monday and I head past the Met (not that one)

            which they renamed Foodtown but which Honor and Joe and I will

always call the Met (not that one), and then a left onto 77th

            and past our coffee shop where Afsal stands outside, talking, but

for once does not say hello even though he looks

            straight at me, and it’s fine, I walk past the Berkeley and over 35th Ave., and

I guess I’m home, considering that my keys have opened

            the door even before I realized I had them in my hand, and everything is

where I left it, even in the bedroom where I keep waking alone quite

            suddenly to find—yes, I left you. You’ve never even been here.

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KC Trommer is the author of We Call Them Beautiful (Diode Editions, 2019) and The Hasp Tongue (dgp, 2014) and is founder of the online audio project QUEENSBOUND. Since 2018, she has collaborated with the Grammy Award-winning composer Herschel Garfein on a song cycle based on poems from her first collection. Since 2020, she has curated and run the Red Door Series, a reading and meditation series at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Jackson Heights, Queens. She has been poet in residence on Governors Island since 2021, first through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s COVID-19 Response Residency Program, then through Works on Water, and now through the NYU Gallatin WetLab. She is the Director of Communications at NYU Gallatin and lives in Jackson Heights with her son.   [To hear KC Trommer reading this poem, click here.]

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                                        1941 photo showing 37 Av W. at 90th St Jackson Heights Queens New York City

Amaud Jamaul Johnson: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Spirit of the Dead Watching

"Men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman.”

                                                            —Jean Toomer

Like so many stones, a handful

of jasper or black opal scattered

along the banks of the Papenoo,

 

Gauguin has fixed his eye upon

a native girl working among the women.

She twists and beats the wash dry

 

for her mother, readying the bundles

to be carried back to their village,

and Gauguin is in love again.

 

Long from those indifferent hours,

long from the doors of the Maison du jouir

and the affected gaze of his mistresses.

 

In this paradise, all of his desires

collapse into color, become baskets

of guava, plantain, and avocado.

 

Tonight, he will offer her chocolate

and hold a red silk scarf before the fire.

Beneath banyan, palm, and sweet gum,

 

he will try to divine the body’s secret,

unburden himself of the thought of history

and paint his language into their silences.

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Born and raised in Compton, California, Amaud Jamaul Johnson is the author of three poetry collections, Imperial Liquor (Pitt Poetry Series 2020), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award;  Darktown Follies (Tupelo Press 2013), winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and Red Summer (Tupelo Press 2006), winner of the Dorset Prize.

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Paul Gauguin, Spirit of the Dead Watching, 1892, oil on burlap mounted on canvas, 116.05 x 134.62 x 13.34 cm (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY).

Elisa Gabbert: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Adalena Kavanagh

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Bright & Distant Objects

 

I read a headline that said, “Human hair behind pigeons’ lost toes, study finds.”

I thought it meant that pigeons were growing human hair. . . behind their toes, their lost toes?

I felt sick with fear.

I read a headline that said, “Just thinking about bright objects changes the size of your pupils.”

So how do we know that we’re actually experiencing anything?

How do we know that we’re not just thinking about objects, bright and distant? Concepts? The future?

What do we know of “the actual”?

If you think about greyhounds, your pulse rate goes down.

I am thinking about 16 Psyche, a metallic asteroid so massive it exerts gravitational disturbances on other asteroids.

Some speculate it’s composed of gold and platinum, which would make it worth “quintillion dollars,” or billions of times all the money on Earth.

In these terms everything in the universe is money, a concept humans made up, like emotions.

In the future, objects in the universe will be so far apart that distant civilizations could never discover each other, even theoretically.

They could not even think about each other.

Sometimes, during a period of dread, I momentarily forget the thing I’m dreading, but continue to feel the dread.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m about to remember something, but the memory never arrives—just the all-consuming feeling of about to.

Or the memory has arrived, but it’s a memory of nothing, with nothing to be about.

The feeling of pure, empty remembering.

If things are just themselves, what do we know of things?

The moon? Clouds? Herons?

Are they decorative objects?

Details on the surface of the actual?

What is a human skull worth—really, what is the cost?

I want to purchase a human skull.

I want to know what happens to desire when you’re dead—should your desires be respected?

You can have your ashes embedded in a record, so your survivors can listen to your death.

