The night I
decided I wanted to make America more dangerous started safely enough.
My mom and I were
standing under Restaurant Hoity-Toity’s awnings, hiding from the drizzle, when
my late-arriving dad sprang upon the scene.
“Seriously,
someone’s going to think you’re the valet! What’re you wearing?” The amused
lilt in my mom’s voice cut the legs out from under her scold. My handsome dad,
usually a dapper dresser, had donned a puffed-up rain jacket that made him look
like a pencil jammed into a large beach ball, with only its tip and eraser
protruding.
“Chill,
Stink Pot,” he parried back, dipping into their pool of edgy nicknames. “It’s
much more embarrassing to spend $3,000 on a thin, plaid, non-functional piece
of cloth. If we’re worrying about appearances, people might think you’re
superficial!”…
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I wailed at the cruelty
when the bi-planes felled him.
Learning then that man, malarial man,
buzzing round the wonder of the great ape like mosquitoes,
would kill us all.
I was Faye, entombed in the leathery digits of Kong,
a font of youth and tears and love, and I was also Kong,
the humanity in his gentled placid eyes when he clutches her,
his brackish rage; part righteous part misguided. …
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Who can guess
which poems become yours? You can be
taught to read poetry and you can be taught to analyze – but only some poems
place you on the stage of your life, in front of your own footlights. And what is it? – Aesthetic reaction, emotive
creation, a phrase or a word that triggers neural firing across your mind as
intense as a lightning storm and as subdued as moth’s wings that brush at the
edges of consciousness. Don’t analyze,
don’t read: listen to the poem, listen
deeper into yourself.
Pam Uschuk’s piece
“Who Today Needs Poetry” comes dense and roiling in image, chattering with
ambiguity, rife with sensory ties to the reader. She starts …
“Who Today Needs Poetry”
Not the California quail clucking for millet
or gold finches glutting on thistle seed, not
last night’s bats jittering between the end
of desert heat and Cygnus rising … …
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When Leslie Bobeck was in fifth grade, a boy everyone called J.B. nicknamed her “Lezbo,”an obvious combination of her first and last names. Now a junior, sixteen years old, she occasionally heard “Lezbo” mumbled nastily in gym class or behind her in the cafeteria’s cashier line, but Leslie was relatively sure that J.B. and his friend, Bodie, were the only ones who used it. Her best friend, Larissa, tried to address it once with Bodie on Leslie’s behalf, but when Larissa approached him, Bodie spit his gum onto her shoe, and she backed away without saying a word. Leslie told the bawling Larissa that she was sorry Bodie had been such an asshole to her, but that the Lezbo thing was old and stupid, not worth their time.…
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I roll the last three peaches beneath my hands,
testing them for water. Watercolor fuzz tickles,
curls away beneath the paring knife. Here
I find the peach pit clinging
like an unready soul
to its flesh, wishing to bring along
riches stored in fibers.
There is another, floating free
within its body. A curve of steel
reaches the center and the pit rolls out,
cordial and without complaint. It is ready.
My hand curls around the very last, blade
easing through softness. My fingers find—
when the fruit is cut away—a third stone
cleaved in two. I think it saw the world
from within its cocoon.
The shock split it clean.
– Teresa Morse
Author’s Note: I find that my poetry tends to land me in small places, allowing me to dignify the unseen or rarely seen.…
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William Frank and DW Stojek are the authors of nearly 10 books of poetry between them, and they’ve been creative partners and performers (at readings and presentations around New York City) for over twenty-five years. When not writing poetry, Stojek is an avid photographer, while Frank enjoys long hours of chess, bingeing on 1950’s Japanese Cinema, taking naps with Scrambles (his cat), arguing with the Devil, press-ganging the elderly and Sadism.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Frank and Stojek about their collections (The Purgatory Elm and The Foreign Excellent Rainbow Company, Inc. 1920, respectively), as well as popular culture, outrage culture, being tongue-in-cheek about poetry, and much more!
– William Frank and DW Stojek
…
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from the patio, my body
twinges, your hands pressed to the glass
of the sliding door, our marriage much like this
when you see the minor injury that will take me
many weeks to overcome, the irritation more
than the pain, and I see it
in your eyes, the injury that will take us
away from ourselves, the way the glass door
keeps us apart, the way the leaves are drained
from the wheelbarrow into the empty field not far enough
from the house to stop the wind from spilling them back
into our lives like the tissue that grows, both ornamental
and necessary, over wounds.
– David Swerdlow…
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