August 31st, 2009
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Christina Kallery
ADULT NIGHT AT SKATE WORLD
You’d think it was an eighth grade dance,
the way we stand shyly eying each other
when the first slow notes sound for couples’ skate.
A fifty-ish man in a striped headband
and custom skates fit with blinking lights
asks would I mind? So we roll from the worn
carpet onto the glossy floor. One hand on my waist,
he gazes at a far wall and sings in high, quivering
tones to Endless Love. We pass a dozen
other couples: office managers in sport shirts,
single mothers squeezed into new jeans
and a few lone ones gliding through the tide of clasped hands.
Take the handsome Indian man with dark hair swept
like a raven’s wings from its stern middle part,
the moustache trimmed to a neat em-dash.
He moves like a figure skater, one long leg aloft
behind his jump-suited frame. No woman here tonight
can match his prowess as he weaves easy figure eights,
turns and sails backwards without a glance;
though I imagine his likely office job, manning
some cubicle in a gray and taupe-y sea
and the gaping dark that crouches nightly at his door.
Now the rink’s Robert Plant commands the floor
beneath a silver disco orb and twirls once, twice,
a third time, pretending not to watch us
watching him. In his prime in ’85, that bleached
mass of frizzed-out curls would have bobbed radiant
under hot stage lights during the guitar solo,
his attention rapt to the art at hand, yet aware
as a preening animal of the lip-glossed girls
in the front row whose eyes simmered
with envy and desire. But the gigs
have fizzled into soundlessness,
the Dodge van scrapped, the red guitar lies
long untuned in its velvet chamber
and each Sunday at eight he pulls the black skates
from their nook and somehow finds a rhythm
not unlike rock and roll in this dim-lit dome
with its carnival colors and claw machine and women
fluffing their hair in restroom mirrors.
Just overhead hover the sour divorces,
languished careers, botched plans, those hours when life
took a sharp turn toward the inscrutable
and left us older and daunted in its wake.
But when the DJ calls the night’s last song, we—
the lonesome and afraid, the jaded
and lost—peer through strobe lights
for somebody, if not lovable, then not a lunatic
and sing to a tune we first heard the summer
someone else left and we wept against a cool steering wheel
and felt the world spin, fierce and marvelous beneath our feet.
–from Rattle #24, Winter 2005
August 30th, 2009
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Review by Joanne Baines
LIMOUSINE, MIDNIGHT BLUE
by Jamey Hecht
Red Hen Press
P.O. Box 3537
Granada Hills, CA 91394
2009, 80 pp., $16.95
ISBN-13 978-1597091282
www.redhen.org
It would be wonderful for all history lessons to be presented in poetry, plays and song. The dry historical texts with their unfamiliar names and dates are so easily forgotten once the test has been passed. If an event is set to rhythm, it permeates your soul and stays with you. If the beat that you hear from this neighboring village pounding out an important story is loud and strong and the words are eloquent enough it will persist until you find it necessary to explore the subject further and add more verses.
“Limousine, Midnight Blue” is such a poem. Fifty poems, each 14-lines and tied to a frame in the Zapruder film, the horrible 26-second home movie that captures the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
This collection of poems is a documentation of the murder and the radiating shockwaves of repercussion, but it is also a very personal book revealing the author’s raptor-like view and a passion for telling this history well. Every aspect of the tragedy is considered, from the space program to Vietnam and the culture of America at the time.
The poems start at frame Z-150 where you can see the motorcade come into view and the first stanza from poem “Z-150” proclaims:
Here comes authority, waving to the many,
riding with the few. Here comes smiling, shining you driven down the ribbon of the end, alone in all that sun
and noise, those thousand hands and eyes and cameras.
Aristotle is introduced in “Z-156” where he teaches the physics that are so important to a bullet. I believe that Aristotle himself would be quite pleased with the choice of words used in these poems. “The perfection of diction is that it be at once clear and not pedestrian” (Aristotle in the Poetics). The combining of ancient Greece and pop culture, Nietzsche and Addison’s disease, stacked syringes and outer space illustrate not only the epic nature of the subject but also the breadth of resources Jamey Hecht has at his disposal.
