Caleb Puckett Ducks the Wide Grandpa Scythe, Taunts the Mute Idols, and Knows the Apollo Placebo

Unacknowledged Legislators

In both letter and spirit,
how close to peon poem
seems of late.

Why’s advice:
Go with peony, then.

Paeon as paean—
Apollo on all fours—
doctoring the gods,
a placebo winning the day.

Yes, but dirt stains
your fingers either way.


Broken Ballad

If stable,

speech lacks labor.

Once bonny,
I had thought on love,
become feeble in finding
the approximation of.

I understood need,
yet would not change
my fear of want,
wanting too much, dearest X.

Did believe. The steps.
Did harm. The ascension.
None turned nonetheless.
Fall deepened.

Alone, a banished man, I traveled
through the great green-wood
with brow beaten
to reclaim nature’s succor.

My causeway crumbling,
a mockery built of shining rock.

Go on to the gone side, gypsy lord,
I cried.
So courteous behind it all.
The intent crystalline in supposition.

She. Anointed.
She. In case appointed.
A baron’s day took me footman.
Pretty little brogues with money
twinkling, she danced for Johnny.

She, likewise, must go.

Testify. Her eye passes wonder
dead.
Hair feathered with ash.

The joy of counsel to part
ever again.
Averring peace
in the burning plain between.
The whole span of hope collapsed.

Strange, still
I must believe in moon talk, that love,

no matter its twisted manner, blame, pain,
comes end-wise for salve or salvation.

Beside time in the bedside kneel,
the rainfall runs to ague.
Odd flash of steel blade. Promises beyond.

A lowland day,
an empty castle
and my wanton
lady drowned at sea-strand,
tangled in broken mast.

Inquire, understand and yet—

a gold ring
sorry for its finger.

Alone at last grasp, she and I.
         
Laws of memory twine
secrets.
Darkened, sheets seem vines, anchors.
Prayers folded, shaped for windfall,
set for no man’s landfall.

A kiss captured for a moment’s glamor.
Good for once and only.
The art of haste.
Grief’s delighted maid
trampling the heather, rutting reunion’s field.

Cloak kept, will to sustain taken in spite.
Winter’s white blast sickens.

So now I switch a sexton’s head for a doctor’s,
dearest X.

Nineveh

Red moon city,
rat city,
city of reproaches
whispering mad omens
from solitary corner
to choked square.

Streets eat buildings
while buildings bite at the air.
The air is an armory waiting to blow.
The wind smelled of sugar, now sulfur.
The old carapace erodes.

Mute idols
and eyeless portraits dissolve
with fevered touches
as we seek vestiges of solace.
Behind the walls, the claws
of rats carve epitaphs
among heaps of black excrement.

Matchsticks for tinder,
promises to be kept,
we pace out the night captive
to the moon’s rasp.
Wrapped in sackcloth,
we repent of our injuries,
history, presence.
Too late to change the signs,
stay the wrath.

Red moon city,
rat city,
city bereft of stability.
The whole of tradition will collapse
with a single, distant gesture.
Our gates cannot be defended
against grave stars.
Look away, stranger.
Know us only by myth.


Pastoral

Grandma’s
peonies doze
offhand beyond
the nutritious grids.
Grandpa scythes wide.
The agent plays doctor,
sewing the Bard’s lips shut
as he says, “Bread’s the thing.”
Shirts on the line drip red with dusk.
Ask not what your country can/ did for art.

Caleb Puckett lives in Kansas. His books include Tales from the Hinterland, Market Street Exit and Fate Lines/ Desire Lines. Along with writing, Puckett edits the literary journal Futures Trading.

Thomas Zimmerman and Cleopatra's Dung Beetle, Fogged Bourgeois Mirrors, and a Radioactive Sexual Road-trip

Double Burn

1
I’ll burn the work. It’s just no good. “It creeps
me out to hear you talk like this”: your life
is drinking. I am deep in toxins. Sleep’s
a promontory gleaming, moon-steeled knife
to slice the seared but bloody muscle of
a dream. The smoke cleaves like a helmet, like
a halo. Tomb and womb. Aroma? Love
and loss, as usual. My muse won’t pysch
me out this time. The weak, the bad—I’ll cut.
And then the luck. Hemp strands of muddled lit.
I’ll braid it like a rope to hang us all.
The buzz? It’s ditch-weed bad. Time was, my gut
preached patience. Now, it screams, “What is this shit?!”
The dawn breaks chill and raw. Like spring. Or fall.

