#118: Two Poems by Ace Boggess

~This poem first appeared in The Bryant Literary Review (2003).

“Prefer Slick, Feverish Grooves Over Funky Backbeats?”

                                                                                [seen in an advertisement]

blessed rock’n’roll R & B funk folk acid jazz

blessed Beatles carnival barkers calling the modern era

blessed Doors Who Grateful Dead immortal

noodling licks on vinyl persistent as the low note

in my college neighbor’s busy buzzing radiator

blessed Sam playing along

“there’s a B-flat in my headboard”

blessed Joshua Redman

saxophone a second tongue whispering sweetest words in bed

blessed Rusted Root rhythmic re-animators of jam-band jam

blessing the crowd with dance shake mystery vibe

blessed locals Jeff Roy Tyler Kat Mike Speedy John Shawn

Annie leaving to return

savor diverse notes catchy refrains

heavy metal blaring

moaning blues

frayed like an old man’s movement into night tonight

a Celtic quintet whistling bullets through

silk armor of a woman’s voice

blessed Shenanigans classic Irish sweetness

melancholia groove & bounce

blessed Van Morrison soulful tone suffering slings & arrows

blessed techno Moby reggae Marley

ska la la da da de da de

blessed Freddie Mercury coy erotic reaching

“March of the Black Queen”

blessed sultry Shirley Manson “happy when it rains” &

sad to be in song blessed blessed blessed

pipers in the summer heat

center stage at Calamity Cafe

vanished-bar nostalgia welcome as the word ‘welcome’

blessed release

in chords chorus tensing cadence

tribal as a movie about the white man’s dream

of Africa

blessed background score to my climax falling action

end blessed end that hasn’t found me yet

Sartre’s silence punctuates a symphony

defines as much as first chords

solos arpeggios harmony

blue notes blessed blue notes &

violence in the interlude anticipating quiet

for the blessed listener’s blessed blessed ear

#117: "Calamity Jane's Grave" by Dale Rigby

~~This essay first appeared in Baobab: Columbia College Journal of the Arts (1995)

                                           Calamity Jane’s Grave

                                     What speaks when we stand silent before such a memorial?

                                     Is it a “monumental past”? A greatness, as lived, whose

                                     heroism…remains a living thing…? No, for it is not “the past”

                                     that we are being asked to recall, but rather something closer

                                     to the “historic”, with its need for reverence and obedience,

                                     for belief and remorse…--and thus, the ports of call for field

                                     trips, postcards, troubled reminiscence.

                                              --Scott L. Montgomery, “Monumental Kitsch: Borglum’s Mt. Rushmore”

                                                      (Georgia Review, Summer 1988)

I. Field Trips

Karen and I were both twenty, bookish middle-class townies, on our second still surreal day driving west from Ohio Berkeley bound. It was the summer of 1979 and our kerfuffled parents warned of Reverend Jim Jones and Commissioner Dan White (or that the Arab Oil Embargo would push gas past sixteen bits a gallon) but fairy tale plans to seek a life together far from family or friends had burned crisp and even around the campfire of the college where our parents taught.  And too. We probably just wanted to reinvent ourselves. Dance on some gravestones.   

The road beckoned with manufactured awe. Indian caves. Gimcracks and phosphorous dreams.  Even the gas stations were museums of that, memorials to this.  The wampum of the wide-open South Dakota plains. Should we stop at the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota? “No,” we agreed, with the same hauteur we’d felt while smirking at parental offers of television sets. Going through the Badlands, we told ourselves that classes at Berkeley could wait; what we needed was to stray from I-90’s picket fence of tacky billboards. We figured Deadwood for an authentic frontier town--and authentic was our mantra--but what we found was closer to a Stuckey’s Restaurant definition of wild and wooly. Deadwood looked like a theme park from Disneyland.    

Then, round a chance corner, we saw an inconspicuous marker for the Mt. Moriah Cemetery. The bullet holes in the corrugated tin looked authentic! “It’s what Tom Robbins would do,” Karen pointed out, a copy of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues on her lap. So we turned up a hill with a grade well beyond Wallace Stegner’s angle of repose. The cotton-speckled blue sky looked so much like something out of Larry McMurtry’s Thalia that it hurt our eyes.  Then my foot fell to the floor with a thud that could be heard all the way back in Ohio. Like the gently sinking end of a bumper car ride, we found ourselves going ever so slowly backwards. My fey girlfriend said, “Arp, we are like Garp down his driveway in the dark!” Gravity roiled us trunk first to a gas station. Where a fella crusty enough to have been one of Calamity Jane’s 1903 pallbearers tested the fuel pump by trying to suck gas from it. “She’s gurn,” he said, dribbling out a mixture of spittle and petro. Turned out the closest Toyota parts were fifty miles away in Rapid City and it was 5 p.m. on a Friday. So we walked a silent mile down to the Greyhound Station and ordered a fuel pump with traveler’s checks earmarked for our security deposit in California.