There is a longing for this thing to have never happened and an accusation because it did. In “Z-162” you hear a naive cry for Santa Claus to stop it, much like the collective consciousness of America looked for Superman to stop that second plane from hitting that second building. A sense of futility and sorrow prevail because in spite of all of the witnesses, the analysis, the precise numbers, the studies, the slow motion, close ups, and the endless reports, it still happened and it seems as if we will never get a straight answer.
The speaker and viewpoint change with each poem and with every differing persona the imagery, rhythm, alliteration, texture and closing combine to create a depth of feeling that belies the structure of only 14 lines. The crafting of elegant enjambements and definitive end stops is effective in alternatively pulling us along and creating tension.
In “Z-163” the earth is impregnated by the limousine (license plate # GG-300) in order to give birth to future wars and toys and sedatives:
Z-163
How about the triple underpass as the cervix of the world
and GG300 as the tragic DNA-laden tadpole
that makes the poor young planet swell with future
wars and toys and sedatives. How aboutthe limousine is itself one giant bullet
pointed, well, you know where. In fact,
you’re still bleeding. Or the pink pillbox hat
is also a horse tranquilizer we must every one of uschoke down, and the headlights are hypnotic lamps
and the pathetic death-of-a-salesman lunge
of Clint Hill onto the lurching hood
is the official dance of the People’s DemocraticRepublic of Craven, Malignant, Heartbroken, Sleepwalking.
Or maybe that’s only the Miltown talking.
We are drawn into these surreal visions of the time period as though we are watching Satan’s vacation slides and then skid to a stop with the mention of the then-favored tranquilizer.
“Z-166 “is a brilliant catalogue, an incantation of the names of the conspirators. Because the names are familiar and each one incites a visceral reaction it is difficult to achieve the hypnotic trance state that a catalogue poem usually inspires. However, the catalogue form is a wonderful allegory for the soporific apathy that allowed these men to go unpunished for this particular crime.
As the Lincoln, and the poems, progress “down the ribbon of the end,” a dynamic tension builds as we are confronted with the inevitable conclusion. Towards the end, “Z-192,” the author assumes the persona of an angry John Kennedy:
Imagine me riding skeletal down Main Street on a bicycle.
I get death, you get the shock of your lives, your daughters
heroin addicts and your sons marines on fire in mud, guilty.
“Limousine, Midnight Blue” is an elegy written out of heartbreak and frustration and yet the author has surmounted those emotions long enough to expertly blend image, rhythm and voice to create the coalescence all poetry strives for. This is history as it should be told. There are terms and phrases that are not common knowledge; Jamey Hecht is kind enough to provide a section at the end of the book that gives direction for these things. He has also created some “video trailers” for the book at
www.jameyhecht.com
My rating? As with all of the best books of poems, read it until it is wrecked.
____________
Joanne Baines is very appreciative of the art of stringing together words. She is responsible for a great many of the perversely hedonistic postings on www.hedonistreview.com
August 29th, 2009
Charles Harper Webb
SWIMMING LESSON
We want to give our son the power
to flutter-kick across death’s bright
blue surface, dive down deep
to where the treasure lies, and swim it up.
We want him to love pool parties—
to guard the lines of half-dressed girls—
to backstroke, butterfly, and walk
on water for their awe-struck eyes.
We want a swimmer’s body for him:
slow pulse and strong heart.
Yet in the pool, our laughing boy
becomes a screaming fiend.
He screams louder when teenaged
Lorelei drags him toward the deep.
“Mommy! Daddy! No!” he shrieks.
Our waving only makes things worse.
