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Wedding Match Books / Dave Morrison

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Some poems seem ordinary until you come to the last line, which knocks you back on your heels.  Here’s an example from Maine poet, Dave Morrison.  This poem may not have made it into our summer issue without his final five words.

Wedding Matchbooks

When I was young, very
often you would attend a
wedding reception, and at
each place setting there would
be a book of matches with the
couples’ names, and the date
embossed on the cover.
It was a beautiful tradition;
weeks later you might light
a cigarette and wish Jerry and
Elaine a life of happiness, you
might throw a match on the
charcoal and remember Burt’s
funny and touching toast, you
might spark a firecracker and
wonder what the future held
for them, you might light the
pilot in the hot water heater
and wonder what went wrong.

Dave Morrison
Camden, Maine

Two Short Poems

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We can’t resist those really short, pithy poems that come our way from time to time.  Here are two from our Summer Issue by poets Mingzhao Xu and Gary Wadley:

The Launch

“Where are we going? I asked the rickety roller-coaster, edging upwards.
The old boards winked, “home,” then launched me into the sun.

Mingzhao Xu
San Diego, California

Cat


it is morning the first day
it is always the first day

Gary Wadley
Louisville, Kentucky

Handbasket

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I love a surprise ending.  Our poem of the week is by Spencer Smith, who lives in Utah.  The narrator asks a lady on the bus what’s inside her basket.  Maybe curiosity really did kill the cat. I was also struck by how Spencer had me hooked from the first three lines. This is how you keep a reader reading.

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Handbasket

It is not large enough to hold hell,
though there may be some pieces inside
that have broken loose.

The woman’s fingers, crimson-nailed,
press tightly on the lid
as if caught in the throes of a Beethoven chord.

She knows I am watching her,
wondering what she is hiding;
she rotates away from me like the face of the moon.

When it is time to board the bus
I sit next to her as if by tragic accident.
but she is not deceived.

It lies clenched in her lap,
wicker lid breathing mystery.
She unwraps her scarf and tents it over the handle.

I hear no sounds of creatures inside;
no scent of zoo or decay hovers before me,
no aroma of bread or berries.

She turns to me suddenly, angrily,
lipstick red as her nails, and hisses that
it is the shrunken head of her dead husband.

I suppose it serves me right.
I smile at her. In these situations, I say,
it is good to keep our heads.

    Spencer Smith
    Taylorsville, Utah

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The Small Sculpture Angel

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Cemeteries, oddly enough, are great places to find inspiration for some great poems. Think of Billy Collins riding his bike through a cemetery in Florida or Ted Kooser sitting on a cement bench in a cemetery in Iowa. In our poem of the week, we turn to Ken Meisel of Dearborn, Michigan for some musings about a “Small Sculpture Angel”.

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The Small Sculpture Angel

       – Mt. Kelly Cemetery

The small, sculpture angel,
writhing over the resting
stone, her cement hands
clasping a bouquet of someone’s
grieving funeral flowers,
seems at first to you
to be alive – her face, so
tender and flushed chaste
with afternoon sun, her eyes
occupied with insects and moss,
her small gown, dirtied
by the season’s robust
and feminine floral platter,
and her tiny toes, emergent
like rose beetles as she
freezes here in perpetuity
as you move closer to her
to find her chronicle
and her sculptural falsity,
so imminent and so still.
And, as you roam here,
where the graves are
solemn signatures of silence,
you discover that she
is not even alive here,
and she is nothing –
compared to the mother
and her young daughter,
these grievers you witness,
so alive still, and so vast,
with their own bird hands,
like raw crows, slashing
the roots and pottage out,
where the graves,
those silent tableaus
of lost hours and echoes,
wait – for living angels –
those reliquaries, to come.

     Ken Meisel
     Dearborn, Michigan

Lament For The Knuckleballers

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Casey is a great name for a baseball player, coach or, as it turns out, even a baseball poet.  Here’s something for all you baseball fans and anyone who feels a kinship with the unusual.  It comes to us from Casey Fuller of San Antonio, Texas.

Lament For The Knuckleballers

They began to die off. Fastball,
slider, cutter, curve—from both sides,
all decent hitters in The Show
could get wood on anything
near the plate and keep the count
going. Even the change-up began
to rise in miles per hour and every
pitch began to look the same,
swaying in one of two directions
at the same speed. Everything
at eye level, of course, was gone.
Even the three and four batter,
following the empirical rule of
Metrics, began to languidly slap
the outside stuff to the opposite side
so the shift no longer worked and
there was only the designated hitter
to grumble about over fifteen dollar
beers. Mirrors matched up in America,
reflecting bad inside of bad, and
everything soulful was glossed over,
ganged up on, faked-news-ed, or gone.
No one knew what was happening.
Numbers began to let out a thick
stench covering the game in a filmy,
putrid yellow-green. Up in heaven,
clouded quite differently, almost
cracking his em-dash mouth with a smile,
Ted Williams elbowed Tony Gwynn
and said: Hell Tone, even you could hit
400 now. Joe Niekro died. Phil Niekro
died. Charlie Hough wouldn’t talk.
Tim Wakefield, as legend has it,
wobbled off into a French village,
happy to pay high taxes, and was never
heard from again. Only the lowly
assistant managers, with real piss
and vinegar coursing through their
Don-Zimmerman like veins had
an idea. And only one or two of them
wished they had a non-athlete up
on the hill, lofting up improbable
59 mile an hour monarch butterflies,
waiting to see if the catcher, outfitted
in an oversized first baseman mitt,
could snag the goddamn thing, because
once upon a time, anything could
happen in the greatest thing America
ever invented, and so much was so
unknown.

