Unshod Quills

On the theme of David Lynch

Notes for the Script I’d Write for Lynch

“Golden rose, the color of the dream I had…
It’s only a dream
I’d love to tell somebody about this dream…”

-Jimi Hendrix

I. They say to live as if you’re traveling—
It’s worth sticking around just to see what happens.

II. Toward Dionysus grease hair and worst fear, toward the miracle.
Hitchhiker’s murder. A scalp in the pool. Fast-food car. Same pants every day.
Our splintered protagonist.
Another word: murk (& its confidence).
Cinema returns us to anima:
Motel room sex, vacuum cleaner watching like a dog.
Her skin had the red of the shower water,
the blue cold of pipes and the silver of the screen.
The perfect poet’s luck, like a rattlesnake tamed.

The poets in Los Angeles must
wear boots, their hair like Gogol’s, matted by cheap chlorine, rolling flint with thumbs
to breathe tobacco’s crystals through stiffness.

Notebook aphorisms like:
“Drink from the L.A. River, you grow a tail. The ocean, the intra-uterine salt, no harm there.”

The similes in film stay subconscious, dampening the lens & your heart
in the seats.
I want to make some of them conscious:
“My father is like a dead raven.”

For the film:
“The Poet’s L.A.,” muscle-red & runny:
L.A. of diner eggs and morning beer
L.A. of long hair that doesn’t itch
L.A. of a woman’s breath caught in a handkerchief, waxy cherry
L.A. of stoplights blinking in closed eyes, salsa colors,
trying to sleep with sunspots:
hot breath of the DVD player projecting flashes of Naomi Watts’ psychotic breasts—pulsating the elastic plump
of her panties like a cartoon heart thumping a shirt.

III. At 12 or so Lynch became an Eagle Scout.
I told Mom, “Do you think I have time for that kind of thing right now?”

It’s rare now these days I’m not wired in the jaw,
In yoga they tell me I have rigid ankles.
In yoga I keep my thoughts.
I fist around their salts like I’m breaking a horse.
My plump exhaust-smell “fuck you.”

I’ll leave home someday w/ a palm of wedding rings
to melt down, playground woodchips in my shoes & a water bottle of wine
siphoned from grandpa.
Leave the rooms where the obsidian taste of hairspray stung
the eyes & tongue w/ flush. That L.A. of nude colored bras in suburbs
w/in folds of dove-wing blouses in church, the one-breath high of beauty products
during hugs, the smell of marriage—
Crystalline mothers walking toward me
like sculptures being made. They’d only let me slip away
out of kindness, I suppose.

IV. 21st Century skin: air-conditioned. The wind on the body after the pool.
The buildings decades too old, bondo split open
like eggplant, the color of an angry man’s face.
I drive up Vermont, looking in on storefront iglesia
dug outta the wall by bullhorns, I see cheap pilates
& the Guevara/Hendrix murals “Hate Free Community”—

A little about me: Before I die
I will see Nashville, Austin, N.Y.
& their hieroglyphs, hospitality, foolhardy mania,
thick drainage of every town.

V. Coffee-stained books piled three neat stacks
by the heat vent, your bed dragged & shoved into the closet space,
clothes dipping into the fucking like willows.
“Never heard a man speak like this man before,” you allow to the blender, getting him another warm Blue Moon from the weak fridge.
Your roommate’s cocaine & highball dress slides up her hips when she stands—
“It’s just like a bathing suit, big deal.”
He crosses wind-gray 5 p.m. intersections with the ambulances, hand inside jacket
like warming a pistol w/ his nerves.

VI. Country song I’d write if it rhymed:
“A man came at me with haywire.
I didn’t kill him but I turned him red.
I see him when I press my thumb down on my eyelid in the sun.
The same way a night blacked out is a dream.”

