Tag: Poetry

“When the Watched Pot Boils” By Kory Wells

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When the Watched Pot Boils

You know time is getting by,
and you try to remember
all she told you:

Use both dark meat and white.
Save bone and skin and gristle
for the cat. Roll the dough thin
as a paper sack. Slice it into strips
no wider than your thumb.
You’d give up sweets for a month
to hold again her wood-handled knife,
its old blade so often sharpened
it was almost gone.

You think of these things
as you stand at the stove,
the kettle’s broth rolling.
Think of the stories she told.
That time a door-to-door peddler
tried to snatch her youngest.
That hot night she and her lover
broke every dish in the house.
That Sunday the kids ate
their own pet rooster for lunch.
Reminding you,
chicken and dumplings need
plenty of salt. You taste

that name passed down to her,
Tennessee,
and she is with you,
barefoot, stirring the pot,
one eyebrow raised.
That hard T, that soft S,
the irony she was born
in Georgia and lies now
all too soon, in Alabama soil.

Some things are never right.
Some things are not better with time.
But maybe her name was perfect.
After all, how many of the stories
she told had a happy ending?

 

About the Author: Kory Wells is a poet, writer, storyteller, and advocate for the arts, democracy, afternoon naps, and other good causes. In 2017 she was named the inaugural poet laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where she also founded and manages a reading series. Her poetry collection Sugar Fix is forthcoming from Terrapin Books. Read more of her work at korywells.com.

 

More By Kory Wells:

Untold Story

 

Image Credit: “Cooking spaghetti and frying chicken for a spaghetti supper at Grape Festival, Tontitown, Arkansas” (1941) The Library of Congress

 

Two Prose Poems by Mike James

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Things I Hate

Things I hate mainly start with u. Things like newly upholstered umbrellas taking umbrage at the rain for doing what it does. Any ordinary person or day declaring herself unique. Special and different are matter-of-fact fine, but unique seems untucked from what is.

Of course, I make exceptions. I’m fine with whatever is ungainly. Even prefer it. And I have nothing against unicorns of saddled or unsaddled variety. If I were Ezra Pound, I would complain about usury. But I’m not. So I don’t. Borrowings don’t make me think of interest. Instead I think of theft. What starts as a favor, ends as a complaint. Such things don’t happen in utopias, but only princes live there. The plain world gets upturned more than twice a day. At any moment the sky might crack open with a new birth of tears.

 

 

Tribulations Down the Street From the Quickie Mart

So, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride into town and what are you doing, Mr. Sunshine, except licking a vanilla ice-cream cone and digging through your neighbor’s trash? Yesterday you were talking about all the things you wanted to do in the Falklands once winter vacation arrived. You planned to watch penguins and begin each day rousing your companion by singing God Save the Queen in the key of Sid Vicious. Now, all that will have to be postponed. And all the Horsemen have noisy and glittery spurs. It would be foolish to think they wouldn’t. And why is one playing a harmonica? And why does another have your name tattooed, with John Hancock style flourish, right above his heart? Each is busy doing what they came to do. And each is pretty good at it. Despite it all, that ice-cream is still delicious.

 

 

About the Author: Mike James has been widely published in magazines, large and small, throughout the country. His thirteen poetry collections include: Jumping Drawbridges in Technicolor (Blue Horse), First-Hand Accounts from Made-Up Places (Stubborn Mule), Crows in the Jukebox (Bottom Dog), My Favorite Houseguest (FutureCycle), and Peddler’s Blues (Main Street Rag.) He has served as an associate editor for the Kentucky Review and Autumn House Press, as well as the publisher of the now defunct Yellow Pepper Press. He makes his home outside Nashville, Tennessee. More information can be found on his website at mikejamespoetry.com.

 

More By Mike James:

Grace

Paul Lynde

 

Image Credit: “Heart of the Turbine” Lewis W. Hine (1930) Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program

 

“A Good Bad Day” By Tony Gloeggler

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A GOOD BAD DAY

John walks slowly up the stairs
to my office every day. Between
four and four-thirty, after the bus
brings him home from day program
and after he uses the bathroom,
he says, “Oh, hello, Tony,” as if
he’s surprised to find me
sitting at my desk. He says
he had a good day, stands
by a chair, and after six years
of living at the residence,
his home, he still hesitates,
wonders if he needs permission
to sit down. I don’t give it,
wait until he sits on his own.
He tells me if he read or painted,
exercised or sang today and I ask
questions as if I was his mother.
Maybe he went to a park, a store,
the library. All along he wears
this pleasant, half smiling,
perfectly balanced, zen-like gaze
across his Fred Flintstone face
and I don’t know if I’m stressed
or bored, mean, or just a smart-ass
acting like we are friends;
but when he asks me about my day
sometimes I tell him the truth.

