Category Archives: Book Reviews

Charlie Bondhus: War Poet for the Post-DADT Era


Charlie Bondhus’s masterful, heart-wrenching new poetry collection, All the Heat We Could Carry (Main Street Rag, 2013), could not have been written in any previous generation. In the closeted centuries following the Greco-Roman era, the poetry of gay male love and the poetry of war have only been permitted to overlap in sublimated and metaphorical ways. Bondhus merges them candidly, but the story this book tells is more elegiac than celebratory.

The alternating narrators of Heat, a veteran of the Afghanistan war and his homefront lover, seem free from their forerunners’ self-conscious anguish about sexual orientation. They can admit openly how sex between men is like martial arts grappling, how killing can be orgasmic and the camaraderie of soldiers more intimate than lovers. They can savor the flowers in their backyard garden without weighting down those fragile stems with the entire burden of their erotic communication, and without fearing that attention to beauty makes them unmanly.

But despite this unprecedented openness, an unbridgeable rift separates the lovers, and that is the tragedy at the heart of this book. Combat changes the veteran in ways that his partner cannot comprehend first-hand. His feelings are hardened like scar tissue. He can’t fit in, can’t understand the relevance of the civilian routines that he left behind. He eventually goes back to the war, not because he believes in it, but because it’s the only place he feels at home.

The past few years have brought high-profile victories for gay and lesbian inclusion in mainstream (some would say conservative) institutions like marriage, the church, and the military. After the celebrations fade, there’s an opportunity to look critically at the social structures into which one has been assimilated. Heat suggests that participation in systems of oppression doesn’t end with the waving of the rainbow flag.

Charlie has kindly permitted me to reprint these poems from his collection, which won the 2013 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award.

Sharing a Bed

I remember the first evening in bed,
making love with the lights on.

Outside the window, a hanging basket
of red impatiens
and a ruby-throated hummingbird.

In late spring’s greenish light
my head was a bowed peony,
     
your torso,
     
a grand urn
     
of tissuey ranunculus.

Summer found us sharing a home
with mismatched furniture,
plagues of ragweed and clover
choking the thin, dark spaces
between our together-time.

Like angel’s trumpet, I craved
the cool white suddenness
the moon brings,
and when it came
     
silent as a cloud
our limbs were not the marble of roses,
or the patrician regularity of zinnias,
but the cheap, unsung beauty
of daisies, wild pinks.

Hornets nested in our heads.
Butterflies settled on our eyelids.
Morning’s first finches began to sing.

My arms were full of nettles and lamb’s ear.

****


Wood Gathering

In November we gather
straight branches into bundles,
and carry them

past flowerbeds
we stopped tending
last spring, to the shed

door which always sticks
in cold weather.
I want to ask you

how long since the seasons
became the same,
neither sun

nor perennials penetrating
our ribs, to the place where organs
slump like frozen vegetables?

When the snow starts,
you will cross
the backyard, and tugging

and grunting, pull open
the shed, where what
we’ve gathered is stacked neatly

as bones. Wordless
(we have no use for lips),
you will track dirt and ice

across the carpetless floors
and drop the flaking
wood on the fire,

filling the house
with the easier
kind of warmth.

First, pink rushes
to fingertips. Next,
skin cracks as heat

refills the heart
like hot water
into a cold glass. And then

like a body
rising
from a thawing lake,

and bumping heavily
against the sheet ice:
a pulse

or what remains of love,
brushing the underside
of the wrist,

a feeling
brittle as firewood,
finite as frost.

Two Poems from Jamaal May’s “Hum”



Winner of the 2012 Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books, Jamaal May’s electric debut collection Hum embodies the vitality and struggle of becoming a man. The word “elegy” is not entirely right for such energetic, muscular poems, but there is mourning here for May’s native Detroit and the men of his family who were scarred by addiction, war, and racism. The speaker of these poems fights back with beauty, noticing the shine of the handcuffs while enduring police harassment, or the inspiring message on the plastic bag that holds his relative’s ashes “in a Chinese takeout box”. In the age of e-readers, AJB’s elegant book design makes a case for the pleasures of print. Poems titled after various phobias are interspersed through the book on black paper with white type, creating moments of visual “hush” amid the “hum” of text.

Jamaal has kindly given me permission to reprint the following two poems, which first appeared in Poetry Magazine and Blackbird, respectively. Follow him on Twitter @JamaalMay.

