The Best American Poetry

Meg Kearney: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Gabriel Parker

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George Says Stop Writing About Yourself

(New York, December 2001)

 

This one’s for George, who urged take off those

shit-kicker boots, leave your husband wrapped

in the scroll of last night’s sheets, forget your mother

sipping a cigarette, a Dugan’s Dew—forget

your other mother, your other father, too,

 

and the one you last saw in a coffin not looking

at all like himself, so much not-him you couldn’t

bear be near that body. Forget your first kiss—

how it sounded like peanut butter, tasted like

a train. Stop talking about the Alabama Slammers

 

and four Blue Whales or those men you drove crazy

with your push-him, pull-him love. And don’t speak

of babies, about not having them or the ugly one

who’s so much a part of your nights she must be

real, her mongrel face breaking into sadness.

 

Don’t talk about holding her above your head,

calling her Sweet Girl, Mama’s Girl—how she almost

smiles. Just for George, this poem looks beyond

Sea Monkeys and that first Louisville Slugger.

It opens the window to the stench, three months

 

now of that smell, man-made, human, wafting

from downtown. This poem is in the street,

where war does its thing. See, there’s a man

walking up Broadway: his shoes, suit, eyelashes,

lips covered with dust that used to be a building.

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In June 2021, The Word Works Press will publish Meg Kearney’s All Morning the Crows, winner of the 2020 Washington Prize for poetry. Meg is also author of An Unkindness of Ravens and Home By Now, winner of the PEN New England L.L. Winship Award; a heroic crown, The Ice Storm, published as chapbook in 2020; and three verse novels for teens. Her award-winning picture book, Trouper, is illustrated by E.B. Lewis. Meg’s poetry has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac” and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” series, and included in the 2017 Best American Poetry anthology (Natasha Tretheway, guest editor). She lives in New Hampshire and directs the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program in Massachusetts.

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Charles Bernstein: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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On Election Day

 

I hear democracy weep, on election day.

The streets are filled with brokered promise, on election day.

The miscreant’s vote the same as saint’s, on election day.

The dead unleash their fury, on election day.

My brother crushed in sorrow, on election day.

The sister does her washing, on election day.

Slowly, I approach the voices dark, on election day.

The men prepare for dying, on election day.

The morning hush defends its brood, on election day.

So still, so kindly faltering, on election day.

On election day, the cats take tea with the marmoset.

On election day, the mother refuses her milk.

On election day, the frogs croak so fiercely you would think that Mars had fallen into Earth.

On election day, the iron man meets her frozen gasp.

The air is putrid, red, interpolating, quixotic, torpid, vulnerable, on election day.

Your eyes slide, on election day.

Still the mourners mourn, the weepers wept, the children sleep alone in bed, on election day.

No doubt a comet came to see me, fiery and irreconciled, torrid, strummed, on election day.

On election day, the trespass of the fatuous alarm and ignominious aspiration fells the

       golden leap to girdled crest. 

The tyrant becomes prince, on election day.

Neither friend nor foe, fear nor fate, on election day.

The liar lies with the lamb, on election day.

The last shall be the first and first sent to the back of the line, on election day.

The beggar made a king, on election day.

“Let him who is without my poems be assassinated!” on election day.

Let he who has not sinned, let him sin, on election day.

The ghosts wear suits, on election day.

On election day, sulfur smells like beer.

On election day, the minister quakes in fear.

On election day, the Pole and the Jew dance the foxtrot.

On election day, the shoe does not fit the foot, the bullet misfires in its pistol, the

        hungry waiter reels before steadying himself on facts.

The grid does not gird the fiddler, on election day.

Galoshes and tears, on election day.

The sperm cannot find the egg, on election day.

The drum beat becomes bird song, on election day.

I feel like a nightmare is ending but can’t wake up, on election day.

 

(November 4, 2008)

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Charles Bernstein is the author of Near/Miss and Pitch of Poetry. ROOF recently published The Course, a collaboration with Ted Greenwald. University of New Mexico Press has published a facsimile reprint L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, a volume of related letters, as well as the late 1970s collaboration Legend. He lives in Brooklyn.  [For more information on, and poems by, Charles Bernstein, see the Poetry Foundation.]

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Sandra Beasley: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Vocation

 

For six months I dealt Baccarat in a casino.

For six months I played Brahms in a mall.

For six months I arranged museum dioramas;

my hands were too small for the Paleolithic

and when they reassigned me to lichens, I quit.

I type ninety-one words per minute, all of them

Help. Yes, I speak Dewey Decimal.

I speak Russian, Latin, a smattering of Tlingit.

I can balance seven dinner plates on my arm.