VII.                        The supermarket parking lot,
hard black lava w/ boot imprints, snags of plastic bags tumbleweeded across the dog city.
Buying meat and malt liquor. A lament, this is, for the unpressed. For the insides of televisions.
For a hungover squint in nighttime
making out the glitter of people. Snake charm for blue souls,
the bruises of miracles waiting—another night, another journal,
another set of meals. Talcum torsos.
Igneous needs, aquiline shame.
For days, “Little Wing” plays for headache’s bent tones
& its piles of grating metal keys.
If this weren’t California we’d have a howling moon, that’s what it’d be called you know,
the moon-tongue freeway, azure deaths.
L.A.’s trapped snow rushing the ears like the speed of light, deafening heaven, brain
in dull white, the sky a crunched ice cube wormed.
A young black woman pulls me close at the party, purple beneath her skirt.
“You’re a good dancer.” I don’t believe her. I’m no dull, dumb snake or sad fag.
You know what I mean. You know how that kind of nighttime feels.

VIII. In another unquenched December night
with the chipping white doors closed
on me in my bedroom,
dead mists of the celluloid swerves
my body’s made from floor to bed half-man
for five years,
sloppy on my winter couch
I watched “Mulholland Dr.” with my boots tied together and slung over the pillow like ice skates.

IX. My favorite colors: red, iron gray, silver, L.A. nighttime smog-black
w/ crackling hue, dark blood sunset orange, sour purple, housing project brick & brown,
static, rust.

My favorite Lynch line: “No I want you to fuck it—Shit yes, pour the fucking beer!”

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
I’m thinking maybe a family flick at this point, a family of muses:
The Dad a Frank Booth, the Mom his mother,
the baby the Elephant Man, Lynch smoking
his scentless cigarettes w/ palmade face & I could play
the suburban beatnik eldest son stealing everyone’s pills.

X. Rose City—autistic laughter,
syrupy smiles, big noses, no good bars.

I dedicate this to my future wife—
Bonnet, learned & glistening, the woman
we all want—
Dear, this is my journal,
don’t ask anyone else
about my home.

And David—
Try to find something to do with this. All thanks. All apologies.

______________________________

On the theme of Secret Life

Parking Lot Oil Puddles with Jim Morrison

They talk an alky ramble. Dance

on tables—I’m on my knees,
the patchwork of my jeans grinds
to a bitter white dust in the dirt mix,
hardwood ground.
Highway taillights to
hamburgers. Green signs, wind, rock
& roll music—Giving lookers the finger. Telling the men
on the corner to fuck their mothers.
“Hey you! Short-shorts! Fuck your mother!”
Orange juice, Goldfish, red candle, the used body
of the blender with pink shredded strawberries.
My fingers cringing your waistband
like a grave’s fingers. My fingers turning to bones
where they’re wrapped. Your pants falling to the floor.
Apartment bedroom doors with codes like safes that beep
when you know them. The black oaks and magnolias sway
from where I sit like people speaking in tongues. Ashen Sister Ruth
giving up her vows to stalk the jungle, chest heaving
in a red dress, red lipstick, red ringlets, looking out of breath
for Mr. Dean, whose balls hang down the hair
coming from his shorts, my grandmother’s age as an actor.
Slime ring of a day-old beer can on the table. Used blue razors
rattling the closet ledge,
syringes jammed with hair. Her hand during sleep
paints my belly red.
Her blood pillows. Her mother’s loose-hanging leopard
thong she shows on the couch. Her ass through the string glowing toward
the bathroom like two pieces of toast.
Empty water bottles. My girlfriends sucking
the metals from their thumbs.

______________________

Author Biography

Michael Juliani is a poet/writer from Pasadena, California currently living in South Los Angeles as a journalism student at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. He’s a columnist for Neon Tommy. His work has appeared at Thought Catalog and as a guest to The Faster Times. Reach him at juliani@usc.edu. Connect with him at michaeljuliani.wordpress.com.