#116: Three Poems by Jane Satterfield

~This poem was previously published in American Poetry Review (1996).

Lipstick

Docs like dad’s standard-issue dress shoes, combat

boots with zip-laces to accelerate the kill;

the leather jacket, the Joey Ramone.

Going to clubs in second-hand clothes,

bodies starved to sticks;

black liner, animal eyes, as if

to take back restless glances,

the desire to see and be seen…

In photographs from the ’50’s, the action painters’

wives are decked out, living dolls, the men self-important,

otherwise engaged.  To hell with the beauty of easy equations—

creeps, criminals, flasher among the stacks—I’m talking

the flip side, damage we did: closed hearts, open legs.

The first fight I had with a lover ended in fists,

the blood left there till it flaked.  Burning with boredom,

we wanted the ugly out in the open….

Destroyer, Great Mother, let me lay it on thick,

the shades I still own, blue-black as the bruise

left there, thick marks

like blood welling up.

*****

#115: "Rara Avis" by Gary Krist

~This story was originally published in Gulf Coast (2004).

            When I was twelve years old and just getting over my unnatural fear of dogs, girls, and thunderstorms, I stumbled on my father's secret collection of Queen Elizabeth memorabilia.  It was stuffed in a cardboard box in the basement of our house in El Paso, on a shelf behind some crusty paint cans.  The collection consisted of several old, hand-colored pictures--one of the young queen-to-be in a white chiffon dress, another of a slightly older queen looking bored in front of a sweep of blood-red drapery--along with a varied assortment of royal souvenirs, including a coronation mug and a tiny silver spoon with a handle shaped like the monarch's head.  When I brought the box upstairs to ask my father about it, his face fell.  "So you found it," he said, embarrassed but not mortified, as if I had discovered his private stash of wholesome Victorian pornography.  He put his drink down, took the dusty box from my arms, and set it on the kitchen table.  Then he donned his thick, black-rimmed glasses and started rummaging through the items inside.  "Take a look at that, Leonard," he said, holding out a photograph of Elizabeth inspecting the horses at Astor.  "She's not a pretty woman, granted.  But what a bearing!"

            "Does Mom know?" I asked him, obscurely worried.

            He didn't even hear me.  He just kept staring at the photograph.  "As if nothing in the world could ruffle her," he said.

            A few months later, my father--Wyndham Hodding Stafford, the Canadian-born, Texas-raised owner of Stafford Printing Incorporated--was convicted in federal court on two counts of forgery and sentenced to five years in the federal pen.

            Five years.  It was the equivalent of a third of my life back then.  By the time my father was released, the divorce had already gone through and I was living with my mother in a red-brick garden apartment in Las Cruces.  I was a junior in high school, and had just won a prize for an English essay on what it was like to have an alcoholic felon for a parent.  "Honor Thy Father?" I had titled it, with a meaningful question mark at the end. 

            He got out of prison in April 1987.  For the next six or seven months, he honored my mother's request that we not hear from him except on holidays and birthdays.  But eventually we weakened and started letting him back into our lives.  And why not?  Prison seemed to have changed him, to have made him savvier and more in control of his life.  He'd stopped drinking, for one thing.  And he'd gotten a job with a respectable printing firm in El Paso.  "I've found myself," he told us during an Easter visit one year:  "I'm in the groove."  By the time I entered my sophomore year at New Mexico State, he'd put together enough money to start his own business again.  There was even talk of his moving back in with my mother.

#114: Three Poems by Bernadette Geyer

~This poem was previously published in The Evansville Review (2008).

Fire Ants Invade Hong Hock See Buddhist Temple

No one ever said

the path to enlightenment

would be easy.

Nor did they mention

it would be strewn

with fire ants

falling from the sacred Bodhi tree

onto the backs

of worshippers seeking shade.

No one warned

that letting go of pain

would be a daily koan

to wrap psychic arms

around in holy embrace.

But there they are—

real as wounds—

a colony of fire ants

the monks cannot kill,

knowing they could

return as one next time.

The vacuum transfer

was a failure. They can’t even

flick the beasties from their skin

(Do no harm).