All I want to do is sit on a veranda while

a hard rain falls around me. I'll file your 1099s.

I'll make love to strangers of your choice.

I'll do whatever you want, as long as I can do it

on that veranda. If it calls you, it's your calling,

right? Once I asked a broker what he loved

about his job, and he said Making a killing.

Once I asked a serial killer what made him

get up in the morning, and he said The people.

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Sandra Beasley is the author of Made to Explode (forthcoming February 2021); Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize; and Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a disability memoir. She also edited Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. She lives in Washington, D.C. ["Vocation" is from I Was the Jukebox: Poems. Copyright © 2010 by Sandra Beasley.]

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Ahmos Zu-Bolton: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Ravis

 

My brother turns his life insideout,

from a jail in Leesville,

from a half-way house in Lake Charles,

from a slave-quarter in DeRidder.

He is prisoner of his own rage,

trapped behind the swollen bars

of some lingering chains

and some sudden cage.

 

I speak to him from miles away,

from the cell next door and

lightyears away,

from motherlands and the fertile earth

our Mississippi father plowed:

 

I am trying to be the lawyer he needs,

the father who died fighting for his son,

the big brother with muscles in his miles,

the preacher with his pitiful prayers,

 

I am trying to give him

the key to the cage, the hammer

to break the chains, the plot

the escape, the magic, the ju-ju

the tunnel under the demon walls,

the North Star to follow,

 

I climb inside all his sins,

find them in the flesh of this poem,

do bloody battle with them,

rip them apart like a white man's curse,

become their bitter judge,

their merciful jury,

their solemn executioner,

 

I leave them on the open floor

of his cell, spread out like the pages

of a testament, shadowboxing him

like a mirror,

 

I can forgive them

those far-away long-ago sins,

but I can't erase them,

for they have their own afterlife,

their own ghost pulsating

on the hot breath where

my brother's frustrated bloodline boils...

 

yet no loving offering

from my elderly black hand

can reverse his youthful middle passage

as he sits

on the frontporch of his betrayed generation,

sent to his silent room

like a spoiled boychild,

where he conjures secret maps

for whatever freedoms

he chose to rock his dusty soul with.

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I remember Ahmos Zu-Bolton II as a charismatic and gifted poet. He occasionally took part in the Mass Transit readings in Washington DC's Dupont Circle in the early 1970s, which was when I met him. A poet, playwright, Vietnam War veteran, and tireless promoter of African-American writers, Zu-Bolton was born on 21 October 1935 in Mississippi and grew up in Louisiana. He founded Hoo-Doo, a magazine devoted to African-American activism and arts, and, with E. Ethelbert Miller, edited the 1975 anthology Synergy D.C. His poetry collections include A Niggered Amen (1975), Ain’t No Spring Chicken (1998), and 1946 (2002). He died  at age 69 on 8 March 2005, at Howard University Medical Center in Washington, D.C.  See Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s excellent post on Zu-Bolton; Doug Lang’s 2007 blog on Zu-Bolton offers links to more information, plus brief remembrances by Michael Lally and Beth Joselow; see also Grace Cavalieri’s perceptive essay on Zu-Bolton’s work in Beltway Poetry Quarterly.  

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Joan Retallack: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

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The Magic Rule of 9

 

Your sonic suit will never be a perfect fit. You’ll learn to

get by. Just don’t assume all art is all about victory over

death all the time. Not to say the meantime isn’t as good

a time as any to enjoy not being dead. In the swell of

many a meantime, many have diverted themselves with

great success. Hence civilizations’ discontents and

greatest hits. Take for instance the magic rule of nine.

That the sums of all numbers within the sums of all

multiplicands of 9, up to and including 9, equal 9:

1x9=9, 9=9; 2x9=18, 1+8=9; 3x9=27, 2+7=9; etc.

This is numerically melodious (bird sings in tree) to the

species that longs for more than a first glance affords.

Someone will say, If you really think this is magic, you

don’t properly understand the decimal system (bird

falls out of tree). Who among us doesn’t long for magic.

Who among us truly understands the decimal system.

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Joan Retallack's BOSCH'D (Fables, Moral Tales & Other Awkward Constructions), in which this poem appears, came out from Litmus Press on April Fools Day, 2020. She feels it's impossible to dispute the aptness of that date given local and global circumstances at the time. Retallack is the author of The Poethical Wager (University of California Press) and Procedural Elegies—Western Civ Cont'd (Roof Books) among many other volumes of poetry and essays. Her Gertrude Stein: Selections (California) and conversations with John Cage (MUSICAGE, Wesleyan) examine the humor and gravitas of idiosyncratic aesthetics that became, respectively, so widely influential. Prior to BOSCH'D, Litmus Press published Retallack’s The Supposium: Thought Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times— 2018 textual/visual continuation of an event she organized at MoMA in collaboration with Adam Pendleton. In all her work, Retallack combines socio-political inquiry with linguistic, visual, performative experiments in what she considers "poethical wagers.” 

