civil defense

concussions rain dust

on flowers in a fruit jar

steady in my palm

____

a fauxku for Out Of Standard "Gimme (Fallout) Shelter"

the image is from the movie "10 Cloverfield Lane"

5 Things To Do Before Writing A Poem

1. Obtain necessary materials.

Get a library card and ask the librarian for Lorca, Dickinson and Ginsberg. Avoid book stores, they'll only have Jewel, Richard Thomas and Suzanne Somers. If you see these, beat the book store manager to death with them.

Convince the head nurse that you can be trusted with pens or pencils. Summon up your old beauty contestant smile. Keep a sugar cube and any medications under your tongue; you can spit them out later. Don't waste the pens by making them into shivs.

Get the warden or the matron to let you out of isolation. Only authors of memoirs can write with their fingernails in the dark. Poets need light.

2. Ask others to look at things you've written up to now.

Show your previous poems to relatives or friends. Most of them will tell you it's brilliant, others will advise you to stop with this nonsense and go to secretarial school. Regardless, it won't matter because if you want to be a poet, you'll have shoved your pens through your ears beforehand. 

Show your work to someone who tells you it isn't good enough, that it's derivative, tired, meandering and lazy. Get as angry and butt-hurt as you like, but keep showing everything you write from now on to this person.

Do not show anything you've written to your spouse, lover, priest, employer or attorney. They'll urge changes, codicils, repentance and cessation. 

3. Think about what you'd like to write about.

Ha, j/k. 

Fuck what you'd *like to* write about. There are plenty of rhymes about love or flowers already, on the insides of greeting cards scattered in landfills along with the authors of same.

If you're really meant to be a poet, you'll be told what to write about. It may feel a little like really needing to be sick, or like a medium-sized lizard is crawling up the inside of your throat or under the skin of your fingers. You may think you have an STD or that someone dosed you with Spanish fly, but in your head and heart as well as your sex. You may feel like you're dying, or that it's one of those dreams where you forget to get dressed before going to work or church. If you're a poet, it's not a dream. 

4. Consider your poem's length and form.

If you write haiku, and it's the usual lazy shit, please go through the door on your left and into the crocodile swamp. The door will lock itself behind you once you've gone out.

If you've chosen a form with a rhyme scheme or a syllable count, don't forget all about it by line three and go careering off into the weeds. Don't jam in words that don't belong or make sense, just to satisfy said rhyme scheme or syllable count. That's like shoving a hand grenade smack in the middle of an apple pie and then serving it like nothing's wrong. Don't be a fucking idiot. Form is like bones, it makes a meat bag functional, pleasing, and upright. The knee bone's connected to the thigh bone, not the shoulder bone. Them bones them bones gonna walk around, but it's up to you whether they shamble or dance.

If you choose free verse, that doesn't mean to make it a journal entry. That doesn't mean make it the same as the shit you write in your diary about your ex-boyfriend and similar tiresome claptrap. That doesn't mean break bullshit into lines and call it poetry. If you're going to do that, please swallow this--it's quick and painless.

5. Place your bets.

Being a poet means accepting a certain level of commitment--what the unenlightened might call obsession, insanity, a certain hemophilia of the soul.  If all you want to do is post a picture of a flower above a breathless made-up love ballad every day on your blog, please take up knitting or hosting YouTube videos about boy bands or something, anything, else. 

To survive as a poet, you've got to frack for the black gold way beneath the surface--as well as avoid painfully poor comparisons like this one--and then hold on during the resulting earthquakes. Wear a hard hat. Don't place a lot of stock in the gathered well-wishers shouting "We have to let you go," or "You crazy motherfucking bitch!" from the sidelines of your life--that is to say, work, family, responsibilities. 

Do all of this, and you'll soon see your work on page 32 of Brick Spoons, the quarterly journal of the University of Southeast Nebraska State Normal School, or in an e-zine called The Vagina That Yodeled. Best of luck to you, Padawans, and

happy writing!!!!

_____

for Out of Standard, "List With A Twist" at Toads.

Emily, 1919

Hello, brother Statue.
You are glorious, your war never over,
yet even the lawn rises in spite of your noble pose.

The trenches here are manned with daffodils.
I have felt them, gobbed with afternoon sun, 
drunk as sailors on the stuff. 