2
“Male secrecy and women’s need to know:
Remember Bluebeard.” So you say. I see
at least three meanings there. Who cares? Spring snow
and bitter blossoms. Burn that journal, free
the energy. Like masturbation? Worse.
In front of me, a half-full pint of stout,
and Monk is on the stereo, his curse
like mine, but darker, deeper. Primed, he’ll shout
his demons down, let Coltrane raise them up
again. Past lives come spooling out, from dung
beetle to Cleopatra. If I cup
a breast, I might remember verses sung
on burnished barges, drunk enough on life
to hail my exiled muse, make her my wife.
 
Fog

You rub the window clear, scratch your balls.
Coffee’s on. The sky can’t get off
the ground.

Maybe you’ve made a baby: one star swimmer
is all it takes.

Where’s the ibuprofen?
Where’s the calamine? Where’s that gal
of mine?

Asleep. Or lolling. Your bourgeois ease.
Your imported cheese.

Your newly manifested
wheeze. If you don’t try to help others, maybe
you will die.

Gauze blocks your thoughts. Painful,
all that thinking. High-school humping, that’s
the thing.
                 
Crass new term: fuck buddy. You heard
your old friend John has one. Beautiful wife
left him. There’s another term: comfort
women. Bad history there, before your time.

You hear the water running, go back upstairs.
She’s in the shower. You grab your razor. Pause.
The mirror’s fogged.
 
Peach Fuzz

The harvest moon, my dear, is God’s ass when
we’re coming down from high or buzz with three-
day stubble. Call it love. Reactors’ glow:
your breasts. And I’m a toxic spill. But will
it last? You used to tell me I was closed,
my poetry was constipated: dry-
turd verse. I’ve tried so hard to loosen up,
bolts moaning, hinges whinging. Yes, it’s just
a vision that we’re whole. You’ve got a hole:
thank God for that. Let’s get back in the car
and gobble up more miles. “Play anything
but Dylan . . . . I was joking.” So you say.
We’re crossing borders that the money’s made:
past truck stops, peep shows, toll gates, cop blockades.
Our ever-reimagined love-song, “Life
Is Just a Slow Slow Death,” still radiates
above the interstate, breaks over us in waves.


Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits two literary magazines at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His poems have appeared recently in Dime Show Review, The Drunken Llama, and Sick Lit. Tom's website: http://thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com/

Catfish McDaris Chronicles Inappropriate Gherkin Use, Route 66, a Komodo Dragon, Balzac, Mayhem in an Albuquerque Valley, and Prickly Pear Tuna

The Pamplona Blues


Sometimes you feel like you’ve
entered the Twilight Zone, I was in
this supermarket and I saw a
stone fox in the condiment aisle

She opened a bottle of catsup
and chugged it down, then
moved down to the pickles and
raised her brown leather skirt
and pulled her panties to

One side and started shoving
gherkins up her vagina, she
was moaning and groaning

Then she turned and looked at me
and said, “I bet you think I’m a sour puss”
 I left my basket and ran like
the bulls of Pamplona were after me.


Cocaine, Lizards and Balzac 


Years heaped like golden maple leaves in
Quebec or snowflakes on a Tucumcari
coyote moon night on Route 66

Sometimes the heart is nothing more than
 a clock measuring your minutes’ while
ticking and pumping in your chest

Life, death, earth, moon, sun all move in
circles, wise people live in circles, right
angles make you a square and box
you in like cattle not free buffalo

If you run a race against death, it always
gets a head start, unless you’re on the train
to nowhere or unless you can stab a flying
mosquito with an ice
pick

When you sleep with a shotgun and machete
and wake with a bloody dog’s head and you
own no dog and your cocaine has been
snorted

And your bald-headed girlfriend you took fishing
with the long blonde hair that got
caught in the propeller is pointing a 357

At your huevos while holding your Komodo
dragon, Booboo and your copy of La
Comedie humaine by Honore de Balzac, it’s
time to quit this nightmare and make some strong black
coffee.