You can turn all the carbon in your body into artificial diamonds—you can want that.

My friend the undertaker wanted to be turned into a diamond, then embedded in his own skull, a decorative object.

An undertaker takes the body under, a coincidence of language. (It’s just a euphemism: an undertaking.)

What you wanted, once you’re dead, is the real without feeling.

Desires with no one to want them.

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Elisa Gabbert is the author of six collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently Normal Distance (out from Soft Skull in September 2022) and The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays (FSG, 2020), a New York Times Editors' Pick and finalist for the Colorado Book Award. She writes the On Poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared recently in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and The Believer.

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                         Jacques-Laurent Agasse (1767- -1849), Nine Greyhounds in a Landscape, oil on canvas, ca. 1807

 

In the new "Southern Review": Poems by Terence Winch

Fallen World 

You never cry anymore. The trees don’t make
you weep. The baseball season has almost
gone missing, but you aren’t really concerned.
You can’t go anywhere. There is a world of free
love, grocery stores, off-track betting shops,
and farmers markets. But that world has
slipped into another dimension, like when
you hang a jacket you got as a kid in your
closet and it turns into an old man’s
three-piece suit a half century later.

I am an absentee voter. I am an absentee
drunk. I assault my senses on a daily basis,
but nothing can open up the sky
again for me and you, no one can tell
us we are free to go. We get carry-out.
We get lonely and scared. No one can
open up the past and let it flow right
into the present the way it’s always
done before. Instead, it’s stuck back there
in the good old days. I blow a kiss to
the priests and rabbis, I genuflect to
the babies and bathing beauties. We will
see you soon, I hope, when the trees
remember the names of every fallen leaf.

-- Terence Winch

Two other poems by Terence Winch appear in the journal's Autumn 2022 issue (edited by Jessica Faust). The issue also includes a translation of Friedrich Hölderlin's magnifcent "Bread and Wine,"  which begins with this stanza:

The city’s asleep; on streets lit by lamplight,
      Carriages glide stealthily, with torches ablaze.
Men return from work, reflect on the day’s doings --
      Who’s in, who’s out, who’s leading, who’s losing --
Happy to be home; gone are the grapes and flowers
      Of the midday market; the craftsmen’s work is done;
But from distant gardens comes the sound of strings;
      Perhaps lovers are at play, or a man alone dreams
Of friends in distant places, or his own boyhood. Fresh
      Water flows freely and bathes the fragrant flower beds.
In the dimming light of evening, bells ring
      And the dutiful watchman calls out the hours.
Now wafts a breeze that touches the crest of the grove --
      And look! The shadow of our earth, the moon,
Rises without fanfare; the phantoms of the night come,
          The sky full of stars indifferent to human kind,
The astounding glow of night, a stranger among us,
          High over mountain peaks, with sad glamour.  

Grace Cavalieri's Milestone Birthday [Terence Winch]

Happy 90th birthday to the extraordinary & indefatigable Grace Cavalieri, an inspiration to all who know her. Poet, playwright, painter, and long-time host of “The Poet and the Poem” interview program from the Library of Congress, Grace deserves all the love she asks for.

 

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This Poem Is Asking for Your Love

This poem is not usually like this
I don’t know what came over it
It’s mostly violet under the sun
with a large yellow parasol and a pond
with a center that never freezes
I swear I had no idea
I’m so used to trees of hearts and
cherries within its branches
I can’t imagine
what woke this poem up
with a truth I never wanted
It called out the tower window and said
I was alone
That in itself is a morbid lie
I have long shadows in Autumn and clouds
anytime there is a sky
In fact everything was going so well until
this poem wanted to undress me
and bring back my love
and hold me close and rub
my forehead when I had fever
It had no idea what trouble could come
from this so I wrote it
then I ran from it
now I can erase it
to show I never needed it after all
because don’t you know, Poem,
if you have to ask for something
it’s no gift.

