Tag: Poetry

Two Prose Poems by Howie Good

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Spy Culture

Just before dawn, the train barreled across the border. My carryall bag on the overhead rack contained an entire set of ant-dreams preserved in amber. Spies lurked everywhere, but, after the train pulled in, I eluded them by frequently changing my facial expressions. Later that day, I traveled by sampan and pedicab to meet my contact, an experienced agent posing as an English nanny. We met in a neighborhood playground beside a tree whose round fruit the children pretended were bombs. At one point I forgot the word “cremated” and had to ask her, “What’s it called – incinerating the body?”

 

The Anxiety of Influence

A banner stretching across the building’s exterior said, What’s Shakin’. You entered through a glass door, walked down a long, dim hallway and up a set of stairs into an area with large windows. The view was constantly changing, and you weren’t always sure what you were looking at or how it was happening. Jack Kerouac berated you for your perceived lack of cool. William Burroughs wouldn’t remove his hat. If you were going to be somewhere, this maybe wasn’t the best place. Many years would pass before anyone would realize that among the 20 most common passwords is “trustno1.”

 

About the Author: Howie Good is the author of three recent collections, I’m Not a Robot from Tolsun Books, A Room at the Heartbreak Hotel from Analog Submission Press, and The Titanic Sails at Dawn from Alien Buddha Press.

 

More by Howie Good:

“Maiden Voyage”

 

Image Credit: Alfred Stieglitz “Rebecca Strand” (1922)  Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program

“Reflections in the Windows of Your First Car” by Jeanette Powers

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Reflections in the Windows of Your First Car

With my first driver’s license
and the 5-speed shifter
of a gold 1984 Plymouth Turismo
gripped in my hands
I drove out of the suburbs
and into the big city
knowing nowhere to go.

Grinding gears through Raytown
passing the long sewer of Brush Creek
I found myself in Midtown Kansas City
took a left on 39th Street from Main
and flashing lights pulled me
into the bank parking lot
immediately.

I didn’t know what to do
when justice is demanded
I popped out of the car
and just began to beg
it’s my first day driving
my mom will kill me
I promise it won’t happen again.

Then I catch a glimpse of myself
in the reflection of the window
and see my face covered
in armadillo stamps
from goofing around
with Sam after school,
who we, of course, all called Scooby.

My heart falls out, because I think
no one looking so foolish
will ever get out of anything
could never be taken seriously
and I surrender myself to my fate
look the officer straight in the eye
and just say, I’m sorry.

He pats me on the shoulder
and laughs, be more careful next time
and drives away, I watched that man
choose mercy over justice
two decades later, I still think of him
and the power of an honest apology
every nowhere I go.

 

About the Author: Jeanette Powers: poet, painter, philosopher, professional party dancer and working class, anarchist, non-binary queer. Here to be radically peaceful, they are a founding member of Kansas City’s annual small press poetry fest, FountainVerse. Powers is also the brawn behind Stubborn Mule Press. They have seven full length poetry books and have been published often online and  print journals. Find more at jeanettepowers.com and @novel_cliche

 

Image Credit: Ruby T. Lomax “Woman Sitting in Car, Texas” (1937) The Library of Congress

Two Poems By Kevin Ridgeway

Posted on by Chase Dimock

 

 

Fake Dad

i was walking out of a liquor store
and he came right at me
with his grey hair and dyed mustache
i realized it was the ghost
of my incarcerated father,
who I’ve been searching
for all my life.

 

 

Midnight Shenanigans

when the rest of the world has let me down,
I amuse myself in the dark with jokes and
invisible girlfriends, waiting for the next best thing 
to happen in my imagination, if not ever in this 
extinguished flame we know as the disappointment 
of reality, a reality we struggle in our words 
to transform the pain into something profound. 

 

 

About the Author: Kevin Ridgeway is the author of Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press).  Recent work can be found in Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Main Street Rag, The American Journal of Poetry, Big Hammer, Trailer Park Quarterly and So it Goes:  The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library.