Magdalena


Scarfing vagabond goulash
from Mexican sombrero
hub caps stolen from a
turquoise low rider short
in the valley of Albuquerque

Spanish yucca roots, flowers,
stems, and blanco corn tortillas
prickly pear tuna, serrano, pob-
lano, Copper Canyon sotol

Slow your cinnamon roll, mama
cooch, no need to gank the skank
let’s booty call tango fandango

Roots of the desert dagger are
full of saponins, a toxin that can
be used to stun fish without injury.



War Everyday Everywhere


Dedicated to the Australian movie Rabbit Proof Fence about atrocities perpetuated on the Aborigines and the Canadian folks that said America was lucky they let us land our  aircraft there after the 9/11 tragedy.


People hate Americans,
they hate McDonald’s,
they hate Kentucky Fried Chicken,
they hate Mickey Mouse,
they really hate our drones and nukes

But when they get in trouble
or need money, they all yell
for Uncle Sugar to come running,
they don’t worry about teeth getting
rotten and falling out or calluses on
their knees from begging for a handout

All the hawks and doves,
left wingers, right wingers, and righteous,
religion, oil, land, water, pride, and egos

Blood is always thinner than money,
gold is forever heavier than love

Some Americans go hungry,
we cry for our brave soldiers,
that die fighting other countries battles,
killing terrorists around the world

Don’t point your fingers and blame us
for your problems or for the freedom we’ve
created, don’t expect us to fill your stomachs



Catfish McDaris won the Thelonius Monk Award in 2015. He’s been active in the small press world for 25 years. He’s working in a wig shop in a high crime area of Milwaukee. His newest book is:
www.amazon.com/Sleeping-With-Fish-Catfish-McDaris/dp/0692671323  

Felino A. Soriano Achieves Momentum in Morning Expanse Littered with Postcard Sketches Syllabled with Erased Cliches for a Tranquilized Anthem

Of this Momentum Song (thirty-two)

    I see what the wonder
                          is
   —is the wonder what
     sees in the wander
    of the watching… we
                      again
  have been here before,
 the same tree swayed
   toward we in the
  hour’s music—
               strong
    hold the rhythm
  was, and is… the
      silence explains
   what absence is—
        heavy, a worded
    need the bark’s rough
  -ness feels like the hand
     of my leaving—
                 absent
  stress the confines
 of it, the break
   from hope noted
     of it… on return
                   a
morning expanse
 finds in movement
the truth of it,
   a death perceives
 movement
          as
  cultural sleek
 forward engage
   -ment, a slur
              when
 light is the clarity
of intrinsic trust,
  posture of this
 light imbues the
               absence
 waiting within
 the body and
   branding it
           alive




    alive as more fractured
   than more so fraction
      of what we eventually
    inherit,
          a
 comatose sleep lures
   and indents this
 music’s longhand
                drawn
    hour… positioned
  near where we go
     in toward, a faucet
   turns on
           announcing

     motive and the dance of it
   leaves the body

bare
                    but unbroken—

      sustained devotion to life’s
   qualitative

                            understanding




Of this Momentum Song (thirty-three)
                        _______________
                        Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how                               one remembers it in order to recount it.
                                                          —Gabriel García Márquez
 
                         

    Postcard sketches: land
   -scape theme, myriad
      sameness toward
                       a
  moment-capture sequence,
   an artistic hand
  -eye collaboration, theory—
                          bene
                                              -ficial scale the
                                             early morning trumpet
                                                 expands and
                                                              awakens—
                                              theme is totality, is
                                             theme of language or
                                                function of the mind’s
                                                                   small
exploratory figments—
     experimental forays
  the body twists to
 adhere in the swell
                  -ing
                                            of removing past
                                           participation, to envelop
                                              what is new in these
                                                                rhythms
  and acute paces
 hands play in the
   purge horns
              throw
  through the tunnel
 of which light
   pulses in the caus
  -ational pause re
 -begin pleasure
                 the
     body finds in nearing
    age of determined
                   splayed
                        circular
  inheritance of the civilized
 permission… we’ve walked
    here and found what
   here shows our
     tired posture
               …the
 timid cycles
  readying our
upward anthems,
              voices
  play the “cling”
 and stays—

