Tara Lynn Hawk Up the River of Babylon With the Ghost of Modigliani Like a Pilfered Cadaver by the Felled Golden Spruce

On Viewing The Liffey At Midnight With The Ghost Of Modigliani 

If only he would push her in 

Filthy water always runs 

backwards 

And it’s going, it’s going  

it’s gone 

gone 

Oh yes he knew 

how to paint them 

All blue and black 

Discordant Adagio 

I am a bit overwhelmed with suicide bombers and harp seals  

clubbed and dog meat eating festivals and women stoned to  

death for falling in love with the “wrong” man with homeless  

veterans….or homeless anyone for that matter, kittens taped  

into a box and thrown on the side of the road my family thinks 

 me a nut with my 

hippie clothes and  

library of beat poets 

At least I am not that woman who locked her kids in the trunk  

of her car so she could go shopping 

The Not Bright Future (Currently On Hold) 

They will not admit us so we remain abandoned  

and unclaimed 

We’ll go ask the Church of Saint  

John Coltrane to take us to the river 

of Babylon once removed or some other river or stream we don’t care 

Campfires to dance around in a mummified haze of indifference 

Spines tingling, nail beds raw 

Yes we will fit in 

We have to  

Overworked Medical Examiner's Assistant 

We are always shorthanded here in this 

cold, dated building of tile and  

sterile stainless 

Made for function not visual harmony 

Daily I see the unnecessary cruelties inflicted by one being onto another 

Often for no reason at all 

than the a rumpled twenty  

The so-called “natural” deaths much fewer 

I  photograph mottled bruises and gaping wounds and pilfer  

the blood from the cadavers 

Not so meticulous tissue sectioning and the spending 

of much time moving my work around, in and out and  

around the fridge where some  

unwanted bones stay for years 

From the long window I see the park outside 

Birdsong permeates these walls as formaldehyde 

does my violent, intimate tasks 

Life goes on amongst all these mortal cells in  

slow decay  

Last fall they cut the tall golden spruce down 

Diseased, they said 

Dead trees felled, dead  

bodies incised 

Tara Lynn Hawk is a poet and writer whose work has appeared in Occulum, Uut, Spelk, Spilling Cocoa, Ant-Heroin Chic, Social Justice Poetry, etc.  Forthcoming In Idle Ink and Midnight Lane.  Her first chapbook, The Dead, is available on Smashwords.  "taralynnhawk.com" 

Michael Brownstein and His Siberian Anthropology, the Death Songs of Crows, and the Rain Whitewashing It All

JOURNEYS AND JOURNEYMEN
 
My mother did not make the trek across earth mountains and rocky beaches.
She allowed us to sail into ourselves one accident at a time.

Nowhere does the graffiti list off every Siberian possibility.
My mother was sweet oil and hard tack, always in full color.

Years go by and time stops.
We knew better and we did not know better.

My mother drove a car into a deer on a country road.
We settled into a denial of one anthropology over another.

A flowering tree has an incredible need to flower.
My mother dreamt us up one brick at a time.

—    [Mendeleev’s] mother must have recognized his
 precocious intelligence, and when he reached fourteen, feeling that he would be lost without a proper education, she walked thousands of miles from Siberia with him—first to the University of Moscow (from which, as a Siberian, he was barred) and then to St. Petersburg, where he got a grant to train as a teacher. (She herself, apparently, nearing sixty at the time, died of exhaustion…) 

Oliver Sachs, Uncle Tungsten


THE END 

Here is an individual who writes because he has to
He seeks no audience no acclaim no book deal
He understands the world is coming to its end
What he writes will no longer matter to anyone
But himself, a friend or two, perhaps a lover.
When the world draws itself into an extinction,
He knows what will be left, what will be new,
A people of the forest with a curiosity of a forest,
Not technology or assembly lines or running water,
But a simplicity of designs in trees, a design in bark,

The song the crow sings as she devours the newly dead.


A MOMENTARY PEACE

She talks of god, she talks to god.
Sometimes she hears an answer.
In the waking silence, she is stubborn.
Early spring, the paper wasp,
Chewed bark, a honey bee,
The wind cruel and heavy,
One hesitation and a pond.
She sings a trumpet to the first cricket,
Everything whitewashed rain and light,
Her notebook open on her lap,
Her pencil sticky with dew.



Michael H. Brownstein has been widely published throughout the small and literary presses. His work has appeared in The Café Review, American Letters and Commentary, Skidrow Penthouse, Xavier Review, Hotel Amerika, Free Lunch, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, The Pacific Review, Poetrysuperhighway.com and others. In addition, he has nine poetry chapbooks including The Shooting Gallery (Samidat Press, 1987), Poems from the Body Bag (Ommation Press, 1988), A Period of Trees (Snark Press, 2004), What Stone Is (Fractal Edge Press, 2005), I Was a Teacher Once (Ten Page Press, 2011), Firestorm: A Rendering of Torah (Camel Saloon Press, 2012), The Possibility of Sky and Hell: From My Suicide Book (White Knuckle Press, 2013) and The Katy Trail, Mid-Missouri, 100 Degrees Outside and Other Poems (Kind of Hurricane Press, 2013). He is the editor of First Poems from Viet Nam (2011)