 

More By Kevin Ridgeway:

Sally with the Accent

Five Hundred Channels and Nothing On

My Nephew and I Escape from Prison

 

Image Credit: Walker Evans “Sidewalk and Shopfront, New Orleans” (1935) Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program

“The Legend of Cousin Wally” By Randall Rogers

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The Legend of Cousin Wally

Rules and convention
didn’t constrain him
he walked his
own path true
the smartest
non-formally
educated man
I ever knew
learning in
discourse too often
and maybe most
truthfully most
rewarding
drinking in bars
parties
talking, sharing,
absorbing
the angles

reading comprehension
facility I dare say
a touch of dyslexia
I always suspect
in such instances
where acute verbal
synthesis comprehension
is markedly on display

I learned much
when I knew
his worth beyond
measure as
intelligent man
educated in discourse
vast
Socratic-like
absorbed in repast
lubricated
into vino veritas

a unique perspective
in my life
silenced
age forty-nine
in time
to this day
I say
when asked
by those few
who do
I say
in things I do
nowadays
I take the
Wally path
in almost
everything I do
except drinking. 

 

About the Author: I am Randall.  Last seen in’ Mad Swirl’ and ‘Beatnik Cowboy’.  I help edit the latter.  I am fifty-seven years of Swedish-English extraction but I live in America now.  That is, North America, specifically the United States.  Yes I’m a patriot.  A poet patriot.  Too old to join the air force now though!  Unless I want to stay indoors and join.

 

Image Credit: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner “Männerkopf- Selbtsbildnis” (1926)

“Untold Story” By Kory Wells

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Untold Story

She was religious     about reading aloud—
         Ann Landers’ advice in the Free Press
              Jello salad recipes in Good Housekeeping
                   letters and postcards from cousins
    and one odd relation    all the way in Australia.

         But neither of us ever     said a word about
the National Enquirer
         which she’d pick up in the Winn Dixie checkout
              next to the gum and chocolate bars     
    as if it were essential           as milk and sugar.

Back from the grocery
              on a summer afternoon
         she’d start supper
              and I’d slip away
          to the over-warm sanctuary
                             of her modest living room:
                   thin floral carpet   knotty pine walls
                       and a nubby mauve sofa where I—
                                  a sensitive and impressionable child—
              would spread the tabloid
and kneel before it

              to absorb    cover to cover
                           and back again
                                           until my knees ached
the gospel of my disbelief:
                    a moon-landing hoax    
         an alien abduction     a two-headed
                                 motherless kitten nursing
                           a domesticated squirrel
              and of course the secret
                                             lives of stars.

What is it that makes us want to swallow
         a story whole?      To think
                   only one version can be true?

We were not          true disciples
    but my grandmother      tended the altar of
                             narrative possibilities
         this woman with an eighth-grade education
                           who I never saw reading a book.

 

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.

 

Image Credit: John Vachon “Grandmother MacDuffey with blackberries she has picked from nearby swamps. Irwinville, Georgia” (1938) The Library of Congress

 

“No Walls” By Larry Smith

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No Walls

Where is the wall that can hold us
keep us from each other’s love?
Artifice is nothing before spirit
mind melted by heart.
Dogs bark at its corners
bay at rocks stacked high,
cement poured into would-be tombs.
Birds fly over, creatures dig under,
people reach through and around.
We paint its face, tear it down by night.
Sun, moon, and stars deny it.
O, where is the wall that can hold us,
keep us from each other’s love?

 

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

 

Image Credit: Carol M. Highsmith “Piece of the Berlin Wall displayed at the Newseum museum, Arlington, Virginia” from The Library of Congress

“Down Tobacco Road, Where The Leaves Fell” By Nick Soluri

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Down Tobacco Road, Where The Leaves Fell

There were plastic-wrapped blankets and the smell of ammonia,
fans on high all over the front room and scuff marks from the bed’s wheels,
and they’d brought her home like that, and she began to sleep again.
There was a hat, a thin blue sheet like a doily, (she had those all over
the house, different designs, she took pride in them) and her sunken eyes
were gray and tired, and that was not how she always looked at me.
She didn’t talk except for a few words, a few coughs,
a few cries from the chest tube cleanings, I remember that
red liquid coming out of her and into a machine, and how I
saw a bionic thing, hardly a woman, a creature unknown to me.
The sun peaked through the window cautiously, as to not disturb,
beginning with a spot on the floor and creeping to her bed,
up her towel covered legs and onto her thin hands.
Those hands created this home, that one blanket, all the smiles
we gave to her before she got real bad, the way I still remember her.
I was always kept in the dark about things like that, we all were,
us kids weren’t supposed to know the inner workings of pain,
her kind of pain, a different kind that caused my mother to weep out of fear.
Her mouth was slightly open, a hand on my little shoulder,
the sun outside hit my back felt warm and comforting,
and I wanted her to feel that way too.
So I took the sun’s warmth from my back and let it flow through my fingers,
like beams out of my hands and onto hers, but hers were cold.