  Casey Fuller
   San Antonio, Texas

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The Dock At Midnight & Curfew

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Our poem of the week is actually two poem by a talented poet from New York, Tiffany Babb.  Tiffany demonstrates the power of the vignette when imagery paints the beginning of a story that the reader has to complete. She packs a lot into poems of just five and seven lines.


The Dock at Midnight

Beneath the black shadow of a bridge,
the power of the unknown.

Lights glitter in a faraway patch of water,
tiny mirrors reflecting the moon back into the sky.

All is silent. The ache too deep to ignore.

Curfew
underneath the yellow light
of streetlamps,
fog swirls

the night thrums

along the street of closed bars,
the muffled sounds of radios
and brooms passing over shattered glass.

     Tiffany Babb
     New York, New York

The Most Shoplifted Poet In America

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Our poem of the week is not a poem at all, but a bit of flash fiction about poetry from a California author, Guy Biederman.


The Most Shoplifted Poet in America

    “Would Bukowski be in poetry,” I ask the young man who is reading behind the counter. I’d already gone to the poetry section and perused the ‘B’s with no luck.

    The young man smiles. “We keep Bukowski behind the counter here.”

    “Why is that?”

    “He’s the most shoplifted poet in America.”

    Once in a Venice Beach bookstore, I’d gone to the “B’s” and found the same thing.

    The clerk invited me behind the counter and I discovered a treasure trove of Bukowski titles I’d never seen.  Above Bukowski was John Fante, also on the endangered list. Interesting because Fante was not well known, but Bukowski admired him, was a friend. Did that mean the book thieves were actually reading Bukowski and then Fante to see what Buk saw? Feel what he felt?

    Who else? I wanted to know.

    “Murakami,” said the clerk.

    “Hmmm … what about Carver?”

    The clerk smiled. “No, Carver’s safe.”

    "Well, wait till the Murakami shoplifters find out how much he liked Raymond Carver. Those books will fly off the shelves.”

    The clerk grinned. There was a time I had to stop reading Buk. A magazine editor had rejected a piece of mine and said I had to quit sleeping with Bukowski under my pillow. I doubt he ever stole a Bukowski. I doubt he ever stole anything.

    I paid for a copy of Factotum, shook the young clerk’s hand. He was a screenwriter, taking a couple of years off grad school at UCLA. MFA? Yeah.

    Years ago I too had worked in a bookstore and was pleased to see young people still interested. It restored my faith, I told him. He smiled and turned to the register to make change.

    Then I slipped a copy of What We Talk About when We Talk About Love into my large leather coat.

    Ray deserved that.

               Guy Biederman
               Sausalito, California

Abandoned Detroit

Published on by Editorial Staff

Our poem of the week come to us via the Inside/Out Literary Project.

By immersing students in the joy and power of poetry and literary self-expression,
InsideOut inspires them to think broadly, create bravely and share their
voices with the wider world. Guided by professional writers and celebrated by
publications and performances, youth learn that their stories and ideas matter
and that their pens can launch off the page into extraordinary lives.

 

Abandoned Detroit (an erasure)

In the mirror of the man who cuts grass
a child once played. A mother
holding the skillet does not say a word.
A bird of a church is what our ashes have become.
The laces of sneakers say my name.
These are the stories we tell.
The records are a poem that cannot be
spoken. An imperfect shape that I can become.
Shining in the dark I shake your hand.
The dirt beneath the nails can’t be seen.
I touch it once before the house is gone.
Words become the sacrifice
and sorrow. The ground.
There is no door or no windows
on the other side of the city. Splintered wood never said
broken glass made a garden. If there were weeds
he would eat. The child learned through our mistakes.
To learn, memorize invisible scars to tell a story.
With a chair nailed to the walls that are ours to climb.
Abandoned Detroit is a poem
even if no one hears it.

Jamilla Russell
Marcus Garvey Academy
Detroit, Michigan

Blue Room

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Our poem of the week is by Ohio poet, Michael Cole, who puts us in an indigo mood with:

Blue Room  

When…you get that mood indigo,
when you slide down the rain-soaked
slope of regret or sorrow…

In the widening circle of music
there are no angles or corners,
no vases or lamps to knock over,

not even a tiny light to guide you,
or a bed to tumble into, or a dream
to get you out of this one…

Listen to a sax’s jazzy moan–
Coltrane, Rollins, Desmond–
the smooth glide around a blue room.

Michael Cole
Vermilion, Ohio