Poetry on the theme of Razor Dance

sharks infest these waters & no one believes

me when I tell them this bar once was hip. it was
hopping. there were peeps all over & you had to push
your way through crowds to get a pitcher of Pabst or Riverwest
Stein. well, not you. you didn’t have to push your way through
cos you got the corner seat right near the women’s bathroom &
you probably planned it all out. to sit near the women’s bathroom cos
you were randy & an ex-
Marine, & later, much later, after we’d fucked, you told me, I want
salt-peter. you wanted to do something about your cock & your needs
or you wanted me to think you wanted to do something about your cock
& its needs. & it all made sense even later, much later, after I’d gone to DC
& back for a feminist rally & all the way on the bus there and back even
I could only think
of you & your cock & my needs.

but that’s not what made it made sense… the bar’s no longer
hip & I go back there every now and then & they remember me there,
the bartenders. the old men. they welcome me & my needs. they want my
needs. they have needs themselves but mine still consume them & mine still
consume me

you know nothing of this, ex-Marine. you are married. you are divorced. you are
re-married. you have kids. you have a gut. you have no guts. your inner resources
are your own & you no longer need salt-peter.

it’s a shame cos I could still fuck for days, & I remember our wobbly legs all
cartilage pure cartilage after we came up for air. after we ate each other
up & the blood &
the blood & the blood & the blood

Author Biography

Ryder Collins is the mama from the dirty South. She’s gots a novel called Homegirl! Other work can be found online, and her blog is here.

Gregory Crosby on the theme of Las Vegas

Bridge of Sighs

And as I stepped into the gondola that would carry me into my life, the gondolier began his clockwork aria (paid by the hour). The Grand Canal, chlorinated. Other brides, other grooms, swarming, yellowjackets washed out in Venetian fluorescence. Laughed, how could we not? Below, under, a world, doubling, down, Our Most Siren Republic. Las Vegas, Venezia: impossible, surrounded. One sinks, another rises. Above or below, in a Roman tub or green-felt dungeon: a Magi couple exchanging their ten thousandth bitter line. But we, gifted, drifted, serenaded by a striped shirt (what dreams, deferred). We were different. The lucky sort, the players, playing. Vowed, kissed, before our sets, parents (dubious), before, lidless, the black teardropped-eyes of God (whose art, in wedding-cake heavens).Vowed, kissed, before Fortuna’s Paycheck Wheel: wedded to this, floating, in the floating world of men, made. Whispered nothings, sweet I guess (who can tell?) as the sky turned blue-in-the-face, smooth, plastered. Moving forward, upward, onward, baby, the sky’s the, uh, limit (right where the contractors put it). Brands, winked, shops, worn, & shoppers’ babble against our song, echoing, echoing.

We could have been the last couple on Earth, but we were not. On earth. Streets full of water—please advise.

Still, we, different (did I mention?). Beneath a shadow, weak, the final bridge (just before cigars, high-end handbags, cruel shoes): the gondolier’s voice faltered, vincero! swallowed, a cough, as if a bug swooned, downward (what possible fly in that climate, controlled?) Looked up, she and I (yes, she was there too—what’s a wedding without a bride?). He laughed, recovered, picked up where the song left off. We laughed—how could we, could we not—as he delivered us (at last, at last, that damned photographer, waiting, paid by the hour) to that piazza, conditioned by air, terror. To the very hour, executed, (we two! at last! O angel! O hour!) of departure.

___________

Fremont

I am lucky. On iTunes, Armstrong solos
on “West End Blues,” still breathing, still dead,
here at the Four Queens, Room 909.
I am one after. Still breathing, not dead.

I am happiest when I play the blues.
My blues light as black patent, not matte.
Shining like vinyl, deep in the grooves.
The gentleman at the shoeshine stand
at the Golden Nugget slips playing cards
into my shoes to keep the black at bay.
I am polished. I am lucky. I was just born
this way. He’s a different shoeshiner
from yesterday but just the same.
The light moves like a little pale moon
across his dark pate. We are both bald;
we shine on all right. Instant coffee’s
going to get you, so I’ll wait. Later,

I’ll walk to the Golden Gate for breakfast.
Walking on sunshine, painted black.
I am back, and I am lucky. I know
it takes twenty-one not twenty
to appease the gods of Megabucks.