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Michael Donaghy: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Shibboleth

 

One didn’t know the name of Tarzan’s monkey.

Another couldn’t strip the cellophane

From a G.I.’s pack of cigarettes.

By such minutiae were the infiltrators detected.

 

By the second week of battle

We’d become obsessed with trivia.

At a sentry point, at midnight, in the rain,

An ignorance of baseball could be lethal.

 

The morning of the first snowfall, I was shaving,

Staring into a mirror nailed to a tree,

Intoning the Christian names of the Andrews Sisters.

“Maxine, Laverne, Patty.”

 

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Michael Donaghy was born in the Bronx to Irish immigrant parents. In his thirties, he settled in the UK, where he became a well-known and highly regarded poet. Also an accomplished flute and whistle player, he was an active part of London’s traditional Irish music scene. His sudden death at age 50 was a great loss to both the literary and traditional music communities. Fintan O’Toole’s piece for the Irish Times examines Donaghy’s “elastic identity.” Donaghy’s wife, Maddy Paxman, published a book in 2014 about their life together.  See also The Guardian and the Poetry Foundation for more on Donaghy's life and work. See the Session for information on his life in Irish music. To hear him play, see this clip:

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Kim Roberts: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Roberts (photo, Art Omi, Oct 2019)

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Double Indemnity

 

No, not insurance. What I

meant to say was “double identity,”

 

as in Boutros Boutros-Ghali,

William Carlos Williams, Sirhan Sirhan,

 

Lady Gaga. For these folks, surely,

The Postman Always Rings Twice.

 

But now I’ve Mildred Pierced myself

to the image of James M. Cain,

 

typing away in his little white house

in suburban Maryland. His typewriter

 

is preserved in a university library;

I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the change

 

from manual to electric to electronic

to what-the-hell-is-a-typewriter

 

and no one will be archiving

our battered beloved iPads,

 

even if they once belonged to Yo-Yo Ma,

Flavor Flav, or Marky Mark.

 

Now all our devices must do at least

two things: phone-cameras,

 

calculator-umbrellas. But in truth

all of us lead double lives, an outer

 

story plus a hidden story, separated by

such a thin skin. Tell us that one again

 

Ford Madox Ford, Kris Kristofferson,

Humbert Humbert, Richie Rich.

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Kim Roberts is the editor of By Broad Potomac’s Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of our Nation’s Capital (University of Virginia Press, 2020) and the author of A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston (University of Virginia Press, 2018). She has published five books of poems, most recently The Scientific Method (WordTech Editions, 2017).

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Doug Lang: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Doug Lang at the Rodin Museum in Paris, 1996. Photo by Sandra Rottmann

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Lang’s Special Fortune Cookies

 

Nothing special is coming your way.

Your luck will not change today.

Your sense of humor is of no use to you.

No one is thinking of you this evening.

Your determination has gotten you where you are today.

You will always be surrounded.

If you see someone, why not have doubts?

You have no sense and you don’t know what time it is.

Nothing in this one.

 

Please ignore the music. it is not for you.

If you stop looking for what you want, you will be sure to find it and lose interest in it.

Everything will now come your way and go right past you.

You do not need to be patient anymore: do not think, do not listen, do not heed signs.

You should regard delays and setbacks as normal.

Versatility is beyond your reach.

A good home is too expensive.

 

You are unable to show your true self to others. You have no true self.

You will conquer all obstacles and achieve world domination, but first you must shave your mustache.

You will notice that nothing has changed in the near future.

You are capable of repeating everything endlessly.

Don’t put your egg in one basket.

A true friend always walks away when you start whining.

A small house will not hold as much as a big one. This should not be a problem for you.

You have a superficial understanding of the arts and music.

You will never forget a friend who owes you.

You will go a long way.

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Doug Lang is from Swansea in Wales. He came to Washington DC in 1973, the year that his novel, Freaks, was published by New English Library. He ran a now legendary reading series at Folio Books in Dupont Circle from January 1976 to June 1978. His erudite command of literature, cinema, music, and visual art, along with his wit, intellectual generosity, and good will, made him the most popular professor at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, where he taught writing for 37 years. His most recent book is dérangé, published by Primary Writing in DC in 2013. A new collection, In the Works, Selected Poems 1973–2013, is forthcoming from DC’s Edge Books. For more of Doug’s poems, see the Beltway Poetry Quarterly. For his 2008 post on the poetry of the 1970s, click here.  His film blog from 2007 is also worth checking out. For a multi-part, six-hour conversation between Terence Winch and Doug Lang, visit PennSound. The Doug Lang Papers are held by the Burns Library at Boston College.  [editor’s note: Doug is currently off-line, but I will make sure he gets any comments on this post.] 