Did you know I was in love once? For five days.
There was an administrator, and the way she spoke, 
with those hard R's and soft K's,

I longed for her interview
and to offer my responses, as I do for the daffs, 
but inside, and without words.

By the end of the week she was gone, like your comrades I suppose.
Now you have new ones--
with avid wings and so they must be angels.
Go to the light, brother Statue. 
I've heard that said.

Dr. Bigelow will unwrap me tomorrow
and....then? Why, then I will be twenty-two again,
and gather my cook books and crochet from their grave-boxes.
If I find your comrades, I will kiss them for you.

Then, I might even hire a car.
My hair wild from the wind, I'll just show up, 
like one of your homing pigeons with a message.

Brother Statue, if you hear an opening door, a hard R and a soft K,
be gentleman enough, old friend, 
to turn--discreetly--away.  
________


For Izy's Out Of Standard: "Waiting for...."

 

Michigan Green Cab--A Eulogy

Dante was a cab driver.
He didn't have a lot to say--
pretty silent like the front coming in
or the energy efficient cab he drove.  

Dante kept a log--
place and time of pick-up,
place and time of drop-off,
miles traveled,
fare;
a whole day's work in neat lines and figures. 

Some drivers ask people questions,
talk about the sports teams,
or swing their arm across the back of the empty front passenger seat,
about an inch from your knees.
Some show up early, when you're still hopping around
with a heel in one hand and your phone in the other.
Others worry you, 
stopping for coffee or Red Bull,
showing up late and putting you past your time.

Dante liked living on his own,
down the block from the car wash.
No wife telling him to turn off the tv
or saying "we have to talk." 
No kids squabbling, bringing home trouble.
Nobody dropping in unannounced.

Every day, the roads could be depended upon
to be where they were the day before:
Walter P. Reuther Expressway,
Southfield Road,
Woodward Avenue,
8 Mile Road, Detroit side, suburb side.

He had a schedule--
don't ask him to switch shifts.
He had his log book
and lunch at 1 o'clock.
Last run as the sun goes down,
earth spinning slowly, 
dispatch taking the calls.

Dante will be glad enough to see Jesus, I expect,
as long as He has the good sense to ride quiet
and know where he wants to go.
_______

for Izy's Out of Standard challenge--Eulogy For A Stranger

Sonya's Tale Of Rasputin

My sister is older than me,
by over a hundred years;
Daddy a dynamo, prolific,
with new wives as often as new cars.

Sis's name is Sonya,
and she spoke to me, 
not a year after she died.
My tea had gone cold on the night table,
and so she brought a samovar and a tale to tell,
waking me with a kiss. 

Being kissed by ghosts may be a Russian thing,
like the men getting drunk, or the inevitable failure of the collectives.
I patted the bed and we sat together,
like reindeer waiting to pull the sleigh of a midnight fable.
Finally, Sonya began.

"I met Grigori Rasputin in a barn when I was 17.
He was asleep, slack-jawed in late morning half-light,
the motes spinning lazily around him like stars. 
The Russian cross he wore
and the vodka bottle he cradled
both shone as if they had souls of their own."

I propped myself up with an elbow and listened.

"There are ways and there are ways, little sparrow," Sonya went on.
"Labor is productive, prayer is powerful.
But sometimes the breeze stirs the leaves just as if they were barynya dancers. 
All I did was set my bucket down and join him--a breeze myself--
and he showed me how God created the world."

I said, "They say he stank. That he was insane!
How could you--"

"Pochemuchka," my sister whispered, 
"Madness is essentially Russian. Without that,
without hallucinations in our blood, how could we endure the winter?
And he smelled only of straw,
holiness, and masculine vigor."

Sonya smiled then.
"Little One, do you remember my oldest,
the sandy-haired one, my poet who died on the battlefield in 1915?
Of course you wouldn't. I forget how young you are."
She looked far away for a moment, even for a ghost.
"He had the gift.
The same one you have,
a closeness with the spirit world, and an appetite for everything."

The tea was gone.
Even here, dawn arrives eventually.
Sonya finished her story, saying,
"I warned Grigori to beware
of cakes, aristocrats, bullets, and wide cold waters. 
He laughed, his big bearded head thrown back,
a booming laugh like a fireball landing in a Siberian forest.
He told me he already knew."