         

           relevant




Of this Momentum Song (thirty-four)

 We wait in our walking,
 walk into what
wears this hour’s waiting
                noise,
   concurrences
 of sound.
        Syllabled
               knowing,
  with sound as knowing
 an echo is resultant
   stone-ripple
            harmony.
     Privilege.  Alive
 is the announcement
  each morning
             assembles
 among tongue and
                proof
the hour rotates
 within choired
hands Song
          rotates,
 spins into splayed
ornaments this
  flame
      evokes
            and
understands as
   foundational
              mirror
 inversion looks
  to impulse,
to interact
        with




entering.  Why the
 oval resonates
on itself and
  selves’ versions
 the numerical
              comprehend—
     we’ve needed rest,
   examine the good
       honoring what has
                     held
  us.  The way
 these colors
   exist in opposite
 blends from the eyes
     erasing clichés,
                 a
 downtown voice
  pulses to live     away
from what
        finds
    connection to bone—
 a pivot exterior
   to night’s
           x-rayed

                            prose and
 decomposing sections

    of
               reinterpreted

        diametric

philosophies




Of this Momentum Song (thirty-five)

Blow with doing
  so
    as does the
 trumpet’s
         variants
                below
  premise:        called
 in all listeners,
    mobile meeting     (we keep moving)
  textured talk the
               language
 rotates atop our
decisive tongues, petrichor,
              comfort
  finds our lyric, we
 devote the body to
    speaking certainties,
  sporadic thinking
                  underlines
 what our horns
  compose, provide.
                 This
   is the catapult
  function we’ve
    known about.
               The
exterior stride hands
 contain, lyrical mobility
we always confirmed.  We
  can piano here, should.
                   Praise
 be to the whole of what
  we’re going into, to-
   ward; and thus
to splay is to behave
  inward to the
 space needing
   no more optics
               than
fade or asterisk
  performs in
 how the hands
             hold
     our language-
 s.  Tomorrow we
    can envelop a
 tranquilized anthem,
   the mode of it steers
 how the eye outlines,
    understands.
               Nothing
 is neither whole nor
fractioned, the foray
  to become is to hold
 tacit reinventions
                  when
the body only
 sees within
           the
              spectrum
                       of
  its organic
           insinuations.




Of this Momentum Song (thirty-six)

   Tumult, we
  praise around it, as is said
    what we call
  music the crow
   renames water—
                 extract
  in the pleasure
   sequences each
 mouth searches to-
  ward, in the
            hiring
   of body to blend
 hanker with
     warmth of
 finding surfaces.
              Offered
  what finds us (renaming)
 what searches to offer
   in the meaning
  of it.  Song
    knows us, knows
 of us; we’ve a buried
      harp in the way
  voices color the air’s between
   gold, gold as does
  the hand give into
    affection’s role
                   to
 invite.  Sway, the
  mission adheres
to the tongue of
   what holds us…
                  from
when we begin, from mothers
 holding the small
of cries, the smallness
  reveals then too,
 the deliberate need
to thread what is human
                       what
   human holds to ident-
 ify each portion of bone
     naming our
                momentum’s
   intuitive meander.
    The unsayable
 says what died in voice.  Paused
  invention.  The water
      from
          where the crow
                         names
 its premise, we’ve pulled
  the harp from where
our hands need flamed
                     succession,
    we continue, we
perform courage into
      what calls to
  praise in the hearing
                    of

         the halo awaiting—
 

    our Song is our going home…
home as where the body

             never bends to a

    dissipating
                        motive




Felino A. Soriano’s poetry appears in CHURN, BlazeVOX, 3:AM Magazine, The National Poetry Review, Small Po[r]tions, and elsewhere.  His books of poetry include Vocal Apparitions: New & Selected Poems: 2012 – 2016 (2016), sparse anatomies of single antecedents (2015), Of isolated limning (2014), Pathos|particular invocation (2013), Of language|s| the rain speaks (2012), Intentions of Aligned Demarcations (2011), In Praise of Absolute Interpretation (2010), Construed Implications (2009), and Among the Interrogated (2008).  His collaborative collection Quintet Dialogues: translating introspection, which features visual art from David Allen Reed is forthcoming from Howling Dog Press.

