#271: Two Poems by Mark Liebenow

 

~This poem previously appeared in The Spoon River Poetry Review (2008).

 

Anger, No. 15

Jackson Pollock, “Yellow Islands,” 1952, oil on canvas

The tortured pain of Jackson Pollock is not some rehab diatribe

that freed his demons, let him sit with bodhisattva Zen smile.

Strangled at birth by umbilical cord left a web of motor,

learning disabilities that hammered his mind with bristled scorn.

Tangled unbent anger for prestige galleries who couldn’t see

his great talent, the backlash against family, friends, his paint.

The stabs at the hole in his mythical dark soul he starved to fill,

the vapid, cathartic release that never held enough death. 

This painting shrivels grand mysteries into drips of disdain

for academy tastes that cater to the known, the well-dressed,

the pricks, the bores, the intellectual crap, the painted taps,

the crank of the well-heeled that clank on hollowed out pipes.

Turned upside down, I wouldn’t know which way was right,

like tube socks yanked on the wrong foot.

Pollock’s hand is weary of sketching the shuttered interior light,

the slippery decay, the pneumatic musk, the stench below city tenements.

His vision of society’s oblivion twisted into streets he crashed,

the spackle of grackles that jig-sawed beneath his skin,

dumped into urine back alleys like chump, fetid trash scrounged for scraps

of cadmium yellow, white scraped from the fat of electric blue clumps.

He attacks the canvas, people that hang around, fills them with scurry

of rats, the splinter, the shiver, the bones gnawed in the gutter.

The drift of the single-celled anemic, the brown grind of cortex rind

that tears apart, the draft that pulls no where but down.

Depression, alcohol, the failed suicide attempts, the night screams

on a subway lost on its one short stop between genius and pity.

His cords of elemental rage disguised as art, laid out, strangled

on the whorl of passionless sex fermenting in the upper left.

  

****

#269: "We Take the Bus" by Jacquelyn Bengfort

~This poem was previously published in Gargoyle (2016).

I take her on the city bus

The six blocks to the library

Six blocks too long for toddling legs

I take her on the city bus

So she knows what it costs to spend a dollar eighty

For an hour’s trip across the District

We take the bus.

I take her on the city bus

So she will learn things

Some people never know, see things

See the women bent over their drugstore walkers

See the men with eyes stuck shut, murmuring

See the girls, young, with babies like her

And hear the boys in the back rapping freestyle

She is nearly two and’s seen

More than I at twenty-two:

A gang of masks on Halloween punching out a neighbor,

Panhandlers asking only for a smile

Homeless people passing the peace at church

And all the sirens at night

In place of stars, sirens and

Helicopters, bellies full of hurt children

How young should one begin to know?

Will all this turn her callous

Or cause her pain?

A man on the radio the other day:

“When it comes to our children

Know the space between pain and suffering

“Pain is a teacher. Suffering

Destroys. Just hold your babies

When they are hurting.”

So we take the city bus

With grandmothers and their grocery carts

And men preaching Jehovah’s promise

We take the bus to see the city

At the slowly rolling speed of

Start-and-stop amidst strangers

My daughter and I, she and I,

We take the city bus.

*****

#267: "Another Curio Shop" by Dan Branch

~This poem was previously published in Explorations (1992).

~Selected by Clara Jane Hallar, Assistant Editor for Poetry

Winter die back comes early to this tourist town.

The east coast sleaze boys left after the last tour boat,

taking their cardboard boxes of cheap furs

and the money of visitors who believed that Loring

is an igloo village.

Forty percent off sales and moonlight madness pass like

Chinook winds over the downtown stubble fields.

Curios still need dusting, don’t you know.

Some folks ride out the season south of the Tropic of Cancer.

Five Star and the Potlatch stay open

to give comfort to Thomas Basin.

Our pale teens prefer Mickey D.

June of June’s Café stays but won’t thaw out any meat.

Last fall they gutted Charlie’s for another curio shop.

Last fall I cared.

I walk on past the Arctic Bar to drink espresso

and watch the sea lions hammer herring near Ryus Float.

Soon the black cod fleet will off load at Silver Lining while

eagles watch perched in the trees along White Cliff Street.