Uselessly endless meetings, piles
of paper work, asshole administrators.
Not enough sleep. Girlfriend trouble.
Yesterday, I told him that a woman
I loved is getting married on a boat
in September and I wished
I owned a torpedo. He didn’t say
anything, just sat there smiling
and I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help it
I had to ask him if he ever
had a bad day. When he said no,
none that he could remember,
I said are you sure. He said
I don’t think so and looked like
he was thinking hard. I leaned
forward, said that I felt very sad
when my father died and I wondered
how he felt when his mom and dad
passed away. John jutted out his chin,
looked beyond me and said yeah
that was a bad day. When I asked
if he missed them, he chewed
on his lips, said sometimes,
and I said I know what you mean.

 

(This poem first appeared in Rattle)

 

About Tony Gloeggler: I am a life-long resident of New York City and have managed group homes for the mentally challenged for over 35 years. My work has appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Rattle, The Examined Life Journal, Raleigh Review, New Ohio Review, Stirring and The NY Times. My full length books include One Wish Left (Pavement Saw Press 2002) and Until The Last Light Leaves (NYQ Books 2015) which focused on my job and the autistic son of a former girlfriend. My next book, What Kind Of Man, will be published by NYQ Books in 2019.

 

More By Tony Gloeggler

“Crossing”

“Visitor’s Day at the Group Home”

“In the Building”

 

Image Credit: Paul Klee “Senecio” (1922) Public Domain

“Melancholy & The Afterglow” By Damian Rucci

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Melancholy & The Afterglow

You can throw all the rocks
from here to Norwood Avenue
up to heaven but they’ll find
home again in the earth

maybe in different places, maybe
find new homes down the road
in the silk grasses of privilege
but they’ll always be covered in dirt

then why do we mourn dawn
hold on to the black skies
of transcendence as light rays
remind us we’re still ourselves?

They remind us that any
enlightenment that comes in a baggy
is another layer we hide truth behind

after all the higher you climb
the worse it hurts falling back down

.

About the Author: Damian Rucci’s work has recently appeared in Cultural Weekly, Beatdom, Big Hammer, and coffee shops and basements across the country. He is an author of three chapbooks and a split Former Lives of Saints with Ezhno Martin. Damian hosted the Poetry in the Port reading series, currently hosts the Belle Ringer Open Mic and is a poet in residence at the Osage Arts Community in Belle, Missouri. He can be reached at damian.rucci@gmail.com

Image Credit: Walker Evans “Houses and Cemetery, Birmingham, Alabama” (1936) Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

“Forget Math and Science” By Larry Smith

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Forget Math and Science

Birds live inside of birds
tucked away for spring release
their naked bodies embraced
in sleep’s sweetness.
Their wings are tongues licking
each other’s face.
Don’t try to count them all
they’re an infinite multiple of six.

To love a single bird
you must become one
inside and out, top to bottom.
Then rise wings up and fly
sing through beak and body
the song of I Am.

 

About the Author: Larry Smith is a poet, fiction writer, and editor-publisher of Bottom Dog Press in Ohio where they feature a Working Lives and an Appalachian Writing Series. He is also the biographer of Kenneth Patchen and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He lives in Huron, Ohio, along the shores of Lake Erie.

 

More By Larry Smith:

Wages

No Walls

 

Image Credit: Frans Snyders “Perroquets et autres oiseaux” (17th Century) Public Domain

“Explaining Depression to My Cousin” by Nathan Graziano

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Explaining Depression to My Cousin

 

It’s melodrama shot execution-style on a sidewalk.

It’s a pit in your stomach stuffed with fluff.

It’s two a.m. with morning’s foot pressed to its throat.

It’s me grabbing your hand and crying on your shoulder.

It’s words desperate to find a sentence that loves them.

It’s an airless dream then waking, suddenly, suffocated.

It’s not losing a job, a loveless marriage or the desertion

of a childhood dream that once made you smile.

It’s the pill you have to take twice a day, knowing

it’s not resolved with exercise or diet or thinking

the positive thoughts that positive people think.

It’s mustering the courage to wake up tomorrow and dress,

one stupid leg after the next laborious leg, and press on.

 

About the Author: Nathan Graziano lives in Manchester, New Hampshire, with his wife and kids. His books include Teaching Metaphors (Sunnyoutside Press), After the Honeymoon (Sunnyoutside Press) Hangover Breakfasts (Bottle of Smoke Press in 2012), Sort Some Sort of Ugly (Marginalia Publishing in 2013), and My Next Bad Decision (Artistically Declined Press, 2014), Almost Christmas, a collection of short prose pieces, was recently published by Redneck Press. Graziano writes a baseball column for Dirty Water Media in Boston. For more information, visit his website: www.nathangraziano.com.