There were rows of tobacco out of the window, we sped down the road,
my mother and father, my sister, we were quiet, just sitting in the
dark listening to the hum of the wheels on the pavement, an innocuous bump or two.
The dark night was clear, clear like eyes glistening in autumnal air,
and the leaves swirled behind us, different shades of reds and yellows,
and I heard my mother begin to cry, and that’s when I began too.

 

About the Author: Nick Soluri is a writer from New York.  His words have appeared in Five:2:One Magazine, Boston Accent, Ghost City Review, Selcouth Station, Occulum, Anti-Heroin Chic Magazine, and others.  He tweets @nerkcelery

 

More by Nick Soluri:

Mementos

 

Image Credit: Charles Aubry “An Arrangement of Tobacco Leaves and Grass” (1864) Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

“Why Answers Are Never the Answer” By Ryan Quinn Flanagan

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Why Answers Are Never the Answer

You could go your whole life in a fog,
kicking up blanks with some of the cobbler’s
best attire, tugboat brinkmanship just out of sight
and still you are pleased, joyous even, sidewalks
leaping up into your arms like a bouquet of flowers,
briefcases rush by with the secret plans, intricate actions
that will never be taken, and the song in your throat
has already found radio, crank calls to the pharmacist’s wife
because she always picks up the phone, just as indignant as
the last time, never letting you down; why answers are never
the answer, and later outside the arcade you finger around
your pockets for coins, stuff a handful into the machine
and try for the high score.

 

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”

 

Image Credit: Henry Pointer “Cat on a stool “playing” a violin” (1872) Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

“Tightrope Dancer” By Bunkong Tuon

Posted on by Chase Dimock

 

 

This is the fourth in a series of poems from a forthcoming poetry collection about raising a biracial daughter in Contemporary America, during this polarizing time of political and cultural upheavals where sexual harassment allegations abound, where a wall, literal and figurative, threatens to keep out immigrants like the narrator, a former refugee and child survivor of the Cambodian Genocide. You can find the complete series of poems below.

 

 

Tightrope Dancer

You climb the five-rung ladder
at the children’s playground.

Your mother crouches
below, holding breath.

I stand behind
counting the plastic rungs.

You kick us away,
“I’m a big girl.”

Your mother prepares
to catch your fall.

Each day we hold our breath,
cover our mouths with our hands,

close our eyes, and pray.
Of course, we want you to reach

The top, but not too fast.
And not too far from us.

 

 

About the Author: Bunkong Tuon is the author of Gruel (2015) and And So I Was Blessed (2017), both poetry collections published by NYQ Books, and a regular contributor to Cultural Weekly  He is also an associate professor of English and Asian Studies at Union College, in Schenectady, NY.

 

 

Bunkong Tuon’s series of poems on raising a biracial daughter in contemporary America:

Ice Cream

Gender Danger

The Bite

Tightrope Dancer

Women’s March in Albany

My Mother on Her Deathbed

 

 

Image Credit: Alice S. Kandell “A young girl swinging on a handcrafted swing, Sikkim” (1969) The Library of Congress

“The Fire of Now” By William Taylor Jr.

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The Fire of Now
for Ursula Nichowski

Sometimes it feels like there’s not much
other than the fact of death
waiting just beneath the flimsy
surface of it all,
and the crass dullness of our hours
wearing us down like the ocean.
The poets are useless, having
broken with the music of things,
the day an unfortunate
accident no one will cop to.
You find no solace
in the misty gray sky
or the sad old buildings
propped against it,
still haunted by ghosts
of decent things long gone.
You wander the streets
in the soft rain
looking for that old place
with the perfect juke,
but they tore it down
and replaced it
with a world of safe spaces
when all you wanted
was a bit of pretty danger.
And then suddenly her face
like a prison break,
her lips like a pardon
from this world and the next,
reminding you that the fire of now
is forever equal
to the smugness of the void.
You are struck by the bravery
of her beauty in the face
of whatever remains of things.
You tell her as much
and she laughs and says,
why don’t you write
a poem about it,
and you do.

 

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. 

 

Image Credit: Giuseppe Arcimboldo “Fire” (1566)