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   Doug Lang with Blaise Cendrars book in Paris, 1996. Photo by Sandra Rottmann.

Patricia Spears Jones: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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If I Were Rita Hayworth

 

I would hear Spanish first.

My father would teach me how to shimmer.

My mother would keep her mouth shut.

 

I would wear red dresses at age 12

and dance like a woman many years older.

I would dance in my father's arms.

 

Later I would dye my hair red

and pluck the last Spanish words from my mouth.

 

I would masquerade as an American­

that healthy girl next door who knows

how to crack a whip.

 

I would dream only in black and white

(after Technicolor, some peace is needed).

 

As the Studio built a whole world for me

full of fresh cream and gingerbread, I would seek

out the darkest men, nigger dark, then fuck them

into marriage. I would wed a Prince of Darkness

and bear daughters named for the perfumes of Arabia.

 

If l were Rita Hayworth, strung between living a lie

and bearing a sickness so furious it ages me to dream of it,

I would rage in my illness, make a black hole

wide enough to swallow the damnation of my beauty.

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Patricia Spears Jones grew up in Arkansas and has lived and worked in New York City since the mid 1970s.  She is a poet, playwright, educator, cultural activist, and anthologist. The recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers in 2017, Spears Jones is the author of A Lucent Fire New and Selected Poems and other books. Her poems are widely anthologized, including in the forthcoming in 250 Years of African American Poetry: Why African American Poetry Matters Today.  Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Brooklyn Rail, msmagazine.com, and numerous other print and online journals.  She co-edited ORDINARY WOMEN: An Anthology of New York City Women Poets (1978) and edited THINK: Poems for Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Day Hat (2009). She curated programs as Program Coordinator for The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church and created WORDS Sunday series in Brooklyn.  She has taught Creative Writing at Hunter College, Barnard College, Adelphi University, and Hollins University as the 2020 Louis D. Rubin Writer in Residence.  She has taught summer poetry workshops at Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center, Naropa, Rutgers University, Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill and Wild Seeds Workshop for Medgar Evers College and at The Poetry Project, Poets House, Brooklyn Poets, for Cave Canem New York classes and at branches of the NYPL and the BPL. She is Emeritus Fellow for Black Earth Institute and organizer of the American Poets Congress. 

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Billy Collins: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Afternoon with Irish Cows

 

There were a few dozen who occupied the field

across the road from where we lived,

stepping all day from tuft to tuft,

their big heads down in the soft grass,

though I would sometimes pass a window

and look out to see the field suddenly empty

as if they had taken wing, flown off to another country.

 

Then later, I would open the blue front door,

and again the field would be full of their munching

or they would be lying down

on the black-and-white maps of their sides,

facing in all directions, waiting for rain.

How mysterious, how patient and dumbfounded

they appear in the long quiet of the afternoon.

 

But every once in a while, one of them

would let out a sound so phenomenal

that I would put down the paper

or the knife I was cutting an apple with

and walk across the road to the stone wall

to see which one of them was being torched

or pierced through the side with a long spear.

 

Yes, it sounded like pain until I could see

the noisy one, anchored there on all fours,

her neck outstretched, her bellowing head

laboring upward as she gave voice

to the rising, full-bodied cry

that began in the darkness of her belly

and echoed up through her bowed ribs into her gaping mouth.

 

Then I knew that she was only announcing

the large, unadulterated cowness of herself,

pouring out the ancient apologia of her kind

to all the green fields and the gray clouds,

to the limestone hills and the inlet of the blue bay,

while she regarded my head and shoulders

above the wall with one wild, shocking eye.

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Billy Collins is a former US Poet Laureate. His latest collection is Whale Day (Random House, 2020.)

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 Cows in county Cork, Ireland. Sept. 2020. Photo by Jennifer O'Riordan.

 

 

Jiwon Choi: Pick of the Week (x2) [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Memoir Mori

 

In Part One, I will introduce my mother, butcher-in-chief

feasting on her young, bones and gristle, sauté

and sizzle with toothsome glee. Day-old tabloid soup

moving you on to

Part Two where I make my escape to a liberal arts college

and become afflicted with a condition known as poetry-writing

where I Ouija-board Plath nightly for instruction on restitution

and virgin suicides.

