January 31st, 2010
Laurie Junkins
MIDWESTERN GOTHIC
That frigid Wichita month hangs
in my history like a smoke-darkened
painting—all tight-lipped Presbyterians
and dormant cornfields frozen beneath
the iron gray slab of January. I was trapped
in a rusty carbuncle of a travel-trailer
stuck like a pimple on someone’s winter
field, a landscape slapped flat by God’s hand.
Each night my father and his wife belted out
’70s pop standards billed as Foxfyre,
in a month-long gig at The Candle Club.
In my eight-by-four bunk, I stared
out a tiny porthole at the Kansas tundra
glittering in moonlight, a bedazzled spread,
and listened to the scritch and thump
of rabbits copulating in the glow
of the heat lamps that warmed
our trailer’s plumbing. Exiled from Denver
and my sixth-grade classroom, I read and re-read
Heidi, made a week-long project of peeling
the price sticker off her face
printed on the cover, scratching away
each gluey shred until my thumbnail
softened and bent inward. But she wasn’t
pretty after all, and then I lost her
somewhere in that 160 square feet
of Kansas winter, so I filled hours
with Xeroxed worksheets and textbook
math, peering at the road outside
for February, as if looking for thaw.
–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
January 30th, 2010
Review by Lori A. May
THEN, SOMETHING
by Patricia Fargnoli
Tupelo Press
The Eclipse Mill, Loft 305
PO Box 1767
North Adams, MA 01247
ISBN 978-1-932195-79-8
2009, 84 pp., $16.95
http://www.tupelopress.org
I am of the age when parents no longer resemble the friendly supervisors of youth. Now, with each passing year, I watch as the once lively duo slowly fades into a subtle, calm battle with time. We suffer mortality. It is what unites us. And yet, there is beauty in witnessing a life come and go. Amidst pain and suffering, we endure. We love. We fight. Sometimes for our own lives. Sometimes for the lives of others.
It is with such consideration that I find myself pleasantly drawn into the latest collection from Patricia Fargnoli. Then, Something offers an honest approach to human mortality, celebrating lives lived, banishing memories best forgotten, remembering those most cherished.
When I read the poem “Applewood Senior Apartments, April Again,” I cannot help but recall my own visits to elderly family and friends. Fargnoli draws the reader in, inviting us to see through the white walls of solitude, as a lifetime passes through shadows along the window:
You’d been told it would come to this, the turning away
into smaller and smaller rooms. The footsteps upstairs
are not anymore a husband’s, but the thin neighbor
who comes and goes beyond your window,
his sick cat in a carrier.
We all eventually arrive at this place. Fargnoli not only takes us there, but leads us through the quiet, refined passivity of a lifetime reduced to memories:
Once, you had a life and it was sometimes good.
Your hair was auburn then, you could run.
If only your legs would move today in that remembered
ease and rhythm.
It doesn’t matter that I am still too young to experience this as a personal flashback; I have seen the eyes of family whose youth has faded, supported their limbs when they could not support themselves, and remembered life where little remains. Life is given to us, and then slowly withdrawn. Fargnoli captures these moments of breath, of beating hearts, and challenges us to breathe life back into the stolen moments of aging.
The poet confronts mortality again and again in this stunning, perceptive collection. “Easter Morning” is a favorite, for its frankness and tongue-in-cheek reactions to strangers, readers, and symbolic figures. Again, Fargnoli’s narration admits concern
about death, how it will come too soon.
Part of me wants release
but we cling to life, most of us,
with passion — or not.
Within this poem, the observations of others, and in particular an “awkward woman,” the narrator wonders about “becoming reluctantly old” and how she “live[s] slowly these days.” It is as though there is much more to read through what Fargnoli presents to sense the line between life and death, passionate desire and comfort with ambiguity.
Fargnoli stretches beyond the immediate to recount lives lost and the impact of losing loved ones long ago. In “The Losing,” the poet resurrects and personifies a mother, if only to relive the loss:
The mother who left in my childhood
is leaving again in my dream.
[…]
My mother is leaving again from the memory
of a white double bed,
[…]
My mother left all my days and nights
and went into the illness for whichthere was, in those days, no cure
and no slowing it down.
Fargnoli may dance with death in Then, Something, but this is not to be perceived as a solemn collection. For with every life lost, with each year of aging, Fargnoli offers a glimpse of that impenetrable human spirit that pushes us to carry on. Call it faith, label it as determination, there is hope in poems such as “Melancholy in Late October”:
I have become extravagant —
I have turned on all the lamps in the house —
all day I keep them burning.
Yes, I am of the age where youthful parents are but a memory. I am, myself, not quite as energetic as I was a decade ago. But through Fargnoli’s collection of perceptive, sensitive images, I choose not only to remember lives lost and years worn on, I embrace the spirit in which lives were lived with vigor.
____________
Lori A. May is a poet, novelist, and freelance writer whose work has appeared in publications such as The Writer, Tipton Poetry Journal, and anthologies such as Van Gogh’s Ear. She is the author of stains: early poems and two novels, Moving Target and The Profiler. May is also Managing Editor at Marick Press and Founding Editor of The Ambassador Poetry Project. For more information, visit http://www.loriamay.com.