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                                                                                Autobiography, mixed media, by Grace Cavalieri

Jack Skelley: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jack Skelley, photo by Gary Leonard

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Green Goddess

 

Who made the salad

Whose tangy vinegar made me wince

Who played pouty Venus to my impudent Caesar

Who taught me to renounce meat

Who flowed forth lubricants

Who performed dark sacraments

Whose tart shrub tangled my tongue

Who with unctuous poses oiled me

Who received my verdant sacrifice

Who, as I reclined panting, poured herself into her dressing

Who lured me to the garden and dragged me into deep greens

Who instructed me on the use of the proper fork

Who inserted an oblong cucumber

Who shredded slender carrot sticks

Whose burning bush consumed the sky god’s timbers, shaking his heavens to the rafters

Who roused me in damp chambers, dousing reasonable fires to consume knowledge raw

Who at the crack of the vernal equinox, broke seasoned bread into bite-sized croutons

Who parted beet-red vestments

Who swelled my painted cave-beast proud and pregnant

Who put me in the red-pepper pink

Whose celestial power I would enviously drink

Who succored me when I lay pallid

Who made the salad

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Jack’s Skelley’s “Green Goddess” appears in his latest collection, Interstellar Theme Park: New and  Selected Writing (BlazeVOX books). Other books include: Monsters (Little Caesar Press), Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson (Fred & Barney Press), and Fear of Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e), spring 2023). He is also songwriter and guitarist for psychedelic surf band Lawndale which just released a new album, Twango.

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    “Product Placement”—one of nine collages by Erin Alexander for Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing by Jack Skelley.

Laura Orem: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Bald

 

Remember, remember that boy

who could not love you

because you were not pretty,

whose terrible honesty you’ve carried

for thirty years, the truth you mined from him

like some strange gemstone made of your

own desperation that you still wear

around your neck.

 

And now this boy, your boy, who carefully wields

the electric razor until, stroke by stroke,

your head is shaven, austere as a nun’s,

beauty or lack of it as irrelevant as it is to God. This is

about power. This is about mess. This is what you do

to claim some purchase on this absurd slide

down a hill of talus looking for meaning

or Jesus or some way to make sense.

The boy reminds you as he shifts

to a disposable razor and, surgically careful,

scrapes away the tiniest stubble, black and gray

as a prophet’s beard. Your choice, he says. My choice,

like forcing truth from another boy thirty years ago.

See, says my son. Look. It’s not so bad.

You can stand it. You already have.

Stand it some more.

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Laura Orem is a writer, artist, and educator. Currently a board member of the Baltimore Wisdom Project, a multi-faceted education program for inner city youth, she taught writing for many years at Goucher College. She is the author of two books of poetry, Castrata and Resurrection Biology.  She lives in Palm Coast, Florida.

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This transformed image of the iconic Mona Lisa from a 2013 poster is the “perfect emblem of the upheaval that cancer brings with it, the enormity of its impact on the life of a person and of the inestimable stakes,” says the National Cancer Association Foundation of Italy, a nonprofit organization that provides free palliative care and pain management services to cancer patients throughout Italy.  

 

 

Diane Burns's "Sure You Can Ask Me a Personal Question" [ chosen by Terence Winch]

 

I can't remember when I first encountered this poem.  I know I stumbled on it accidently, I think while doing some on-line research during my days as an employee of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.  We had launched a poetry feature called "Pulling Down the Clouds"  for our membership magazine, and I was always on the lookout for interesting Native work to run as the focus of the feature.  

I knew immediately I wanted this poem in the magazine.  I loved its directness, its snarly, unapologetic, in-your-face attitude. Its completely sophisticated, contemporary use of language.  This was not work that catered to white assumptions and stereotypes: just the opposite, in fact.  Hers is a complex voice in which humor, bitterness, and hipness all coexist in service to the poem. This was a voice like that of many of my Indian friends and colleagues, but one rarely heard by the non-Native world (at least beyond the pages of a Sherman Alexie book).     

Further investigation revealed that the poem was written in 1989 and that Diane Burns, a Lac Courte Oreilles/Chemeheuvi, was born in 1957 and had passed away in 2006. She "first emerged," we told our readers, "as a powerful literary voice in the 1970s working as a poet and model in New York City. Burns’s first and only book of poetry, Riding the One-Eyed Ford (Contact II Publications, 1981), further established her reputation as a unique talent by challenging Native American stereotypes through sharp wit and honesty. In the 1980s, Burns joined a circle of poets and writers in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, reading her work at the renowned Bowery Poetry Club and Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery." 

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Sure You Can Ask Me A Personal Question

How do you do?
No, I am not Chinese.
No, not Spanish.
No, I am American Indian, Native American.