With that, Sonya was gone.
Our old one-eyed rooster crowed outside in the yard.
I sat up, pushing my long hair back with my fingers,
and collected my coat, scarf, and ice skates.
Out, then, to the pond where a local fox keeps her den full of kits,
watching my every move.
I spread my arms out to glide, easy as branches in a breeze,
not needing to lay eyes on her to know, 
just the same, 
that she is there. 
________

for Out of Standard at Toads

pochemuchka--a child who asks a lot of questions

barynya--traditional "Cossack Dance" featuring the prisyadka, or knee-bend. 

Hi.

 "Magic Mirror, if we only could / see ourselves as others would." --Leon Russell


Hi.
I tried to call you last night.
I tried twice more but you never picked up.
Where were you?
Oh. Who did you go with? 
Yes, I know her parents. She smokes, doesn't she?
I'm just saying.
Nothing. Nothing at all. Don't get upset like you do, please.
Yes I know she's 21.
No, she can't be 37? 
Okay. I guess that's right, you kids are the same age. Time flies!
Well, you'll always be kids to me.
So...
Did you get the recipes I sent you?
Some coupons, too.
Did you go to that job fair I told you about?
I thought it would be good for--
Oh.
But you don't want to do that for the rest of your life, do you?
It's not really going to take you anywhere.
You could do--
Pardon? You did? That's wonderful. How much of a raise was it?
Well, excuse me. I'll never ask anything again.
So...
Any men in your life?
Hello?
Yes, but I thought that might have changed.
Oh yes, her.
Uh-huh.
But why were you so upset? It was only another woman. 
I just worry about you.
If you'd lose a little weight, and dress a little more--
What?
Well, I'm sorry you heard it like that.
You've always been too sensitive. 
Your brother isn't that way at all!
Always do what?
Don't be that way. I'm trying to help you.
Why take everything I say as criticism?
Don't raise your voice, please. 
I never said that.
I don't remember saying that.
I just want you to be happy.
Well I'm sorry if you misunderstood what I was saying.
You know how you confuse things sometimes, just like your father.
Well, your friends don't say these things to you because they don't love you like I do.
Have you thought any more about becoming a Lutheran?
I only thought--
Well, when we went to church with your brother and Debbie, you said--
Oh. 
I thought you did express an interest. 
He'd be glad to talk to you about--
All right! I just wish you had something solid in your life, that's all.
I worry.
So...
What have you been up to?
An award, how nice. Is there any payment for that, or...
Oh, I see. 
Well, that's a nice hobby I suppose. Nothing I would ever think to do, of course.
Yes. Yes, but...
I just think that if you spent that time in a more--
Well, because I'm your mother. I care about you. I worry.
At your door? Right now? It's rather late.
All right, I'll call you tomorrow then. 
You won't?
How about Wednesday? Any room in your schedule then? Ha ha.
Well, they'll wait, won't they?
You're just like your father, always running off someplace but never getting anywhere.
All right, yes, better go see who's at the door, my goodness.
Be careful.
Love you.
Bye.
_______

for Out Of Standard at Real Toads.

Image: The Broken Mirror Effect by croissance at deviant art.

Blogger won't let me add a video, so here is a link to Leon Russell's "Magic Mirror." 

New Banana Town

In Old Mango City,
I wore the thrift shop jacket you like,
and the big shades.

I wore them up, in my hair
as if I were trying out for Queen of the Produce Stalls.
You dissembled, became incorporeal,

And slept with my better nature
behind my back. Remember that tune we liked?
Neither do I. I wish I could.

Here is my black top hat,
and my white gloves. Here is you, appearing again.
Ta-da, I say. You kiss me to make me shut up.

The buses are all out of service
on the road to Old Mango City.
An urchin brought me an orange soda and said it was voodoo.

So, sit here. On the curb with me.
I bet you never knew we were a post card; I mailed us,
addressed to our ghosts, postage due.

Don't be sad. I'm not.
I just always cry at beginnings, arrivals, being here in a new place:
New Banana Town--population you.
_____

for Out Of Standard.
 

Olga

We were texting.
Olga said, 4 a portrait.
I told her no 1 does ur portrait in the middle of the night.

She knew,
yanno,
to be careful of older guys in chat rooms and stuff,
but this one walked right in,
said get ready,
come downstairs.

I said, where r ur jewels?
She said, in my dress, stitched inside.
She sent me a j-peg.
I said you rock that, girl. Now sneak
out. Meet me at Bigby's.