In Part Three I seek solace in philosophy (I fuck

therefore I am) also known as impersonating Freudian slips:

you’re not a family until you’re a tragedy.

How to begin Part Four?

Cue the tall, blond Tourette’s syndrome, a foolish moth

trapped inside my self-loathing. I pull his wings right off.

Must I make meaning of my stint at the 7-Eleven roasting wieners

for pimply boys seeking nirvana in Hot Pockets and Ding Dongs?

If I leave salvation unwritten, will it come in?

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Let’s Go Out Tonight

 

Charging from one neck of the woods to another

the cab driver pushes our chariot from one pothole to another

over patches of pigeons while the radio bleeds the blues

“Is that Blind Lemon?” I ask

“Lightnin’ Hopkins,” he says

“But Blind Lemon liked Hopkins to play with him sometimes,” I add

“How come you know about that?” he turns to look at me

He is an older black man, forehead furrowed with Socrates’s worries

“I like the blues,” I reply

By the time we pull up to the curb John Lee Hooker is cajoling

“Let’s go out tonight!”

so I pay my fare and do just that.

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Jiwon Choi is a poet, teacher, and urban gardener.  She teaches preschool at the Educational Alliance, a multi-generational non-profit located on the Lower East Side of NYC.  She is a long-time gardener and coordinator for the Pacific Street Brooklyn Bear’s Community Garden located near downtown Brooklyn. She is also a poetry editor for Typehouse Literary Magazine. Jiwon is the author of One Daughter is Worth Ten Sons, published by Hanging Loose Press. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.  

Bill Nevins: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

photo (detail) by Tony O’Hara

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No Prisoners

What can I say?
We met in Santa Fe.

She’s got everything she needs,
She’s an artist
And she knew John Berryman.

Poets
are worse
than lawyers
she said
worse
than mosquitoes
Like those big flying cucarachas
down south
they get in your hair

Poets!
Poets tell you stories!
Stories about
anarchist painters
who won’t take cash
from the cruel corporate state
so
they live in boxes
made of cardboard
under bridges
without berets
without brushes
without canvas stretchers
without grants
without patrons

without brushes

Poets
she said
are like syrup
on a pancake
they soak in
until they wipe out all the taste
of the pancake itself
and fill it in with words
words
words
sweet, sticky
words!
Poets make everybody else
taste
what they taste
she sighed.

I
hate
fucking
poets
she said

First,
she hissed,
after the revolution
we’ll kill
all the poets!

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Bill Nevins has two books of poetry from Swimming With Elephants Publications: Heartbreak Ridge and AWE. Bill is an Iona College graduate who has lived in New Mexico since 1996. He is profiled in the 2007 film Committing Poetry in Times of War. He is also a widely published cultural journalist. He may be reached at bill_nevins@yahoo.com.

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Diane Ward: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Diane Ward, McGinty's Pub, Silver Spring, Maryland, Oct. 2018. Photo by T. Winch

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Never Walk Out of Your Life

 

consumer, you are biologically

natural and acceptable

 

and I am imitating a man

imitating a toddler’s attempt to walk

 

there are tiny white shoes that

fit my fingers – yet they’re useful to me

 

I am the armchair spectator as my life

collapses under the weight of desire, one deepest level

 

the flight circumnavigates my bed,

my table, my toilet, my self

 

your one syllable is sentence to me

your no-more-forgetting, a world

 

the lap is lost when you stand – a joke

until the body’s consumed by lap when it’s down

 

there’ll come a time: no amount of

bracelet enhances the arm devoid of content

 

there’ll come a time: to mention the name will be

proof of no claim to its object

 

I am bound by doors so seriously, to enter your

apartment is to enter the creation of your life from your body

 

in anticipation of the burst declaring movement

imperceptively portrayed, we, for one, can wait

 

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Diane Ward was born in Washington, DC, and currently lives in Oakland, California. She attended the Corcoran School of Art in DC and earned a doctorate in geography at UCLA. Her publications include a collaboration with Tina Darragh and Jane Sprague, #8 in the Belladonna Elders series; No List (no list) from Seeing Eye Books, Los Angeles; Flim-Yoked Scrim, Factory School; and When You Awake, New York: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. Several of her poems have been set to music by the Los Angeles composer Michael Webster, including “Fade on Family,” which was performed in 2005 as part of The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound series at the Schindler House in West Hollywood. “InHouse,” a constructed poem, appeared in Kindergarde, the first avant garde anthology for children.