No, not from India.
No, not Apache
No, not Navajo.
No, not Sioux.
No, we are not extinct.
Yes, Indian.

Oh?
So that's where you got those high cheekbones.
Your great grandmother, huh?
An Indian Princess, huh?
Hair down to there?
Let me guess. Cherokee?

Oh, so you've had an Indian friend?
That close?

Oh, so you've had an Indian lover?
That tight?

Oh, so you've had an Indian servant?
That much?

Yeah, it was awful what you guys did to us.
It's real decent of you to apologize.
No, I don't know where you can get peyote.
No, I don't know where you can get Navajo rugs real cheap.
No, I didn't make this. I bought it at Bloomingdales.

Thank you. I like your hair too.
I don't know if anyone knows whether or not Cher
is really Indian.
No, I didn't make it rain tonight.

Yeah. Uh-huh. Spirituality.
Uh-huh. Yeah. Spirituality. Uh-huh. Mother
Earth. Yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Spirituality.

No, I didn't major in archery.
Yeah, a lot of us drink too much.
Some of us can't drink enough.

This ain't no stoic look.
This is my face.
__________________

For more information on Burns, check out this obituary. I don't know if this is Burns herself reading the poem in this clip, but perhaps someone else out there would know.

Joe Wenderoth: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

___________________________________________________________________

My Life

after Henri Michaux

Somehow it got into my room.

I found it, and it was, naturally, trapped.

It was nothing more than a frightened animal.

Since then I raised it up.

I kept it for myself, kept it in my room,

kept it for its own good.

I named the animal, My Life.

I found food for it and fed it with my bare hands.

I let it into my bed, let it breathe in my sleep.

And the animal, in my love, my constant care,

grew up to be strong, and capable of many clever tricks.

One day, quite recently,

I was running my hand over the animal's side

and I came to understand

that it could very easily kill me.

I realized, further, that it would kill me.

This is why it exists, why I raised it.

Since then I have not known what to do.

I stopped feeding it,

only to find that its growth

has nothing to do with food.

I stopped cleaning it

and found that it cleans itself.

I stopped singing it to sleep

and found that it falls asleep faster without my song.

I don't know what to do.

I no longer make My Life do tricks.

I leave the animal alone

and, for now, it leaves me alone, too.

I have nothing to say, nothing to do.

Between My Life and me,

a silence is coming.

Together, we will not get through this.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Joe Wenderoth has published a variety of books, all of which are available for sale. He is from Baltimore.

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                                                                                Lion Man, Photograph by Bilal Arslan

When Insults Had Class [by Terence Winch]

With thanks to Terence Winch, here are some well-turned insults from back in the day before the era of the ubiquitous four-letter word.

Lady Astor: "If you were my husband I'd give you poison."
Churchill: "If you were my wife, I'd drink it"
[Note: it has to be said that Churchill is the Yogi Berra of witty British repartee; when you're not sure who came up with the bon mot, Winston's your man.]

A member of Parliament to Disraeli: "Sir, you will either die on the gallows or  of some unspeakable disease."
"That  depends, Sir," said Disraeli, "whether I embrace your policies or your  mistress."

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." -- Winston Churchill

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.." -- Oscar Wilde

"I  am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend. . . if you have one."
-- George Bernard Shaw to Winston  Churchill
"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second. . . if there is one." -- Winston Churchill, in response.
[This exchange has been attributed to Shaw and James Whistler.]

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." -- John  Bright

"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily." - Charles, Count Talleyrand

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" -- Mark Twain
[A retort a philatelist has to love.]

"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." -- Mae  West
[In a fit of remorse, a convicted murderer said, "my father should have used a condom!"]

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." -- Oscar  Wilde

"He  uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts . . . for support rather  than illumination."
-- Andrew Lang  (1844-1912)

"He has Van Gogh's ear for music." -- Billy Wilder

"I've  had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." -- Groucho Marx

from the archive; September 16, 2009

Sommer Browning: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________________________________

Great Things from the Department of Transportation

 

My mother desires to track my location on her phone.

My mother announces that she’s “latex intolerant.”

My mother is horrified that the children’s cartoon character Caillou is bald.

My mother to the server at a terrible restaurant: I don’t want a box—I want a flamethrower.

One’s mother might be the most famous person one knows.