One spin changes your life. I am spinning
every day. Watch my hands for the changes.
Sun moon star shine. I wonder which cards
like dry little tongues are snug beside my
dark socks. Perhaps I am flush.
The Devil peeks out from my socks
in a pattern of red. His tongue is hanging
out. There’s a halo around his pitchfork,
he’s been shoveling it all the live long day.
What’s the Devil anyway but a blues,
a worksong, chorus upon chorus. I am lucky,
what can I say. That’s why they call me shine.

Pops shined on Nixon when asked to play
the White House. Fuck ‘em, growled Pops
(you can hear it on the tapes, all that Satchmo
had in common with Tricky Dick). Pops
didn’t give a shit what you might say.
That’s how the blues is played, smiling
all the way. Don’t let anybody tell you
what to play. Somebody will still pay.

I am still breathing, still paying.
I am lucky, I am full of blues.
The blacks I polish and wear out.
At breakfast, the short order cook,
his own shaved brown pate bobbing
along to the tune of a golden earring,
starts to sing Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Yes. Let it. Outside, I am frightful.
Inside, the fire is so, just so. I am
banked but I glow. In the casino,
Cheap Trick sings Surrender, surrender.
But don’t give yourself away.
Yes. I’m just lucky that way.

______________

Lewis Avenue

Everything fades except its representation.
I’m a river of gin flowing in search of a still, sour ocean of tonic.
Someone is asleep on the long shot.
The homeless are secure in their homeland.
I am so far from home that I am home.
Wherever my hat is, is (that’s why I wear it).

Across the way, the Duke in his fur collar breaks the spine of a paperback.
The Patriot beneath his star-spangled bandanna cradles a burning Parliament.
St. Jerome annotates his Bible in between sips from forty days, forty nights.
In stained red sweatpants, the Wandering Jew holds forth his coffee cup, as if in search
of the Wandering Waitress.
Salieri contorts his nut-brown face and conducts his crushed can oratorio.
Virginia Dare draws her knees to her chin, huddled against the chill of sunlight.
In the stone’s throw, the bankrupts sort their failures, vendors setting out their wares.
The parade passes in honor of suits, sack lunches.
Here and there, a silent messenger.

The courthouse is a miracle.

I am down to a sunless sea. I am calm, and out of order.
Yes, and you’re out of order, and you’re out of order.
We’re all out of order.
Who else did they think would sit here when they built it?

Every waiting room is painted robin’s egg blue.
Have you ever seen a robin’s egg?
You’ll have to take my word for it.

It’s the middle of the day.
It’s home.
Here comes the judge.

_______________________

Charleston Underpass

Everyone avoids it in a heavy rain; it floods in a flash.
But even when bone dry, you still dive, driving beneath it to break
the surface of the Union Pacific rails; rising now, windows down,
on a late moon-baked night, some July twenty years in the past,
to smell the newly baked bread from the Holsum Bakery,
its neon clock proclaiming the middle of the night is now
… Hours fresher. The scent in that ellipsis, that pause
as you turn your eyes to the left, the fresher flooding
you in a flash, the miracle of the loaves that whips
around your nose and eyes and recedes like the flood
as you pass. It would be worth it, every night of
your benighted life, to stay up this late, to take
this drive, to surface like a drowning man
who didn’t know he was drowning.

The bakery is gone, but they saved the sign.
Everything is gone, but they save the signs,
though, sometimes, the signs too are gone,
and there’s nothing but dark water
where the road bows to the world.

_________________

Sig(n)nature

For Jerry Misko

The haunted house always wins.
Foxy’s Firehouse burns,
always up, never down.
Gone with the rest, those words
like pasties twirling in the dark,
come-ons sans their referents.
Frontiers of dunes, sand, dust.
She’s got neon in her veins.
Strikes her poses, & holds ‘em.
He shutters. His hands do not
tremble at the glow, empty,
refulgent, that spells it out,
giggling, beautiful, blank:
sign here… here… here…
here. Dyer’s hand, dyeing.
Signifier, re-signing.