I’ll have a double,

The first Princes boat isn’t due ‘till May.

*****

#265: Three Poems by Sophie Cabot Black

~This poem was previously published in Bloom (2015).

THE PENITENT

How tired the day of me realizing

Again not the way wanted, the waste

Of each body by mine and yes

I kept myself capable and yes

When entering a room I was the center

But how unchosen I stood

In a slow undraping to catch

Any task of your broad and apparent

Hands; no longer do I know what to cover,

The cat in the corner overseeing

My fall toward not how I have changed

But finally how I could not bear you.

*****

#263: Three Poems by Meg Eden

~This poem previously appeared in Kansas City Voices, Salzburg Review (2015).

Civilized People Keep their Silver Polished

My mother polishes her father’s silverware

on the dryer downstairs because

he’s asked her to, and there’s no room

to do it elsewhere. The basement bathroom

hasn’t been clean since my grandmother died.

In the living room, her Greek statues dangle

from bird cages, her piano untuned and unplayed.

In some of the rooms, it still smells like her.

My mother tries to go through each room

with “a woman’s touch”—as if she’s

some spin-off Midas, who can make

the ugly shine—but my granddad

won’t let her throw away anything

that might come in handy one day.

In his workshop, rusting hammers wait

to fix and be fixed.

 *****

#259: "No thanks, I'm just looking" by Welton B. Marsland

~This poem was previously published Cargo (1988).

~Selected by Clara Jane Hallar, assistant editor, poetry

"No thanks, I'm just looking"

I stand and peer in through the window.

I want him.

Everyone else thinks I'm admiring the clothes

  placed so strategically casual in the display

  but it's him that I want wrapped up to take with me.

Every night, on my walk home from work, I stop

  and fuck him through the cold glass.

Does he think I only like the clothes, too, or

  is he aware of me outside his shop,

  the red neon light illuminating the lust in my stare?

I don't think I want to speak to him.

He's simply another item in the shop,

  to be admired, perused, pinched, considered, bought and used.

And so I watch him -

  he woos customers, wrestles coat-hangers,

  stands strangely on one foot 'cos those new shoes are hurting again,

  placates complainers, runs long sensual fingers through jet black hair,

  and looks relieved to see the last of them go at half-five.

He glances at the window and my eyes dart back to the display,

  that cream jumper is cheaper than last week... how interesting...

Then I walk away towards the train station,

  leaving a foggy patch on his window to remind him I was there,

  and I go home empty handed.

*****

#257: Two Poems by Jacqueline Jules

  

~This poem previously appeared in The Cape Rock (2014).

How Is Mom Holding Up?

When they heard the news in December,

Mom did not cancel their summer cruise.

The doctor said three rounds this time, if all goes well.

Besides, they bought insurance.

She hasn’t canceled yoga, either. Tuesdays 9 a.m.

are blocked off from January to June

to breathe deeply in class,

not at the hospital in chemo spouse position.

With no surgery scheduled, no bedside duty,

Mom plans to keep tutoring Wednesdays, too.

She’s already flipping through catalogs,

choosing seeds for the spring garden

unplanted last year in the storm

of a darker diagnosis.

And when I asked why she was gazing

through a frosted bay window

with dreamy gray eyes,

she said she was picturing

Sunday walks at the lake

hand in hand. Each day

growing longer and longer

until twelve hours of sun

and dinner for two on the patio

consumed the fear

of one plate on the kitchen table

and a six o’clock sunset outside.

*****

#255: Three Poems by Gregory Luce

~This poem was first published in Logical Reader (1997).

“Better git it in your soul”

(for Jim)

Better embrace it like Mingus’

bass, stroke it, caress it, pull it in,

draw it like smoke, drink it

like old bourbon burning

all the way down.

Then give it back.

 *****

#253: Two Poems by Esteban Colon

~Selected by Clara Jane Hallar, assistant editor for poetry

Before the Storm

~This poem was previously published in After Hours (2014).

polka dot dress traced love on

Japanese streets

                        chalk

saying what cards never could,

waited

            for a mother she never met,

till

foster parents dragged her inside

drowning in the downpour

like

drawings

erased in the rain

 *****

#251: Two Poems by Anita Sullivan

~These poems were selected by Clara Jane Hallar, Assistant Editor for Poetry.