My mother says, There is no Denny’s, only Zuul.

My mother on penises and traffic cones: On occasion they’re both orange, aren’t they?

The young lungs of my mother fill with fine particulate matter on the streets of Clairton, PA.

My mother on the X-rated hypnotist: He was only concerned with having the hypnotized persons act sexually stupid.

One night in the 1970s, in the Mojave Desert, my mother ceases to feel apart from the world.

My mother pays my sister and me $40 each to not have birthday parties.

My mother’s soulmate is not my father but her dog, Six.

The only thing I don’t like about John Wick is that he never washes his hair.

My mother’s father, a bipolar beer distributor, laughs at least once that I know of because it echoes through me for 40 years.

On the whole my mother likes Miranda July’s novel, The First Bad Man, but could have done without the sex parts.

I listen to my mother tell my child a story as if I were my own daughter.

My mother tells me there were some skanks on America’s Next Top Model.

My mother asks, Didn’t someone famous say, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?”

My mother prays for her children every night.

My mother prays for children every night.

I bet you never thought you’d marry, have a baby, and get divorced before you’re 40, she tells me.

My mother expects great things from the Department of Transportation.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sommer Browning is a poet, writer, curator, and artist. Her latest book is Good Actors (Birds, LLC; 2022). She's the author of two other collections of poetry, Backup Singers and Either Way I'm Celebrating, as well as the artist book, The Circle Book (Cuneiform Press), the joke book, You're On My Period (Counterpath), and others. In 2017, she founded GEORGIA, an art space in her garage in Denver. Her poetry, art writing, and visual art have appeared in Lit Hub, Bomb, jubilat, Chicago Review, Entropy, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is a Librarian. ["Great Things from the Department of Transportation" first appeared in the American Poetry Review.]  _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                      René Magritte. The Double Secret, 1927. Oil on canvas. 114 x 162 cm (44.8 x 63.7 in). 

Richard Vargas: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________

13 Angels Rising

 “Starting early in February investigators recovered 13 sets of skeletal remains from a once-remote section of mesa now being developed as a residential subdivision. Four have been identified… They are among a list of 16 women reported missing between 2001 and 2006.”  —Local Albuquerque TV news, krqe.com, 3/27/09

 

they say good is greater than evil
and if it is then the dead
shall rise and walk again
right out of their Westside graves
past the tracts of generic
cardboard neighborhoods
past the cars cruising Central Ave
driven by men with bloodshot eyes
and Budweiser breath who wave
dollar bills in the air
like honey coated flypaper

and if so inclined the dead
will reinvent their renewed lives
so that closed fists open up
become soft as pillows where
dreams of violence fade away
the way a bruise heals when
kissed by a seraph’s lips

families, babies, and friends rejoice
embrace their return from
the eternal night
the cruel night
especially now as
the sun’s light
shines down and
warms the sidewalk
beneath their feet

especially now as butterfly wings
with a gossamer sheen sprout
from the satin skin stretched
over once battered
shoulder blades
healed and whole

especially now as they
show us how to fly
and rise above the
nature of our sin

not a moment too soon
to come back and save
us from ourselves

inclined to walk unafraid
among the demons we
all have within
and show us

how like a pebble
dropped in water
calm and still
our inhumanity
ripples outward
touching one
and all

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Richard Vargas earned his BA at Cal State University, Long Beach, where he studied under Gerald Locklin and Richard Lee. He edited/published five issues of The Tequila Review, 1978–1980, and twelve issues of The Mas Tequila Review from 2010–15. Vargas received his MFA in creative writing from the University of New Mexico, 2010. He was recipient of the 2011 Taos Summer Writers’ Conference Hispanic Writer Award. He was on the faculties of the 2012 10th National Latino Writers Conference and the 2015 Taos Summer Writers’ Conference. Published collections: McLife, 2005; American Jesus, 2007; Guernica, revisited, 2014; How A Civilization Begins (MouthFeel Press, Summer 2022). He currently resides in Wisconsin, near the lake where Otis Redding’s plane crashed. [For more on Richard Vargas, click here.] 

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________                     

Seven Angels Pouring Vials of the Wrath of God upon the Earth. By a British School Painter influenced by William Blake. 19th century.

 

Abbie Bradfield Mulvihill: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Ciara Mulvihill

___________________________________________________

We Can Move Forward Now

 

My nose is burning from the Urine Destroyer.