Author Biography

Gregory Crosby’s work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Court Green, Copper Nickel, Paradigm, Rattle, Poem, Jacket, Pearl, [sic], and The South Carolina Review. He is a recent  winner of the Marie Ponsot Poetry Prize.

photo: Ashley Bovan - Secret Life

on the theme of Razor Dance

Further Grid

you take your bag
and go you do not
stop you do not
sleep when
you called when
you asked when
you wrote and asked
what was it
for what did
the magic say you
dance you shake
dice you stir
tea bathe
in a coloured bath so
dark so
insular so
unbroken so
lost a song of light a
song flickers to shadow
diesel out and back
nightline

___________

on the theme of Secret Life

Untitled 

If you can’t sleep
and you get up
stand by the back door smoking
and it’s a clear night
with thousands of stars
thousands
and a breeze blows into the kitchen
tinkles the little bells on a cord
you bought from the hippy shop
a gentle ringing
and the stars

_______________

on the theme of Democracy

Untitled 

I hate toast
I would rather kill someone
than have them make me toast
I often wonder why they don’t get up early and leave
instead of hanging around and making breakfast
which means toast
but then I remember I’m at their place
and it should be me who’s getting up early and leaving

I keep some rose petals in my jacket pocket
ready for such occasions
to leave on the pillow
Sometimes I write a poem and leave it
but then I can’t remember the words when I get home
and it could have been really useful
like for winning a competition
something important

______________________

On the theme of Cheese

Untitled 

I am writing a poem with meter
– it’s about a gasman

Author Biography

Ashley Bovan lives in Cardiff, writes poetry and takes photographs. He has been published in many journals and recently finished writing up his MA thesis.

VISIONS OF JOAN
(on Joan of Arc)

As a child, I saw your birthplace;
a small cottage, barely four walls and a roof.
Nothing inside but a faint smell of urine,
like an empty barn; appropriate enough,
whether for a Prince of Peace,
or a Princess of War.

Your cathedral on a grassy hill
blessed you as you played your games
outside on the gnarled monstrosity
called “The Fairy Tree” –
while angels and saints talked to you.

Rheims, the cathedral of coronation,
spoke differently, of duty,
of kings and queens.
Which voice was loudest, Joan?
Shakespeare showed you aloof
to the shepherd from Domremy,
“Thou art no father nor friend of mine.”
Is that a clue, Maid?

Finally Chateau Jaulny whispered,
“Come to me. My walls will protect,
be it from armies or inquisitors.”
The dining hall had a portrait of a Lady,
looking weary.
Is that you, la Pucelle?
Did you hear of Margaret d’Anjou
and long to feel
the honesty of steel?

Author Biography

Robert Meyer received a BS in Math from UNLV in 1977, enrolling in their Master’s program in the fall. In May of 1978, during the last week of the school year, he had a brain hemorrhage (left side, affecting speech & right side of body) while lecturing in complex analysis. He completed work for his MS in Math in 1981. He began working for the US Air Force at Nellis AFB in various computer related jobs (database management, programming, and system administration) in 1982 and retired after 22 years.

on the theme of Dancing About Architecture

NO RUNNING

I went to the bank
I stood in line and looked at myself
in the security camera
a man ran into the bank
everyone turned to look at him
he ran to the little table that holds deposit slips
he got a deposit slip
he ran to the drinking fountain across the room
he got a drink of water
he ran over to the information table
he got a lollipop out of the bowl
he ran a circle around the line of people staring at him
he ran outside

I went to the library
a woman ran in the door
she ran through the lobby
past the computers
the librarians were aghast
she ran around in the magazine room
she knocked down a few books in the fiction section
a few people looked up from their reading
she ran out the door

I went to Jiffy Lube
I checked in with the guys outside
I went into the waiting room that smells like
oil and coffee
I got a cup of coffee with powdered creamer
a man ran in the door
he picked up a magazine
he sat on a chair across from me
he turned upside down and had his feet
sticking up and his head on the floor
they called my name to get my car
I went home