~This poem was previously published in Nimrod International Journal (2011).

A Broken Abecedarius of How Things Might Be if the World Were Saved

Achoo! at the beginning of a tale.

Beasts wandering in daylight, unafraid of being shot, even

Centaurs, who would not be drunk any more if invited to your wedding.

A dragon or a dinosaur named

Ellen.

Flies who would go to the front screen door on command so you could

            let them out.

Galumphing as the normal gait of soldiers.

Hazelnuts that fall one by one into the mouth of the Salmon of Wisdom who swims

            beneath, until the time comes for her to be caught by a wizard’s

            apprentice and cooked over a slow fire until she has rendered up all the

            wisdom remaining in her unsung parts. But

I digress. . . .

Intoxication once a day by the scent from white

Jasmine flowers tumbling over a garden wall, except for the

Keepers of Butterflies, who would need to remain sober.

Loping as an alternate choice (see G above).

More respect for Dame Love, who has thoughtfully abolished Reason.

Nearly all the children reaching the house in the middle of the forest, where they will be

            temporarily changed into birds, and introduced to their hearts’ desire by a very

Old bear, who knows all the tales with caves in them.

Pearls of music rolling around between the warm, uneven bricks, under the chairs.           

                        Quiet

Regales of yellow leaves, and the musk of grapes.

Sisyphus released from duty but staying on as a volunteer on weekends when he has

Time off from being a taxi driver in New York, something he has always wanted to

            try.

An upset

Victory by

Whim, who has finally convinced Steven Hawking that she is indeed the final black hole

            into-which-and-from-which comes

Xanadu with its plazas and feasts, its gardens of endless endings for which we have all

            secretly

Yearned—and to which we have spent the last million years

Zigging and Zagging (see G above) and where we will arrive this very

            AFTERNOON.

           

                                               

 *****

#249: Three Poems by Bruce Robinson

~Selected by Clara Jane Hallar, assistant editor, poetry

~This poem was previously published in Spoon River Quarterly (1991).

Dialing and Dolor

                                    la vida es sueño

            Selena’s on the telephone. Richard

is in conference. Philip’s on hold.

Rosalie is calling. Kevin

is dialing. Mark is listening.

            At the front desk Pat is decding

whether to be masculine or feminine.

Most of us have already made this decision,

some have lived to regret it.

            And where is Caroline?  Philip calls Selena,

there’s no answer. He calls Bob, but

Caroline’s not there.  He calls me,

I’m holding for an open line. “Mark, is Caroline there.”

            She is not. She is in the conference room,

speaking to herself, practicing eye contact,

practicing doing without cigarettes

for an hour and a half, studying inflections, weighing nuance.

            Through the skylight the sun lights

without connection or warmth; it’s working on a

concept, it’s on to something big. The sun is so much

like light it’s almost uncanny,

            As if masculine were feminine,

or dialing listening, sometimes there’s just

the warm contours of the telephone

when you’ve been on hold.

*****

#247: Three Poems by Shahé Mankerian

~Selected by Clara Jane Hallar, Assistant Editor for Poetry

~ This poem was previously published in The New Guard Literary Review (2011).

The Mosaic of the Missing

We found the doll’s head

rolled under the chassis

of the charred Mercedes,

then one plastic sandal

on the cracked manhole.

Her mother fell

on the sidewalk, staring

at the feet of the crowd

that circled the bomb crater

like crows. They found

her braided pigtail twisted

around the telephone wire.

We heard the choked whisper

of the mother get louder.

“Ya, Souraia, stay home

and dress your doll.

We’ll have the damn okra

without bread.” We mistook

shards of glass for fingernails.

The three o’clock chimes

of the clock tower muffled

the siren of the ambulance.

The corner grocer needed

help behind the counter,

but his son was busy sifting

through bones and limbs

as if searching for souvenirs. 