He publishes the online journal Of/with, and is Multimedia Editor for Unlikely Stories Mark V, and is a contributing editor at Sugar Mule. 

Visit Of the poetry this jazz portends for more information.  

A.S. Coomer Reverberates, Looping the Eavesdropped Barstool Amidst Dew-Soaked Heatherdowns

Hootie’s Cave

There’s a cave

just up the road

from the house

where I grew up.

I used to go there

with my family

when I was a kid.

There are rocks

the size of cars

partially blocking

its entrance.

Rocks hard enough

to break yourself against.

Rocks beaten, slowly,

by time and wind and rain

into little grains that mushed

under the soles

of my dirty shoes.

I used to climb over the rocks,

drop just inside the opening

of the cave

and call out.

It didn’t matter what.

Not words or names or commands.

Just noise. Just the sound of being.

Just something to send out and hear echo

back a fraction of a second later,

already in the past, already over.

These days I’m sure I’m still stuck

just inside the mouth of a neighbor’s rockhouse,

spinning circles, splashing off spraypainted walls,

--in motion but trapped--

in that time loop reverberation.

Another Three Lonely Ones

“I don’t have a problem, Chelsea.”

I overheard him from across the nearly empty,

noontime bar. Sun, weak as stale tea,

filtered in hazily through cracked blinds & dusty windows.

The summer crowd had ceased thinning out

over a month ago. It had stopped entirely now.

“You said you did last night,” she persisted. “You said so yourself.”

A stool creaked in their direction.

“I was drunk when I said that.”

An awkward pause stretched out like the endless horizon of pale blue

--Lake Michigan not a stone’s throw from where I sat.

I could almost feel the little stings of pelting sand

off Sleeping Bear Dunes & the hanging mist

of the great lake’s spit haloed like a bad reputation not readily dealt with.

The barkeep--quite suddenly--found something that required

his immediate attention in the dark recesses of what I assumed was the kitchen.

The batwing doors beat an off-rhythm, doubling with each swing

as the rusty hinge screamed and squawked,

piercing the stagnant air like a quietus keen,

stabbing it, shooting it through like the period, a black hole slashing all,

serving as the end of sentence of whatever relationship had just ended.

I took a long pull from the bottle of beer. Ice beneath my fingers

slipped down the label and pooled on the waxed & shining wood,

the only thing aside from the beer that looked well kept in the place.

I peeled a corner of the label off the bottle & watched the little icebergs

flow south as gravity steered us towards our eventual endings,

collective and a part, together but alone, always alone really.

“You know what?” her voice was triumphant

in her bitter disappointment & resentment now.

“You are the problem, Josh.”

I heard the door shut behind her,

the beaten bells clanging their discordant knell,

a beck & call as much for the barkeep as for us all.

as I finished what was going to be my last beer of the afternoon.

The barkeep reemerged from the kitchen with a glass and a rag.

He took a quick glance in the direction of The Problem Josh

then set down the glass in front of me.

It was chipped & battered. There’d been a logo on it some years ago

but it was indecipherable now. A cryptic, vaguely female eye peeking out

of a wash of faded colors & jangled letters.

“Thought you might like a glass.”

We both looked down at my empty bottle & waited.

Oh, the weight of the wait.

I hadn’t asked for a glass with any of the four previous beers

nor had one been offered.

I smiled and slid another three lonely ones across the bar

just as the door closed a second time.

Little Platte Lake

There’s a thousand lives to live out here.

A thousand means of finding meaning.

I’ve stumbled onto one of them, I think.

Pine needles, knots of twining vine,

a vegetation nearly Northern Pacific in feeling;

the rain pattering sound on the dew-soaked heatherdowns

like gently muted toms or nearly forgotten, rustic spells.

Incantations of what you’ve lost but strive to find

but what can you retrieve from so much lost time?

I saw a mother and two cubs scamper across Saffron Road

in the post-rain haze of a late September day.