January 29th, 2010
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David James
THE FAMOUS OUTLAW
He rides into town on a retarded horse, falling off five times before reaching the saloon. His horse has a tendency to trip over its own hooves, like steps or bowling balls. The cowboy wears a helmet to safeguard against personal head injuries.
Unknowingly, he ties himself to the hitching post while the horse wanders down main street, looking for a barber shop.
Within ten minutes, the outlaw realizes what he did and quickly associates this as being the reason for his failure to enter the saloon. He unties the rope and barges in. “Give me dirty milk in a clean glass,” he says to the
bartender so everyone hears.
As evidence of his brilliant courage, he carries his left nipple and mustache in a leather pouch, both shot off during bank robberies. Later, as you know, he made thousands of dollars selling the banks to riverfront store owners in Mississippi.
His mother and father never met in person, although we do have an extensive series of letters from their correspondences, each containing diagrams of tattoos and question marks. Nothing is known for sure about his childhood. The rumors now circulating state he used to be a choir boy at the age of two.
He finishes his drink and walks out without paying. The street is empty except for some children who are watching his horse kick in the side of the General Store. He gives them each a bullet and rides off into the sunset. The children stand close to the buildings, waving goodbye. The outlaw turns to wave when his horse trips, throwing him head over heels. The dust slowly evaporates and he is still lying on the ground.
The children keep waving. They can tell he’s famous.
–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
January 28th, 2010
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Mary McLaughlin Slechta
THE HOUR OF OUR BELIEF
I want to know who cried for the toy I found out back this afternoon.
Was it the same child who ate a sandwich made from the bread
out of the plastic bag I found last week? So difficult to date plastic.
The toy gas pump promises five cents a gallon.
That would make a dollar’s worth about a tank.
Maybe 1960. Maybe a politician now. Small world.
Someone who keeps voting for war to save our way of life.
The Onondagas want the land returned to their stewardship.
They want the lake cleaned properly.
They want everything back the way it was
before that odious Simon LeMoyne grabbed all the salt
for his three-minute egg. Before his flock fouled the water.
I want everything put back. The toy put back in the boy’s pocket
and the boy’s father back on a ship beside his parents.
I want the ship setting a reverse course for the shores of Europe.
Before they arrive I want Hitler back in his mother’s womb
and the reset stone in her garden wall
back in the path of her thin-soled slipper.
The passengers will insist on sandwiches, I suppose,
lovely little sandwiches wrapped in paper.
If they trim the bread, let them leave the crusts behind
to feed the birds a lavish supper. Then let the birds go back
to eating whatever it is they did before McDonald’s.
I’ll go back too, a circuitous route by wagon first,
returning my skillet to the forge, my rolling pin to the forest,
discharging my nose and hair like a Halloween mask,
my skin like a suit of mail: a withered champion,
at last, more onion and potato than flesh and bone,
ascending the bow of a ship from the cool dry cellar of my soul.
Oh, amazing grace! To cross the dangerous shoals
where the bones sing home all the ships at sea.
Let the women swallow back air they churned to storm.
Let them refill the lungs of children
they pull from waves and wrest their husbands
from the teeth of sharks. In the restored calm,
let memory whet my tongue
for the anchor of my mother’s food.
On shore, my father waits.
His hands are empty with missing me.
Let the glint at his feet in the sand
be only the sun, chasing the tail
of a golden worm.
–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
Tribute to African American Poets
January 27th, 2010
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Kimi Cunningham Grant
INTERFERENCE
In March, two Eastern Bluebirds, balanced in an autumn olive
Near the carcass of a deer you shot months back. The flesh now gone
And the ribs stretching upward like the belly of a boat.
Last November, that deer had come to you in the woods. Stumbled
Through a grotto of jack pines further up the hill. Gangrenous.
Its breaths heavy and white and the whole thing as dizzying as a dream.
You ran back to the house and asked what to do.
Grabbed a rifle and snapped a bullet into the clip. Minutes later,
A shot. We’d put it out of its misery. Saved it.
But now with the bones white against the cheatgrass and the hair
Matted and rank, I’m thinking maybe we should have left that dying thing
To die on its own, in a time and place of its choosing.
And yet I’d done that once: turned my back on a life that veered
Into mine. A man with torn pants and no shirt, his skin
As bruised and shiny as a river. I gave him no clothes or drink,
And he kept on walking. Through the steaming blue streets. Walking,
As the deer might have. For days, maybe. Or even weeks. But right here
The mice and beetles have been feeding, all winter long
On this body on which we believed we were bestowing some dignity.
And soon those holy blue birds will pass from us,
Swift as sacrament. The crocus will unfurl. The dogwood at our door
Will turn a furious white. And the thistle will grow thick over what’s left.
This spring and the next we won’t know what it was
We were saving, or whose blessing we were hoping to become.
–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