She said idk.
I said, they got BOGO. Just come.
She sent an emoji and that was it.

Years later, living in New York City and older than shit,
we still were BFFs.
She'd been sober 27 years.
I'd been divorced twice.
Sometimes she'd see Putin on the television and trash him in Russian.
I found her a meme of him falling off a horse,
and showed it to her on my phone.

We laughed til I started coughing.
She banged her palm against my back until I could breathe.
"Thanks, Your Highness."
"Fuck you," said Olga, but she meant "welx".
_____

for Izy's Out Of Standard.
 

Successes, Enumerated

I.

Congratulations! I didn't get the job.
Useful degrees never bore my name,
but the inside covers of used paperbacks did.

Tolstoy, Ferlinghetti and Bronte made poor references,
had no current phone or email,
and though I came to know them well, they had little to say about me.

Way to go! I stayed for years in part time positions
because there was staring out the window to be done,
bad poetry to be written,
and rain to be contemplated.

II.

Fan-freaking-tastic! The acrimonious divorce,
the shit-canning of thirteen years of trying to be
straight,
responsible,
respectable, and all that jazz.

So sorry, Mr. and Ms. Notgoodenough.
Hello, solitude. Hello to bashing away at the hunk of marble
inside of which I had been hiding.

I got rid of my slave name.
I loved several wrong but exciting persons,
too much and briefly, but oh boy. (though most of them weren't.)

And now here I am. Ta-da! 
With the house on fire,
my tail on fire,
and my words on fire.

Don't call 9-1-1, I want to burn.

III.

Somewhere, in some non-existent suburban shadowland,

there is a sensible person who put her books away

along with her red shoes.

She is liked, I guess, by all,

whoever she is,

blinking on and off as required, like a traffic light.

______

 
For Izy's Out of Standard at Real Toads.

 
 

Pigeon Superstition

Why did they put a ledge here?
I've got to get you out here.
The cop's got erudition--
he'll read me Yeats in prison.

He called you on his cell phone
cos baby you're my love jones.
I'm out here on a mission--
it's pigeon superstition.

Three steps left will make you be
my bitchin love eternally;
and if that fails, then turn around,
and magnetize you downtown.

If you come and if we fall,
we'll look like ants but feel like gods.
We won't blame the Irish cop
if we come to a sudden stop.

Backwards counting down by threes
will bring your smokin' self to me.
It's not infatuation fiction--
it's pigeon superstition.

It's you and me and Walden too,
that's what superstition do.
________

for Out Of Standard at Real Toads. "Pigeon Superstition"

Thanks to Jarrod Dyson of the Kansas City Royals, who famously quipped "That's what speed do."

The song whose melody just happens to fit. Thank you Susie Clevenger.

 

Immunity

"I love too hard, my friends sometimes say"
--Can I Get A Witness, written by Holland, Dozier and Holland

For a while there, I kissed every snake in the basket.
Such pretties,
So persuasive,
every time they catch a girl like me
searching for lost sheep beneath their tree.

I got a reputation--
not like you think.
People thought I did it for love,
or did it for Jesus, letting those vipers crawl all over me;
but I did it for the thrill.
I did it for me.

I never knew there was a real devil,
and she bit me sick deep.
The wound went white, my blood dire thick,
my life-light low; but I had babies at home
so I refused to die and refused to sleep--
you should have heard that bitch-wicked devil thing shriek.

Now I'm home, my babies grown;
looking just like I used to, when I had that strut and those careless ways.
I walk around,
I shuck and jive,
but I just can't let you close, babe, even though I would have loved ya
back when I was alive.
________

Isadora Gruye says write about a zombie apocalypse.

Girl Sphynx

She doesn't know,
and I would never let on.

Didn't I tell you?
I stopped wearing my rainbow jewelry to work.
I act so straight
that I can't even bend to sit down.

So there's this woman.
She has no idea.

She's warmer than a San Antonio tiled roof.
She smiles whenever she sees me,
but she's just nice to everybody.
She's got a husband, if I forgot to belabor the obvious.

I like to make her laugh.
She's cuter than sunflowers in June when she does.

God can she rock that orange tee shirt,
or any of those summer sweaters she's got.
She has gray eyes
and a heart shaped face.

I never let on.
I'm a riddle, a Sphynx, an aviatrix under the radar.