I’ve given myself over to substance use today:

intoxicated by a story I never lived, I translated it to music,

spent the time after in a pot-filled gauze,

a claustrophobic morning of clouds and sky and lake,

losing sense of where the reflection ended and the real began,

later a double IPA daze, watching the changing

leaves in the passing car’s suspended breeze

dance and twirl like the uncurling furls of the locks of your sanguine curls.

You get a sense that the land here is waiting, patiently biding its time,

the time just before the big white hands of winter sus out the sun,

wrap the heavy blanketed cloak around the starving pines,

granting everything under

only

the chance to hide & wait & sleep.

A.S. Coomer is a native Kentuckian serving out a purgatorial existence somewhere in the Midwest. His work has appeared in over thirty publications. He’s got a handful of novels that need good homes. You can find him at www.ascoomer.wordpress.com. He also runs a “record label” for poetry: www.lostlonggoneforgottenrecords.wordpress.com. 

Steven Porter Would Rather Be A Dinosauric Iconoclast Amongst Blasphemies of An Anti-Theists

"I'd Rather Be"

I'd rather be a scarecrow on a farm, licking crows'
wounds, inhabited by a murdered farmer's ghost,
than lick the Italian leather asshole of a college
graduate with an overpriced sheet of paper
firing an inflamed hubris into his ear.

I'd rather be a spider in the Amazon rainforest
weaving a gossamer trap in a moist, hollow log,
brawling with my fellow Arachnid neighbors than
be a flighless bird staring into the sun and weeping
because the sky disowned me eons ago.

I'd rather be the mouse than the snake.

I'd rather be the scorpion than the shoe.

I'd rather be smudged makeup on a woman's face.

I'd rather be sweat dripping off a man's earlobe than be a man.

I'd rather be the poem than the poet.

I'd rather be a cigarette butt, than a brand
new cigarette, because then at least it's all over.

I guess I'd rather be dark matter, pushing
the universe further and further away
from the human species.



"Pride of the Serpent"

My stomach growls, I haven't eaten
since the last Solar Eclipse.
I killed a rattlesnake today.
I shot it in the head with a
pistol I stole from a friend.
He lies on my table, decapitated,
stripped of his flesh and pride that
came with deceiving Adam and Eve.
I put his head in a jar with formaldehyde
borrowed from work.
Its expression captured in
a final moment of defense,
like photographs of American
Soldiers storming Iwo Jima,
planting the flag as bullets whizzed
past them and explosives detonated.
(He may have been a part of Medusa?)
A folic-token thwarting warriors with two fangs.
What I can't finish, I wrap in cellophane
and store in my refrigerator; this
miniature-morgue, now a grave
for a dinosauric iconoclast.



"Birthday at 95-Years"

Today is the 95th-birthday for
a tribe's eldest member.

An empty chair at the head of the table
creaks as hurried guests pass by to take
their own seats. A birthday cake awaits.

A birthday cake laden with candles is
like a coffin built from cheap wood...
each has trouble carrying the weight of
nearly a century of suppressed despair.

The guest of honor takes his seat and hesitates to
blow out the burning candles, wax inundates the cake.
A hearse waits outside honking its horn.



"Confessions of an Anti-Theist"

This dream...snakes temporarily grow
arms, pluck out nuns' eyes and
tear their pious cemetery
garments from their flesh and
twist their areolas until they
screamed for God to come down
with lotion to lather their breasts.

Adam and Eve finger fuck in a cathedral
and pour holy water on each other's
genitals to wash off blood of the lamb.
Eve takes Adam's rib and deepthroats it.
Adam's petty, botanic cock can't do the job.

A whale nips Jonah's ass, but Jonah confesses
that he's already in a relationship with a plesiosaur
who promised to write his story and make it a Number
One bestseller on the Stars and Stripes Cro-Magnon hit list.

As Abraham leads his son Isaac to Moriah,
God descends with Satan and says "See, man,
I told you I could get him to murder his son."
"Alright, alright. I guess I owe you that 50 bucks
and the Southern Hemisphere?" responds Satan.
Abraham looks up at God and Satan and shouts,
"Hey! I didn't bring him here because you told me too,
I did it because that little bastard drank my last jug of wine!"