Robert Hershon: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chatter

I did the Saturday puzzle on Sunday and

the Sunday puzzle on Saturday and I

watched a thousand hours of cops and robbers

when my friend assigned me the task of writing

a baseball poem, since right now there is no

baseball except in memory so I thought of

the Miracle Mets and then the Boys of Summer

but they both seemed frayed from overuse and I

began to think of the teams of my boyhood, call them

the Boys of Early Spring—Eddie Stanky and Pete Reiser

and Cookie Lavagetto,  Kirby Higbe and Ed Head and that perfect

baseball name, Dixie Walker, brother to Harry the Hat Walker,

and remembered more as a bigot who wouldn’t play with Jackie Robinson

than as an outfielder, but I didn’t know that when I was

ten and we had the only television set at 946 Bushwick Avenue

and  I watched the games by  myself with a bag of candy corn

the cheapest loose candy Woolworth’s sold, assuming

the Dodgers and I would grow old together (twelve, fourteen, beyond)

and wondering why all baseball announcers had Southern accents

and now the rich players and the even richer owners have finally

decided to play some baseball and I guess I’ll slump down and

stare at the games, by myself again, without candy corn

but maybe with a sip or two of Scotch

 

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Robert Hershon has written 15 books of poems, most recently End of the Business Day and Freeze Frame. He's won two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and three from the New York Foundation for the Arts.  Hershon has been co-editor of Hanging Loose Press since its founding in 1966.

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Sarah Clancy: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Turlach O'Broin

 

Ringing in Sick to Go Mermaid Hunting

 

Once when I wasn’t I called in sick for the evening shift

and went instead to meet you at Raftery’s in Kilcolgan,

we left your car there and I drove south-west down

the summer solstice evening, hitting for the coast.

We squinted through sunglasses at Ballinderreen and Kinvara

but didn’t stop, turned for Fanore at Ballyvaughan, you leaning back,

feet on the dash singing along to the Indigo Girls and Johnny Cash,

asking me where we were headed. But messing about,

I wouldn’t say, I told you: On a day like this, trust me,

it will all work out. We’re going mermaid hunting

and the signs are good for catching.

 

There were no mermaids though, at the pier before Black Head

just one dolphin doing her bit for inter-special integration,

she came in waist-deep to meet us and we were charmed,

and drenched. From behind wet hair you asked me how

I’d known and in my stupid humour I said: Oh you know,

I had my people call hers – that’s how it goes and of course

you pushed me backwards off the pier then jumped

yourself and our dolphin circled as if she got the joke,

spearing herself four feet skywards above our heads,

then vanishing beneath. Us two fools, we swam through seaweed,

feeling elemental. You’re half fish, you said,

and I said yea but I’ve caught you this time.

 

In Lenanne’s at dusk we had chowder and a pint

I sat with salty skin and hair and when you joined

the jobsworth band to sing ‘The Dimming of the Day’ for me,

you made every hair on every sunburned neck there stand.

You slept then as I drove back but I woke you in Kilcolgan

to send you down the Craughwell road–Me? I hit for home

but parked at Whitestrand Beach, the longest evening

of the year, too full of everything to go inside just then.

 

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Sarah Clancy is from Galway City, Ireland, although she now lives in county Clare. She is the author of three collections of poetry, including The Truth and Other Stories (Salmon Poetry, 2014), Stacey and the Mechanical Bull (Lapwing Press, Belfast, 2011), and Thanks for Nothing, Hippies (Salmon Poetry, 2012).  She has been placed or shortlisted in several of Ireland’s well-known poetry competitions. Sarah has won the Cuirt International Festival of Literature Grand Slam Championship and was runner-up in the All-Ireland Grand Slam Championships. In 2015 she was named The Bogman's Cannon People's Poet and in 2016 she was the Lingo Festival's Poet Laureate. Her work is widely anthologized and has been published in translation in Mexico, Slovenia, Poland, Italy, and Spain, as well as in the UK, Canada, and the US in English.

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Lawrence Welsh: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo 2019 by Bruce Berman

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The Birds Are Flying Over

 

the birds are the dead

or the ghosts of the dead

flying over

 

we salute the birds

see their shadows

on this day of the dead

they are kings and queens

so much more than us

as we take our place next to them

 

the birds are the dead

or the souls of the dead

flying over

 

we salute the birds

and pray for their passage

we burn sage and candles

for their safe arrival

they carry our faulty traits

our lies

our stolen inglewood beer

our ripped off keg money

and every woman who ever wronged us

and every woman we ever wronged

they carry our children who were never born

they carry our drugged-crazed eyes

they carry our eight-balls of cocaine

our cheap marijuana

our irish whiskey

our pharmaceutical morphine

they carry our love for the black market

they carry the cities that are all black market

they carry el paso and los angeles

they carry every echo park overdose

 