*****

#245: Three Poems by Kate Bernadette Benedict

~These poems were selected by Clara Jane Hallar, assistant editor for poetry 

~This poem was previously published in Without Halos (1988) and Pudding (1993)

“Early Lessons: Submission”

She hates it, they make her eat it,
she mustn’t leave the table until every slice
of cold boiled carrot is off her plate.
6:30, 7:00: she sits there, staring
at those vomit-orange pellets
on pink Melmac, stabbing
at them with a fork, smelling
their sickening odor.
7:30, 8:00: now and then she thumbs a wedge
into her pressed mouth, gagging.
8:30, 9:00: her father holds firm,
she has to eat them.
Her mother warms them up and makes
a carrot sandwich: carrot bits,
pocked with mayo, poking
out of soft white Wonder bread.
It feels moist and lumpy in her hands
but the ruse helps.
She gets most of it down
and is released to one TV show,
a cupcake, her sheltering bed.
Then it’s time for breakfast.
They feed her boiled eggs
with raw running whites,
and orange juice, mossy with pulp,
and bacon, blubbery with slick fat,
and she hates it and has to eat it.

*****

#243: Three Poems by Michael Morell

~These poems were selected by Clara Jane Hallar, Assistant Editor, Poetry

~This poem was previously published in Paterson Literary Review (2004).

The Ghost of My Grandfather

I.

It was a summer night in August

when my grandfather came downstairs from his bedroom

wearing an undershirt, scarf, dress pants and hat,

and asked my father to call him a cab because he wanted to go home.

Gramps was eighty-two, I was ten, and he’d lived with us for seven years.

When my father questioned him, reminded him that he was home,

Gramps gave his boyhood address in Darby, two towns from where we lived,

close enough for a man to smell the ham and cabbage

his mother cooked for him on special occasions.

After hours attempting to convince him

he lived with us, fruitlessly showing him his bedroom,

my father called for a cab, slipped the driver extra cash

and asked him to drive Gramps around the block a few times

before bringing him home. Fifteen minutes later

he was sound asleep in his bed.

Sometimes the mind plays tricks on you, son, my dad said.

Three weeks later my grandfather died.

II.

I drive to my parents’ house for Friday night pizza

and my eighty year old father, who no longer looks like

he’ll live forever, calls to my mother like a crow

home home I want to go home. Later, I drive my father to Darby,

where he was born, where his father was born, past Fitzgerald

Mercy Hospital where I was born. He sees the pointed brown bricks

of his childhood, overlooks new storefront signs, falls back into

1940 and penny candy, today’s Soul Food Store once again

Waxman’s Shoes, smell of glue, rubber, and polish permeating the air.

III.

I have always wanted to go back in time and meet my parents

as children, eye them walking home from school or chasing fireflies

on a summer evening, begging their parents for one more minute

of playtime before surrendering to the darkness, and now, here

my father sits, man, boy, dad, son- a mixture of everything he is

and was, time stripped aside, years peeling away like old paint

to reveal bare, clean wood, a moment where the sea of consciousness

is parted by some invisible staff we cannot grasp.

*****

#240: Four Poems by Michael Hettich

~These poems were selected by Clara Jane Hallar, Assistant Editor for Poetry.

~This poem was previously published in The Great River Review (2015).

The Milky Way

If we could imagine that every word we speak

were an animal or insect, the last of a species

ever to be born, that the very act of speaking

brought extinction even before our words 

had been heard and replied to, we might get a feeling

for the vanishings we witness but don’t see. And if every

conversation were understood as a kind

of holocaust denuding whole landscapes, some people

would simply fall silent—as far as they could—

while most others would keep chattering on. Just imagine

the vast forests of lives, the near-infinity of forms 

brought to a halt with a simple conversation.

And I would be one of the talkers, despite

the fact that I knew what my talking destroyed.

And so I would mourn every word I said,

even while I argued passionately for silence

and for learning to honor the sacred diversity

of life. Just imagine watching the stars

go out on a dark night in the far north, a clear night,

one after the other until the sky was black.

Once, when I was taking out the garbage, just walking

dully across my back yard, a huge bird—

as big as a vulture but glittering and sleek—

rose from the grass and flew into my body,

knocked the breath out of me, then flew up and away

with a powerful pull of its wings. I could hardly

see it in the darkness. And then it was just gone.