Steven Allan Porter was born February 5, 1992 in Coral Springs, FL to a Jewish mother and a German father. His influences include: Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Bob Kaufman, Steven Jesse Bernstein, Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Simic, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine. His work has appeared in Red Fez, Degenerate Literature, Wildflower Muse, Dead Snakes, UFO Gigolo, Dali's LoveChild, Blue Mountain Review, Beatnik Cowboy, Rasputin: A Poetry Thread, Peeking Cat Poetry, Horror, Sleaze and Trash, The Basil O' Flaherty, Saudade Magazine, and Syzygy Poetry Journal. He currently resides in Chino, CA.

Marianne Szlyk and the Battle Ground From the Basement to the Womb and the Twins Haunting Cities of Possible Parallel Lives

For My Ex-Husband’s Twin Sons (2)

Winter 1996/1997

That winter I stopped in Boston
on my way back to Indiana.
A friend told me my ex-husband,
your father,
had been all but evicted,
not packing until the last day
of his last month in our apartment
of several years.  But he wasn’t
homeless, she reassured me.

In retrospect, I am surprised that
he wasn’t living in her basement,
the place I had planned to be,
if I were still living in that city.

My friend was too old to be your mother.
Some other woman bore you.
She raised you both,
her last chance to have a child.
Fierce in red, her strong core
hiding her bump, she traveled down
the winter sidewalks alone.

Come summer,
she would push a borrowed stroller
past empty storefronts and dying trees.
She would push past my ex-husband
who, talking to himself, wouldn’t know
his own children or even her.

For My Ex-Husband’s Twin Sons (3)

Summer 1997

The next summer I believed in nothing.
Windows open, drinking icy Pepsi, with the fan off,
I lay awake upstairs, not reading Clarissa
while my friend the atheist slept
in the basement to escape the heat
while the man I liked slept
back in the city I’d left.

As I listened to the oldies from Battle Ground,
I thought nothing would change.   I had
been listening to these songs for years.
Levi Stubbs would always plead to Bernadette.
Dusty would always offer advice I’d never take.
Alone in bed, I would be reading
these thick books forever,
my life captured in small print
and amber-colored soda
drunk in some college town.
Like Clarissa, this life would continue
as long as I chose to turn the page.

This was the summer you two could have
been born, perhaps to a stringy-haired woman
who had traipsed in and out of our apartment,
perhaps to a fierce woman in red.
For her, whether or not she kept you,
whoever she once was,
everything would have changed.

I guess.  I’ll never know.


For My Ex-Husband’s Twin Sons (4)

Summer 2016


Somewhere else you exist with my own son
and the daughter my husband and I
adopted from Ethiopia before I died.
The two of you sit or don’t sit in class.
You roam the hallway, pace the aisles,
perch on bookshelves, listen to heavy metal
or rap or garage rock from the 60s.
You chatter constantly about video games.
You don’t know your father or mother.
To you, they are ghosts.

Like Emily Dickinson, each of you
dwell in possibility.  Unlike her,
you write nothing down.
You do not evolve
the way she did
over two thousand poems
written on the back of envelopes.

I see you in glimpses,
standing around Harvard Square
and the upscale mall it’s become,
as children riding the Orange Line
with your mother,
the fierce, stout woman
in red.  Now she has forgotten
your father’s name
but not his face.
She may even be friends
with the woman
who would have been my landlady
if I’d stayed in this city.
Maybe you have left it as well.

I must imagine what this life is like
for you who do not exist
in the real world
without children.

Marianne Szlyk is the editor of The Song Is... , an associate poetry editor at Potomac Review, and a professor of English at Montgomery College. She and her husband live with two cats, too many books and CDs, and no cars.  Her second chapbook, I Dream of Empathy, was published by Flutter Press.  Her poems have appeared in a variety of online and print venues, including Silver Birch Press, Cactifur, Of/with, bird's thumb, Truck, and Yellow Chair Review.  Her first chapbook is available through Kind of a Hurricane Press.  She hopes that you will consider sending work to her magazine. For more information about it, see this link: http://thesongis.blogspot.com/