He thrashes, flails. “Help me!”
he wails, seeing us wring hands
we don’t bring to his aid. “We love you,”
we swear each night before bed,
and soothe night-fears with “Honey,
you’re safe here.” But now, like dying
gods, all we can do is watch
his faith in us fight to the surface once,
twice, three times, then disappear.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
August 28th, 2009
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William G. Ward
A VISIT TO THE SUPERMART
There are reservoir-tipped Shaker condoms hooked openly in plain view on
aisle 14 which causes Rev. Day conniptions, and I remember when you had to
edge up to the druggist and ask for rubbers and he would palm a pack into your
hand like he was breaking all ten commandments, and now here they are out in
the open, liberated latex at last, next to Baby Wipes and Tinactin for the feet
and ProxiStrips, all marked down in price on white stickem strips,
then I wind up in framed pictures and hangings, where I got a nifty litho by
Adam Schoolcraft for 7 bucks and works by Gertrude O’Nasty and Jolly Nair,
and you can make a whole museum of pictures at 7 to 10 dollars each, paintings
of bees smelling roses, of kids pissing on stoops, and an imaginative
embossing of Great Grebes flying into the setting sun, all of which goes to prove
that the art is not in the price, and every Saturday I get to sort through carelessly
flung panels looking for another H. Smythe or Maria Orange,
and licorice bits on sale at only 99 cents a bag because they are today a bluelight
special which brings customers running from all parts of the store, and
while you have the chance you might as well stock up on three or four which is
definitely not such good advice because when I get all that candy back home I
go through it like a thresher goes through wheat, and over-sugared my brain
gets fuzzy, and I sweat, and the lightning will zing,
and once I bought a psychedelic watch for 19.98 which got all sorts of
comments like, “What’s that on your wrist?” or, “How can you tell time with a
watch like that?” and they don’t get the part that I don’t wear a watch to tell
the time, but mostly to decorate my wrist which is about the dullest part of
anatomy I can imagine, unless it is the kneecap,
then the final stop: a bagging girl, trim little thing working for 4.30, no package,
always asks, a ritual that never fails, “Paper or plastic?” and if I need something
for garbage I say, “Paper,” and if I need to line cat boxes I say, “Plastic,” evaluating
and deciding, the intellectual process, and the bagging girl usually is
obliging, and gives me paper if I ask for paper, and well, you get the drift.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
August 27th, 2009
Alison Townsend
BLUE WILLOW: PERSEPHONE FALLING
“Depression is hidden knowledge.”
—James Hillman
You think it will never happen again.
Then one day in November it does, the narrow,
dusty boards of the trapdoor you fell through
twenty years before cracking apart, a black grin
opening its toothless mouth, darkness seeping out
to fill the dead cornfields rattling around you.
That sound’s back in your head again—
like angry bees or static or rubber bands
breaking. And beneath it a distant hum
you remember being scared was voices
till the doctor explained it was your own brain,
working overtime to understand its disordered signals.
And meanwhile, every sadness on NPR is yours—
from the African country where 30% of the childbearing
women have AIDS, to the Appalachian mother
who sells her great-grandmother’s Blue Willow china
for fifty bucks to feed her kids, to your own
mother, who dies again every autumn, something
wrong when she didn’t come home for Thanksgiving
the way she promised, the torn-sheet dinner napkins
you’d embroidered—“M” for “Mommy”—with ordinary
thread, wrapped in tin foil under the bed, melancholy’s
blue index finger pressed into your forehead, choosing
you for its team. Where it seems you must play for life,
whether you want to or not. Though that’s not
what you’re thinking as you hurtle
through the night, jittery as the rabbit
you swerve to avoid, your head filled
with chattering fog, a glass door sliding shut
between you and the world, that feeling of being
outside yourself so loud you don’t seem real.
Though you are. As you maneuver the car carefully
through the dark, remembering how you willed
yourself to live this way for two years,
synapses flashing like emergency lights
you thought you’d never see again.
But here they are, the medication you’ve ratcheted
down for a year necessary after all, the biochemical
net too small, the darkness you’ve pushed away
for twenty years with what your doctor calls
one hand tied behind you suddenly back.
As you remember setting out your mother’s
Blue Willow on the table every night
as a child—blue people in blue houses
under blue trees—each plate a story you can
walk into, where everything is fine. If it weren’t
so dark inside and you weren’t so scared.
If you could only think how to get there, and what
treasure you are supposed to find when you do.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