Author Biography

Khadija Anderson returned in 2008 to her native Los Angeles after 18 years exile in Seattle. Khadija’s poetry has been published in Pale House (forthcoming), The Ark Magazine, Unfettered Verse, CommonLine Project, Qarrtsiluni, Gutter Eloquence, Unlikely Stories, The Citron Review, Killpoet, Wheelhouse 9, and Phantom Seed among other wonderful publications. Her poem Islam for Americans was nominated for a 2009 Pushcart Prize. Khadija holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University LA and her first book will be published through Writ Large Press in 2012.

on Joan of Arc

joan

i learned about joan of arc later than i should have
she of remarkable youth and tenacity
guided by faith and madness

joan’s would make such a great autobiography
to tattoo upon my dominant hand
if i still shaved my head
and fucked with the world
if i were still 24

what was she like
before the fire
the girl on the horse
i wonder if i would think her insane
or just another human trying to make it through

i wonder what my father knows about joan
i wonder what kinds of things go through his head
as his life, measured in calendar days and timed doses
falls through the narrow net
filling the bottom until there’s nothing left on top

he raised three daughters
i feel like he should have been the one to tell me about joan
it would have helped

to empower my girlhood
and lend shape to a shifting life
instead, i always waited for the other boot to drop
waited for the coast to clear
and then searched for the straps in the rubble

my father will die soon
diagnosis means i don’t need a vision
i wonder if joan had to be told or if she already knew?

and i wonder how she felt
when the fire was lit
did that tenacity stay with her?
and when the last of the coals were raked
did she know she was gone?

Author Biography

x. joloronde is a west coast girl living and writing in boston.

on the theme of Childhood

5 poems from For Coming Forth By Day

FOR BEING ANY SHAPE ONE MAY WISH

FOR NOT PERISHING AT SUNDAY LUNCH

Mother kills my joyride in the new red Opel.
Says his breath stinks. He roars off without me—

With my last stick of Juicy Fruit and a thin mint.
I drink more sweet tea, pout and wait

For my grandfather to finish banana pudding
And the story of Mother baptizing kittens.

Rescue lights race us on Raleigh Road, as red
As the car flipped in the fallow field.

Mother jumps the ditch in church heels,
Her daddy right behind.
We wait.

PSALM 43

I rustle the bulletin to make a fan;
Mother shoots me the eye, shushes.

Why cast down thine eyes?
Sweats the preacher. His chins jiggle.

Why so disturbed within,
Put hope in Him. I stare down.

Lace socks, white patent toes.
Where does hope hide?

I ask me, eye scuff marks.
I find lost keys with him.

MAKING A THIRD-GRADE SOUL
WORTHY TO MRS. MINNIE LEE LONG

Mrs. Long doesn’t like erasing.
Any mistake, I copy the page again.
Even if at the last sentence.
Even if my hand cramps.

If I erase, I need to know
That very second
The ghost of the pencil
Leaves without a tear.

Eraser shavings smell
Like forgotten socks,
Cling dingy to lined paper
Or scatter across my desk.

She holds up bad examples:
Messy math, crumpled spelling,
A hole in history.

THE PUMPKIN MAN

As I land for my father’s funeral,
My first plane ends in an orange orb:
Dawn lifts off the runway.

More poems by Ms. Woodard

MY STORY FOR THIRD GRADE
(After Mrs. Long Fixed the Spelling)

Slaying dragons requires lots of planning and practice. You must listen very carefully in dragon school. Dragons hide themselves. Sometimes they pretend to be kittens and just when you stroke their fur they snap back into dragons. But as long as you pretend they aren’t dragons they cannot eat you. That is the rule. You have to pretend hard even if your head hurts.

Other times they look like dragons, pretend to sleep outside your bedroom. I tiptoe to bed, guard against dragon thoughts. If I sleep before they creep in, I am safe until dawn.