Welts rise like prayers.

The worshippers decline

in numbers; something

must be done.

The monks say

if someone comes unbidden

to get rid of the ants

it is the will of the universe.

They’ll just be over there,

praying, eyes closed

tight against seeing.

*****

                                                                                   

#113: "Car Wash" by Joseph M. Schuster

 ~This story originally appeared in Missouri Review (1988).

            Thief wonders if it will rain.  The smell of it fills the air. Miles to the west, beyond the town limits, a line of black full-bellied clouds moves into the valley.  He stands up to look at them from where he is working on his mother's roof. Two blue jays flap angrily around him, swooping and scolding.  Thief is trimming branches from the tree where they have their nest.

            "Yes, I see it," he says, waving his arms to drive them off.

            The branches are low. If there is an ice storm this winter, the weight will pull them even lower until they scrape the shingles. They could put a hole in the roof. Thief has cut six branches from this tree and another dozen from other trees that surround the house.

            He has also caulked the flashing around his mother's chimney, and cleaned the debris—dead leaves, maple seeds, twigs—from the gutters. Some of the seeds had sprouted in the decaying leaves. Thief pulled them out, tiny trees with three or four leaves and thin white hairs for roots.

            He used eighteen trash bags to collect it all.  As he filled each, he tied it closed, and threw it off the roof.  Some split when they hit the ground.

            He's been at work for three hours and has another hour to go, if the light holds.  It's 5:30.  He still wants to weed the flowerbeds on either side of the front porch. The statue of the Virgin in one of the beds is dirty, covered with cobwebs.

            Thief has tried to take better care of his mother since his father died six months ago.  He works around her house every Saturday, mowing the lawn, fixing leaking faucets, painting rooms, laying new tile in the bathroom.  He's told her she should sell the house and, even though she says she won't, he wants it ready to put on the market.  It is too large for one woman.  There are four bedrooms. Two and a half baths. Thief thinks of how the house will look in the shorthand of the real estate ad: W of O'ville. 2-story. 4 br. 2 ½ b.  fin bsmt. amenities..

            The amenities are a new dishwasher, a side-by-side refrigerator/freezer with an icemaker and a cold-water tap, a new gas stove. Thief gave them to her from his hardware store.

            His mother never uses them. She doesn't cook at home.  All she keeps in the refrigerator is milk for her cat and a few beers for Thief.  She likes her meals out, she says; she doesn't like eating alone.

#112: "Her Favorite Book" by Jonathan Weinert

~This poem previously appeared in The Kenyon Review (2008).

Her Favorite Book

1.

smelled of Red Astrachan apples and rust,

smelled of library, the long untethered afternoons

made, like any book, a door

She gripped it as its red

skin puckered from its spine,

she cradled it, the gold

                                      stamping on its boards defaced

                                      by her attentions

2.

Big light blistered through the cunning trees—magnolia,

white ash, Carolina silverbell with sawtoothed leaves     Sharp

electric smells of severed grasses mixed

          with smells of watered dust, of dusted rain

          Little balled-up fists of rain

          hanging in the highest leaves     Hush-a-bye babes, don’t you cry

          she sing-songed to herself, a practice mother

          trying on a kindness

          like a Sunday dress

3.

She read, in August heat, and felt the stitching of her shorts-hem

bite into her thigh     She tasted metal

in the socket where her last front tooth

had fallen out

                          imagining herself a hundred years ago

                          and ten years older—capable, mature,

                  

                          as she and Clara Barton

                          bound up men’s strange wounds with husks

         

                          there being no more bandages

4.

The book smelled of care and chloroform and suffering,

of pain and battle and the cries

of wounded soldiers bleeding in Antietam mud

or freezing in the drifts at Fredericksburg,

                                                                     swarms of black flakes

                                                                     falling in their faces

5.

Shoeless, gloveless, ragged, wringing blood out

of her laden skirt, she waded to the far

red bank of Acquia Creek with loads of biscuits

and supplies

Virginia, bring that saw and lantern here     She bent above

the vague white faces, speaking to her

now and then of mothers, daughters, sweethearts, wives    

It pleased her to be tending men, despite the grimness

and the strain, to earn their gratitude and curb their pain

                                                                             

6.

Her father, dead already seven years—

beyond her help, beyond her memory

She bent above him, in her favorite book, and sheared

his ruined limb away     Hush my baby, don’t you cry

—each stroke of the saw blade

binding her to him, letting her inside him,

cutting her to bone

*****