they carry our nicknames like chuco and slim

slim angel and larry safeway

rolling red and mescalero dancing crow

gordo and flaca

standing man and standing bear

they carry the medicine that we carry

the medicine that we burn

they carry the medicine we didn’t know we had

like wolf and raven

owl and lizard

they carry us without regret

 

they carry our ancestors and entire countries

they carry all of ireland, all of mexico

the places we know and love

all of ireland, all of mexico, all of new mexico

and they tell us the irish are the mexicans of europe

and they tell us that everything

is the way it is supposed to be

they tell us don’t struggle just surrender

they tell us our day is coming soon

our chance at happiness

our chance for the other side

they tell us to light all the candles

to pray all of the rosaries

to mix the rosary with the medicine pipe

to accept your medicine name

to pray on your name

to contemplate the ardagh chalice

and the ditch banks of moss

to get in the sweat lodge

to hold the buffalo skull

to stuff its eyes with sweet grass and sage

they tell us to fly now

and respect those who never do or never will

and respect those mired in liquor and weed

and pills and rusted needles

respect them and love them

for their time is coming

they tell us our time is coming

when we will be them and they us

they tell us to open the windows and let them in

for we will be them and them us

 

and they tell us all paths are one

and death is a celebration

death is now

death is everyday

and death will only be the beginning

our chance to fly

our chance finally to be the birds

our chance to be them and so much more than them

or simply them and nothing more

for we will be the birds of the dead

the souls of the dead

and the birds are flying over

 

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Lawrence Welsh has published 12 books of poetry, including Begging for Vultures: New and Selected Poems (University of New Mexico Press).  His books have won the Southwest Book Award, the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, the Southwest Books of the Year Award, and have been short listed for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Writers’ League of Texas Book Award. His poetry, reviews, essays, as well as journalistic writings, have appeared in more than 300 national and regional magazines, journals, newspapers and anthologies.

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E. Ethelbert Miller: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

Photo by Max Hirshfeld

 

The South Bronx

We lived in the land of broomsticks

stickball played between cars

manholes for bases

We ran past fire hydrants

and caught balls near curbs

Now and then someone smacked

a Spaldeen to a rooftop—

Making pigeons fly

 

Fences

In the playgrounds

there were few left-handed

hitters so right field

is where the big kids placed us.

We became ghosts of the game.

We stood alone in sunlight.

Sometimes during a third out

we escaped through a hole in the fence.

We returned home like players sent down

to the minors.

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E. Ethelbert Miller is a literary activist and author of two memoirs and several poetry collections. He hosts the WPFW morning radio show On the Margin with E. Ethelbert Miller and hosts and produces The Scholars on UDC-TV, which received a 2020 Telly Award. Miller’s latest book, If God Invented Baseball (City Point Press), was awarded the 2019 Literary Award for poetry by the American Library Association’s Black Caucus. (See The E. Ethelbert Miller Papers.)

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Karen Sagstetter: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo [detail] by Diane MacEachern

 

No Crying in Baseball

No crying when I struck out swinging.
No crying when a runt smashed a grand slam
off my pitch. Or when I wrecked my legs
black and blue sliding into third. 
No crying when I was picked off
at third for the third time
or when my wondrous fly ball
whacked the rear fence
and bounced back like a prodigal to a centerfield glove.
Not even when my mind wandered to the beach 
and I bobbled the ball and the manager screamed
get out of my life!

I’ll tell you what brought me tears. 
I was in space, orbiting the generous blue earth 
and pressing my face against 
the plain window glass of my ship.
I witnessed ball fields in neighborhoods on every continent,
green diamonds shining through glorious clouds 
and dogs the world over
chasing grounders in the afternoons.

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Karen Sagstetter is author of Commotion, a book of poetry, as well as poetry and fiction in numerous literary journals, two chapbooks of poetry, two nonfiction books, and The Thing with Willie, a collection of linked stories set largely in Galveston. She  studied in Japan as a Fulbright journalist and  worked as senior editor for many years at the Smithsonian’s museum of Asian art and at the National Gallery of Art. She grew up in Texas and now lives in Maryland. 