MY DIARY, AGE SEVEN

My Diary, Age Seven

I am in a bad mood.
I get sweet. I help Daddy
fix supper. Daddy makes Mother
a pretty birthday dinner.

***

My nose bleeds at my cousin’s wedding.
I am the flower girl. The white dress is itchy
Hot. Mother pulls my head way back,
holds tight with a big wad of wet tissues.

***

My pillow has a problem.
The feathers lump up.
Mother says it’s been loved
Too much. Was her pillow too.

FAMILY ALBUM

My parents run
Through wedding rice.
She is 19. Hopes her linen suit
Makes her look mature.

***

My brother at three plugs a gap
Between holster and hips
With a bear plucked of fur.
He stuffed his nose and ears
Till Mother bribed him with guns.
His pistols drag the ground.

***

I am starched at four
In pinafore and smocking.
A hand cups my chin.
I stare where the photographer asks.

Author Biography

Catherine Woodard lives and plays basketball in New York City. She swerved to poetry in 2001 after an award-winning career in journalism. More poems about a Southern family miming Egyptian death rituals have appeared in Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, RHINO and other journals. She co-published Still Against War/Poems for Marie Ponsot. Woodard has a MFA in poetry from The New School and is a 2011 fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is a past president of Artists Space and a board member of the Poetry Society of America, working to return Poetry in Motion to NYC’s subways.  Her recently launched website can be found here.

A Brief History of Cockroaches, Glitter Rock, and Inappropriate Love Objects
(on the theme of David Bowie)

Once upon a time, my nemesis was the cockroach,
that summer I worked at the Indian import shop in Brattle Square.
Their squadrons aligned for daily battle over the barricades:
drying dishes next to the apartment kitchen sink.
Whenever I got up in the night, turned on the light,
how they’d scatter, their claws a skin-skimming whisper
married to hiss. I tried every variation of the “Vegas roach trap”—
stale beer, coffee grounds, sticks up the sides of a Mason jar
and Vaseline around the lip to increase the slick.
All hail, the cockroach, apotheosis of tenacity!

It was the roaches in their 4th of July parade
across my futon, the final straw that finally
drove me into Ted’s bed (and arms)
even though we weren’t that kind
of roommates—one more who was gay not bi.
This was, after all, 1974: the U.S. still in Vietnam,
the Dead on their first tour without Pigpen,
and Bowie at the Music Hall in Boston where he donned
a Ziggy Stardust jumpsuit for half the evening’s songs.

My enemy should have been tanning
so to protect this Irish-mottled skin.
Or Camel straights because of my (future) asthma lungs.
Or bare feet on the hot tar, bottle-shard Massachusetts Avenue.
Or the guy who grabbed my crotch under my hippie skirt
that eve walking home from King of Hearts
at the cinema on Central Square.

Those days of rush and foolish trust,
any stranger might be christened “friend.”
A guy’d walk into a store, blond hair a waterfall
over his Pendleton plaid. Back-and-forth sallies
about what you’re reading (Anaïs Nin), the decline
of literacy (shameful), whether Mr. “Enemies List” Nixon
will really be impeached. Then, cosmic coincidence,
you’re both Tassajara Bread Book devotees!
The next night, you’re on the Red Line to Alewife,
a dinner of lentil loaf, alfalfa sprouts, and Something Missing
muffins. Followed by lips locked over a rickety
kitchen table then the (requisite) screwing on the linoleum floor.
After? Midnight’s T back to the Buddha
who, by the way, is not in favor of lust.

Who teaches to love, accept, live and let every enemy live,
cockroaches and all. I’m not sure I ever got to that,
that August when I watched the swans in the Public Garden
and walked walked walked those city streets, restless
to escape my awkward infestation-situation,
notebook in a messenger bag, my temporary
enemy an inkless fountain pen.