Yesterday she was kidding me the way she does.
She winked,
and I wavered mid-air, but
I never blushed, I swear.
_______

for Izy's Out of Standard challenge at Real Toads: lies not well enough told.

image: Cristina Scabbia 

 

Chanel and Shibboleth

You held a grapefruit in one hand
and a knife in the other,
the morning you called down a coffee ground curse
in my kitchen, off the bedroom, in blackberry June.

Mousers know, as crows do,
that an unmade bed in the afternoon 
is sweet green thick as an ivy vine,
a tangle of moon drawn out before the sun is even gone.

You knew, standing there with your summer robe open,
your eyes dreamy-closed,
and the grapefruit in your hand,
what you could do to me, 
and how to kitty the solstice whichever way you chose.

Now, it is always night, always summer,
and blackbirds do your bidding at every blue hour;
I can kiss someone else until my lips are bruised,
but the pot is cold, the kitchen is empty,
and the robe hangs itself for trying, but 

can't
bring you back
no matter that I promise it Chanel and shibboleth,
pretty as a calico cat.
______

Izy at Real Toads says, write about a curse, so I have. 

Fun fact: calico cats are nearly always female.

 
 

The Feast of Saint Creola

We are the adherents,
the Sisters of Saint Creola,
Our Lady of the Falling Piano.

We are a strictly female enclave,
here at the edge of a continent,
at cliffside,
with the surge of the waves below us
and within us.

Today we honor our blessed Saint C.,
she of the fair face and the wise word.
Born in the year 1899, she remains beautiful
in appearance,
in utterance,
and in her endless inspiration of us, her Sisters.

"Soooo, what's chocolate?" she demands in her honey voice,
entering the room like light from a taper.
If the Pope could see us,
in our unconventional garb,
and our unconventional affections,
he would want to be one of us, I feel certain.

Blessed Saint Creola teaches us that God 
is a waitress
in a coffee shop;
an expert at creating chalk menu boards,
and at assuaging that indescribable homesickness
we all carry inside us like some melancholy luggage
we don't know how to set down.

Today there will be blends from Turkey and the Orient;
chocolate from Europe and from two old hippies
who have a store down the coast a little way.
There will be the cerulean sky
and the indigo waves.
There will be the white stucco of our convent,
and the toasted tan of the cliffs,
the high grasses of late summer,
and our warm skins.

Today we celebrate Creola,
living saint and mother hen to all of us.
We are off the grid,
off the radar,
off the chain.
Have a chocolate truffle,
have a Girl Scout cookie.
The sun is right at home in the sky, her hammock,
and the pianos have long ago flown over the cliff 
and into the sea,
like gulls.
_____

for Out of Standard at Real Toads.

Kitchen Girl

There are stairs,
scarce been used--

the smell of wood,
straight cut and new--

all of it built
quite recently, for you.

Didn't I tell you, baby,
I'd get you before a preacher one day?

Didn't I tell you, Lonesome,
that I'd find the words to make you stay?

I saw it all,
can't prove I lied--

in the case of those
who've lately died.

A ring means an unbroken circle,
a rope means a broken neck--

I knew one day I'd make you fall,
and dance, and turn--
first east, then west.
________

Izy at Real Toads says take her to an exotic location where you'd never want to go. All right. I think a gallows is fairly exotic and I certainly never want to end up there.

The title is taken from a traditional song of the same name. It goes, in part:

I never will believe what one man says
though his eyes be blue or brown--
unless he's swingin' from a scaffold high,
sayin', darlin' I can't come down. 

 

No Eskimo

First, warm with words
(not too many. discard old or extra.)
add 2 lips
to 2 lips.
put them in the steamer.

add a cup of kindness
and a tablespoon of cayenne pepper.
whisk in a whisper.

take a head of baggage,
then cut away most of it with a sharp knife.
add two cloves of Mata Hari
and a dash of Roller Derby Queen.
shake it.

mix one finely grated anticipation
with hey batter batter from the softball girls.
place over a low flame for 20 minutes or until her voice thickens.

fold in one set of clean sheets,
slowly increase heat.
Marlene Dietrich til it reaches an internal temperature of 160.
Bettie Page any excess.

finally, sprinkle devilish looks over the top,
add ground temper for seasoning.
sweeten with oh honey.
temple whore to taste.
no eskimo.

(serves two)
_______

for Izy's out of standard challenge at Real Toads.