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Bernard Welt: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

photo by Arthur Gary

 

Sabbatical

for Doug Lang

 

We hear tales of a wonderful country called Wales

Only Wales is wholly imaginary, like Middle Earth

Or the Starfleet Academy

There is no holiday called Christmas

Children do not exist

 

Humans have as yet failed to discover

A reliable means of reproducing their kind

Except in elaborate fictions—a kind of imitation of life

Lana Turner has not collapsed, at least not yet

 

There was no ancient mariner

And he never stopped anybody

All the world is not a stage

Some people actually are islands

The world is not too much with us

 

All happy families are not alike

I know whether I am the hero of my own story

I think I am extremely likely to see

A poem lovely as a tree

I do not celebrate myself or sing myself

There is not much of me

And I don’t taste all that good

 

This not the saddest story I have ever heard

I am not a parcel of vain strivings tied

By a chance bond together

Although I admit it must look that way sometimes

I did not place that jar in Tennessee

I didn’t eat the plums

 

In the beginning God did not create anything

This is not Illyria, lady

The answer is not blowing in the wind

You are not my funny valentine

Fish do not gotta swim, birds do not gotta fly

 

‘Twas not brillig

Lafayette, we are not here

I do not want you green

 

I do not wander lonely as a cloud

If clouds really are all that lonely

I took the road everybody else takes

And it hasn’t made any difference at all

A thing of beauty is not a joy forever

I don’t have to go down to the sea again

The sea is not calm tonight

I don’t remember

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Bernard Welt is the author of Serenade (Z Press), and poetry in journals including The Antioch Review, Sun & Moon, Little Caesar, and Z, as well as of Mythomania: Fantasies, Fables, and Sheer Lies in Contemporary American Popular Art (Art issues Press). His poem, “I stopped writing poetry . . .” appeared in The Best American Poetry 2001 (Robert Hass, ed., New York: Scribner, 2001).

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Amy Pickworth: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Ohio Poem

So even after all this time
when I see a dog that’s eager to bite
I think of my darling angry boys of southeastern Ohio
skinny kids on short chains
shortchanged and wary of the stranger’s hand
Their fury comes to them honest
as the mongrel great-great-grandsons
of unlauded Civil War heroes
who recklessly avoided death
so they could simply turn around and walk back home
shoeless and enraged over the mountains

Christ you poor dumb sweet lugs
now you’re cannon fodder
in countries they never showed us on the map
or working at Walmart or the basket factory
or maybe if you got lucky driving for UPS
You can shoot a deer and
leave its steaming organs in the snow
You’ve had pictures and words
tattooed on your necks
and will not regret it later
Sometimes it’s better when you just drink yourselves
into a great artificial calm

My beautiful sunburned farmhands of Appalachia
my first sweethearts you’ve all gone to seed
But you don’t need Mom to tell you you’re fat
You can see when you’ve gone soft lost your nerve
and your way as the heirs of all those pious Germans
who built modest houses and the furniture in them
checked their traps and stocked their cellars
with fat little apples from trees their fathers grafted
who knew the price by the pound as well as the cost
beat their wives and children into good behavior
and meted out their own pleasures with tweezers
or gorged on them in the dark
Whose boys served front line KP patrol any shit assignment
in Europe or the Pacific or Vietnam so that now as their grandsons
you can sleep on the couch in the waning light of the flat screen

O O O Ohio you were the Mother of Presidents
but now they’re always born someplace else
That industry has been outsourced
to where they make them prettier and cheaper and
no one has to worry about plowing and
salting the driveway

You, men of Ohio, were once my own
I grew tall in the light
of your refrigerators
I licked around the edges
of your ice cream sandwiches
I swayed in your arms at prom
I let a few of you lay me down
on the gold shag carpet
but not pull off my pants because
it wasn’t until after you enlisted
and I went to college that I put out
and then it was for boys
who weren’t from around here

So I’m sorry, Ohio
You were my home and
the home of my mother and her mother
and her mother’s mother before her
and the parking lot where I finally did lose my virginity
to a guitar player who’s now a banker in Tokyo
Your gentle hills once spectacular mountains
worn down over time by the monotony of glaciers
finally dismantled and cast aside for their paltry seams of coal
are still the setting for all my best plane-crash dreams
but in the end I betrayed your sons
          except that one who had the audacity
          to betray me first and for that of course
          I am doomed to love him forever

Sometimes I think I should’ve taken
one of those boys by the hand
          I could’ve found him in the dark by his calluses alone
and we could’ve lit out together

We had our opportunities, you know
“Goddamn it this movie sucks”
he whispered in the flickering light
“Let’s get out of here
Slap me hard across the face
scream ‘You’re an asshole’
run up the aisle
then I’ll come running after you”
God I remember our delight
at how we’d shock them all
But in the end we just stayed
in our seats obediently waiting
till it was over and
they turned the lights back on

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Amy Pickworth is the author of Bigfoot for Women (Orange Monkey Publishing, 2014). “The Ohio Poem” originally appeared in Smartish Pace issue 18.

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