  

*****

#238: Three Poems by Lori Lamothe

~These poems were selected by Clara Jane Hallar, assistant poetry editor

~This poem previously appeared in New Madrid (2016).

Forecast

At the border between properties

a galvanized washtub collects falling

snow. Hours later, the white’s risen

so high it brims over emptiness.

I want to kneel down before it

and rinse my bare arms in its cold,

clean comfort. I want to let the idea of

an original, untouched world accumulate.

Because there are so many spaces inside me

waiting for renewal. The heart with its huge

barn doors thrown open in anticipation

of love’s galloping horses. The mind

and its attic of memories, or even the hands

held out for work, its solid, familiar tools.

Above me, the clouds open their trap doors

all at once and flakes sift down, blanketing

everything with a marvelous innocence

that will surely last long enough this time.

#234: Three Poems by Scott Dalgarno

~These poems were selected by assistant editor Clara Jane Hallar.

~This poem previously appeared in The Yale Review (2007).

JESUS TURNS UP IN VAN NUYS, BUT HIS NUMBER IS STILL UNLISTED

I was raptured, temporarily, then recalled

due to a clerical error. There was the office

generated apology, of course, with a cc to God.

Des Moines looks so different to me now. Not nearly

so plural. Apparently I wasn’t missed, but then,

I’ve always been the penguin in the red muffler.

Sure, I want you to notice me, but I still want you

to have to look. Like the rest of the half-wit

world, I beat my gong with a spent cucumber.

We’re all of us faking it, right? Only the young

don’t know that . . . . which makes them young.

Everything shifts over time. Now they’re saying

filthy is the new dirty. Don’t get me wrong,

I welcome the chance to come clean about my hiccup

with Jesus, but my people have always adored their

secrets, hording the unstutterable, holding their cards

under the table. My grandmother was a Shaker

all her life. She had teeth made from old mah

jongg tiles. Even her husband didn’t know. What

must Jesus think of the news that all these years

he’s been married; his wife, a rehabilitated Bible

whore? Hell, we don’t even know what he looked like.

Maybe dark short, with splayed feet and an eye that

wanders. Christus Domesticus. See them commuting. 

“Pick a lane,” he says, “Any lane, I don’t care”

(Mary likes to take her half out of the middle). Afraid

of being left behind, she’s forever offering

to drive, while Jesus leans into the tragic like some reckless

geek magician. Profiled in PEOPLE, they’re

like rock stars on holiday; see them walk, A-framed,

purling their way down Sepulveda, that Picasso body

of hers moving like a crab. He could fix that,

but likes her crooked, pink, & halting.

*****

#233: Three Poems by Ava C. Cipri

~Work selected by assistant poetry editor Clara Jane Hallar

 

~This poem previously appeared in Western Humanities Review (2008).

 

Queen of Swords

i.

you are the curator the loud custodian    one set of keys

one pass    single access

you stand guard at the gate

no other entrance no other may come

ii.

fast forward if you are looking for the protagonist

a woman of reticent character by this name [H.] you will not find her here

fast forward nor will you find her       Heath[er] . . .

no time

I write it down

rewind    I will not witness

iii.

the sky pinches back from its corners    fast forward

I know your window from the bus shelter & the hour

it crests the wall then the snow heaves the way I

watched the end from outside myself steeping

from that porch dismantled for three full seasons

iv.

it’s the photograph I continue to pick up the one my grandmother never

     displayed

too often    declared the futility of being a writer & want of spontaneity

photography at my command to have a camera around my neck

yesterday there was a tall blond amazon    her hair tightly pulled back in a

    leather-band

the season halts from November’s edge

v.

your door    and the season

it cuts the city the way a dancer

his partner clipped in the distance vanishes

into night into dreams too far

I return from your absence and limp into my life

knowing terror for the second time

overhearing the scream

vi.

for two Septembers I walk out into traffic

wonder the month it stopped—you finding my hair in the drain behind the

    stacks of books

under the suitcase which was our table

vii.

the walls of you the way you pulled me into those voice-filled fields until

no one could make you come as hard    fast with the trains extinguishing

    behind us

*****