 

I’m speaking to the judge with my bare feet

Perched on the cedar chest in front of me.

I move the socks from my pocket

To the couch cushion next to me.

Why wear socks when

The aging dog

Has suddenly sprung a leak?

 

The judge thinks my husband called in.

We’re going to wait for him to call back.

I take a deep breath and explain,

“That was me.

I needed to be sure

I’d have audio on the Zoom call.”

 

We can move forward now.

 

It’s not emotional

Except for my disgust

For the attorney’s failure to tell me

I needed to have the Separation Agreement

On hand.

 

Of course I have it.

I’m always prepared.

 

I am getting divorced

In the same house

In which I was married.

Two rooms away.

 

What if I’d worn the same dress

Stood in the same spot

And placed the iPad judge

Where the officiant had stood?

Would I have erased time?

 

10 minutes.

 

It’s over.

I still feel nothing.

 

I move to the room

Between marriage and divorce

Where once we celebrated with

Coconut cake and a toast to our

Future.

 

Now, I sit alone at the table and play

(for the umpteenth time)

Mika singing, “Happy Ending” with

The Sinfonia Pop Orchestra.

 

The pets have concerns

About this behavior.

But I’m trying to add emotion after

The cold, masked Zoom call.

I need to cry

And I want céad míle slán.

 

Today is my childhood best friend’s

56^th birthday.

I don’t know where she is or

What she’s doing.

I haven’t seen her in decades

But I’m glad today is her birthday.

She is the only other person I know

To be divorced

Twice.

 

A “two-time loser.”

Evidence that “you’re the problem.”

This is what people say

Out of fear.

 

Ultimately,

No one remembered this day, but me.

I am relieved

Because it’s not the champagne day

Everyone wanted.

 

What now?

Return to telework?

Dairy Queen instead of champagne?

Drive around the Beltway

In my own personal Freedom Convoy

While blasting Life in Cartoon Motion?

 

It’s raining

Tears of joy

Or sorrow

Or Urine Destroyer.

 

Traffic will be a disaster.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Abbie Mulvihill lives in the Washington, DC area where her federal government work focuses on webs, spiders, bugs, and taxonomies in the digital realm. "We Can Move Forward Now" is her first published poem.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jeffrey McDaniel: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________

 

The Narcoleptic’s Marathon                                                              

 

The hetero married version of a 69 is: she does the dishes

while he folds the laundry. The sadomasochistic version

 

of a hand job involves sandpaper gloves. My body

is an old house; you fix one thing and something

 

else breaks. Today at the beach, a dolphin

sucked the wedding ring right off someone’s finger.

 

The decay is down to your gums, said the dentist.

This cabinet will have to come out. The narcoleptic’s

 

marathon involves twenty-six beds and strategically placed

alarm clock stations. In Sweden, there is a little jar

 

for you to spit your dreams into, in the bathroom

when you wake up. In France, married couples

 

must have sex in front of beginners once a year.

Encularnuit. I never liked that molar anyway.

 

The hole in my mouth where tooth number eighteen was

feels like a burnt-out bedroom. When I was twenty,

 

this girl literally set my futon on fire, and the firemen

chucked my stuff from the kicked-out dorm window.

 

When I was twenty-one, a different classmate

metaphorically set my bed on fire and left claw marks

 

on my vertebrae, and we role-played a couple firemen

squirting us with water pistols. She had great teeth

 

and now she has a couple kids and a wedding ring

the size of a strobe light. When I see her

 

at our fiftieth reunion, I’ll whisper in her flower petal ear:

honey is the only food that never goes bad.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Jeffrey McDaniel’s seventh book, Thin Ice Olympics, is coming out in September 2022 from Write Bloody Books. He is the author of six previous books of poetry, most recently Holiday in the Islands of Grief (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). Other books include Chapel of Inadvertent Joy (Pittsburgh, 2013), The Endarkenment (Pittsburgh, 2008), The Splinter Factory, The Forgiveness Parade, and Alibi School, all published by Manic D Press. McDaniel’s poems have appeared in numerous places, including The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The New York Times, and Best American Poetry 1994, 2010, and 2019. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

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Eileen Agar, Erotic Landscape, 1942, collage on paper, 255 x 305 mm.