 

More By Nathan Graziano:

“My Bipolar Ex-Love”

“The Misery of Fun”

 

Image Credit: “Nos” by Ismael Nery Public Domain

“Why Did You Try to Sober Up?” by Ace Boggess

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“Why Did You Try to Sober Up?”
                           [rehab workbook]

Couldn’t afford the cost of words.
I snorted sentences, gambled paragraphs
on Texas Hold’em—no limit.
My wallet left me in stanzas of regret.
Someone would’ve placed a lien on my house.
Someone would’ve called the cops
if I hadn’t invited them first.

I wrote, wept, raved, & spent,
chewed bad checks like after-dinner mints.

Was it the drugs that broke me, or the prose?
We never know what value to place
on what we want. I wanted
to etch my unconscious thoughts on rocks.

Did I love the pills? I loved them: little songs
I could sing to me, pay-to-play,
the tab so great I’d be muzzled
if I wasted coins on anything but wishes.

 

About the Author: Ace Boggess is author of four books of poetry, most recently I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So (Unsolicited Press, 2018). His writing appears in Notre Dame Review, Rhino, North Dakota Quarterly, Rattle, and many other journals. He received a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.

 

Image Credit: Jacob Byerly “Portrait of a Man” (1855) Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

“Listening to Blue Monday on a Friday” By Ryan Quinn Flanagan

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Listening to Blue Monday on a Friday

Listening to Blue Monday on a Friday
it seems the specifics have crawled off some time
during the night, snuck out past the perimeter,
back down into the sewers perhaps with all the other mutants,
those walls of industrial sludge caked on so thick
the city superintendent starts to speak about layers,
like removing the paint from some famous rendering
looking for hidden secrets and finding nothing but canvas,
it’s Al Capone’s vault all over again, this is why the television people
don’t like to go live anymore which is understandable,
a pie eating contest is the only socially acceptable way
to explain pie on your face, the rest looks like straight fetishism
in the badlands, someone collecting trophies that came  
from other human beings instead of sporting events,
those bad boys and girls that get locked away all by themselves,
the sound of the manacles rubbing together as they walk,
but this poem was never for them; my cassette tape threatening
to unwind at any moment, the pink eraser end of a no. 2 pencil
at the ready to turn the spools, over Chamomile tea and
droopy socks I still listen for Ian Curtis’ voice even though I know
it can’t be there.

 

 

About the Author: Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many mounds of snow.  His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Cultural Weekly, In Between Hangovers, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.

 

More By Ryan Quinn Flanagan:

“Robbie the Owl”

“He Brought His Canvases Over”

“Before Evening Med Pass”

“It’s a girl I can tell, we’ve had nothing but trouble”

“Why Answers are Never the Answer”

 

Image Credit: “Katedrala” František Kupka (1912) Public Domain

“One of Pessoa’s Ghosts” By William Taylor Jr.

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One of Pessoa’s Ghosts

Under the kind and forgiving influence
of three glasses of cheap red wine

I haunt the city like
one of Pessoa’s ghosts,

adrift in the beauty and the terror
of an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.

At Vesuvio Cafe the tourists
drink and laugh at balcony tables.

I take my wine and sit among them,
the soft music of their faces,

my heart forever breaking a bit
for something I can never
quite name,

and it’s all I’ve ever
asked of the world.

 

About the Author: William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco.  He is the author of numerous books of poetry, and a volume of fiction. He is a five time Pushcart Prize nominee and was a recipient of the 2013 Kathy Acker Award. He edited Cockymoon: Selected Poems of Jack Micheline, published by Zeitgeist Press in 2017. From the Essential Handbook on Making it to the Next Whatever is his latest collection of poetry. 

 

More By William Taylor Jr.:

The Fire of Now

 

Image Credit: Eugène Atget “Petit Bacchus, 61, rue St. Louis en l’Ile” (1901) Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

“My Grandad” By Bruce Hodder

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My Grandad

My grandad supported Ipswich Town FC.
He said he’d been to every game at home
since his teen years in the Nineteen-Thirties.
That was his escape from grief:
his wife, my gran, had died
from meningitis while the German planes
were flattening the Ipswich docks for Hitler.
She was only twenty-seven,
and in those days meningitis killed.
His love for football was how he didn’t join her.
The Tractor Boys were my grandad’s poets,
his rock stars, the actors whose careers he followed.
They made spirit light in bones and flesh
left heavy by the long, hard hours
in the factory at Ransome’s.
A ball struck high and curling past the keeper
had him gaily dancing on his mangled leg
on the terraces at Portman Road each game.
He took me to the ground one day.
It was like a mantle being passed.
‘I was your age when I first stood here,’
he told me, one hand on my shoulder.
As we left, a player that my Grandad knew
from the Fifties in a rumpled suit
called him Fred and shook his hand.

 

About the Author: Bruce Hodder lives in Northampton, England. He is the editor of the Suffolk Punch Literary Journal, now in its thirteenth year. Recently he has been published in Academy of Heart and Mind, Winedrunk Sidewalk and The Song Is.

 

Image Credit: “AZ vs Ipswich, 1981” Public Domain Nationaal Archief Fotocollectie Anefo