_________

Ligature
(on the theme Enough Rope)

Tie Me Down, Tie Me Up

Strips of rag, one nubby wool, one silk,
we re-arrange our cast-offs, braided, taut.
Down to what’s underneath we merge—
your strapless bustier, my Gucci jock.
Touch is our glove, our tether,
& our truss—the ties that lash,
that fret us to the bed. Oh,
lift your legs & let them wrap around
my clarinet,
my woody reed,
my head!

Licorice Stick

Jimmy Dorsey tootled “Green Eyes,”
with—oh, the power to send me ogling

your rings of amber, my cautionary hepcat.
Hell, even Ol’ Blue Eyes wanted to fly us

to the moon. Why didn’t we take him up on that?
Go go-go before Bechet blew jail, his clarinet

emptied of the gone-away blues while we two
dueled, all our wrong chords snorted out.

Likely, the reed was simply slipping,
needed a new ligature, thread or hemp.

Ampersand

Our typeset was a unit.
Two graphemes make a glyph
& letter shapes depend on circumstance.
The Latin et for “and” signs & in Trebuchet.
And per se and (ampersand):
& by itself is and.
And me myself?
I start, you stop,
I finish sentences. Fee! Fie!
Foe! Fum! Why won’t you let me
fl-fl-float, slurred ligature,
disfigured cuneiform?

And What About the Necktie?

He went crazy for the ties,
that winter of detox,
rehab, the county
psychiatric ward.

Every pattern,
every hue to match
the expensive suits
tailored to fit.

Blame it on the manic—
he must have draped
one hundred
by the end.

When his landlord walked
the rooms with me
an empty rack,
all that was left.

Where Mandrakes Grow

Estragon: What about hanging ourselves?
Vladimir: Hmm. It’d give us an erection.
Estragon: (highly excited). An erection!
Vladimir: With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow.
That’s why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you not know that?
Estragon: Let’s hang ourselves immediately!

—Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Pressure on the cerebullum from the noose.
Forensically, postmortem priapism is an indicator—
death was likely swift and violent.

Lynch me, hog-tie, jute my carotid,
cinch it closed. All I wanted was
to merge—the font, the fount, the godhead.

Angel lust.

Suicide Vaudeville

Way out on Sapsucker Road,
a sidewalk to shovel and snowdrift
steps to reach the song & dance.
Rifle behind the door,
a wineglass shattered on the stairs.
Daisy-chained neckties lassoed to beams
in the living room where the radio
belted the “Best of Broadway,”
Ethel Merman and Everything’s coming
up roses, her mezzo soprano clobbering
every tenor within reach.
Better Gypsy than Sweeney Todd,
the ambulance driver said. Meat pies
and a trail of blood would have been—
let’s face it, a little too burlesque.

The Final Inamorata

That tightening loop,
a failed
meridian.

Un-
blessed the bruising ties.

They bind.
They rend.

Author Biography

Born in the coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania, Nancy Flynn’s writing has received a James Jones First Novel Fellowship and an Oregon Literary Fellowship; her second chapbook, Eternity a Coal’s Throw, will be published by Burning River in 2012. A former university administrator, she now lives in Portland, Oregon. In 2004, she happily reclaimed www.nancyflynn.com from the realtor in Massachusetts who had it first.

On David Bowie and Dancing About Architecture

What Grows In Its Place - David Tomaloff - Dancing About Architecture

DAVID BOWIE

hey kid,
look up at the stars;

do you think
one
of them
is david bowie?

go ahead
, make a wish:

dear david bowie,
I wish I had more
facebook friends

Author Biography

David Tomaloff is a writer, photographer, musician, and all around bad influence. His work has appeared in fine publications such as Mud Luscious, >kill author, Connotation Press, HOUSEFIRE, Prick of the Spindle, DOGZPLOT, elimae, and many more. He is the author of the chapbooks A SOFT THAT TOUCHES DOWN &REMOVES ITSELF (NAP), Olifaunt (Red Ceilings Press), EXIT STRATEGIES (Gold Wake Press), and MESCAL NON-PALINDROME CINEMA (Ten Pages Press). He resides in the form of ones and zeros at: davidtomaloff.com