Hum for the Bolt

It could of course be silk. Fifty yards or so
of the next closest thing to water to the touch,
or it could just as easily be a shaft of  wood

crumpling a man struck between spaulder and helm.
But now, with the rain making a noisy erasure
of this town, it is the flash that arrives

and leaves at nearly the same moment. It’s what I want
to be in this moment, in this doorway,
because much as I’d love to be the silk-shimmer

against the curve of anyone’s arm,
as brutal and impeccable as it’d be to soar
from a crossbow with a whistle and have a man

switch off upon my arrival, it is nothing
compared to that moment when I eat the dark,
draw shadows in quick strokes across wall

and start a tongue counting
down to thunder. That counting that says,
I am this far. I am this close.

****

Man Matching Description

Because the silk scarf could have cradled
a neck as delicate as that of a cygnet,
but was instead used in last night’s strangling,
it is possible to marvel at the finish on handcuffs.

Because I can imagine handcuffs,
pummeled by stones until shimmering,
the flashlight that sears my eyes
is too perfect to look away.

Because a flashlight has more power
on a southern roadside than my name and blood
combined and there is no power in the very human
frequency range of my voice and my name is dead
in my mouth and my name is in a clear font on a license
I can’t reach for before being drawn down on—
Because the baton is long against my window,
the gun somehow longer against my cheek,
the vehicle cold against my abdomen
as my shirt rises, twisted in fingers
and my name is asked again—I want to
say, Swan! I am only a swan.

Poetry by Lauren Schmidt: “The Waiting Room of Past Lives”


In Lauren Schmidt’s earthy, revelatory poetry collection Two Black Eyes and a Patch of Hair Missing (Main Street Rag, 2013), bodies eat, sweat, climax, and die. Some of them are stuffed. All are handled with reverence. Comical or embarrassing moments open up suddenly into a vision of fellowship that levels social distinctions.

Schmidt shows why humor, humility, and humane have a common root. Many of her poem titles sound like premises for a stand-up comedy sketch: “Why I Am Not a Taxidermist“; “My Grandfather’s Balls”; “Portrait of My Parents Making Love as a Stomach Virus“. Each time, however, the poem takes a surprising turn, reversing the typical use of disgust to create distance and superiority, and instead breaking down the pretensions that alienate us.

Lauren and Main Street Rag have kindly permitted me to reprint the poem below, which first appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review. For more about her work, enjoy this interview on the Splinter Generation blog.

The Waiting Room of Past Lives

No one likes it here. You can tell
by our bodies: this one chews
his cuticles; that one pretends
to read. A woman fingers the drag
in her stockings. A man watches
from across the room, blowing steam
from his third cup of sludge.
He’s used up all the stirrers.
The girl behind the blurred glass
snaps her gum, watches the clock
for five. On the wall, CNN

bleats something about this
or that. The war here or there.
There seems to be only one channel,
but nobody bothers to check. We wait
in the glow of the red numbers. Now
Serving, the sign says. We pinch our slips
as if waiting for lunchmeat.

It gets harder and harder to do this.
They put a note in my file. It explains
the crutches, the bandage on my brow.
I was eighty then, collapsed in the hedges
racking my brain for the line that came
before the dish ran away with the spoon.
When you’re eighty you don’t always
remember. The last time I was eighty,
I left notes on my front door
should a visitor happen by: Be right back,
in the bathroom, scrawled by my shaky hand,

letters like the eyelashes I pulled out
with my fingers and arranged
in my notebook during Physics
in the life before that. I loved
to watch them scatter in one full
breath, didn’t care much that girls
stared at my nest of hair or laughed
at my penchant for saying silly things.
I chose my words carefully,
spelled them with my lashes.

By senior year, I had no brows
left either: two bleached seams
arched above my eyes, an eternity
of expressing horrified surprise.
My mother made them draw brows
so I wouldn’t look strange
in the casket. The irony, too much
for the man I shared it with here,
in the waiting room, a man
whose laughter made his jaw click,
like the snap of my infant neck
in the life I had that didn’t last very long.
My memory went only as far
as the garden of my mother’s
hair when she hovered above my crib

to kiss me. In the life where I learned
what it meant to be a father,
I put my nose to the rose of my son’s
lips, waited for breath, contented
just to watch his infant chest rise
and fall. I recall the feel of my own

stuttered breast as I lay in my mess
of wings in the middle of the street.
After the windshield, I remembered
the boy, the rock, the way he lifted
it above his head. Its shadow trembled
above me, dilating as it broke over me
like a dark corsage before the lights
went out and I was back in line again.
The rock was something like mercy,
but do we really have the words
for the magician’s hat of how

our lives are made and taken? We’re rabbits
blinking in stiff confusion, some big hand
fisted around the ears, feet, kicking, pendulous,
and marking time. Sometimes we’re a flurry
of doves in a round of applause. I have been
the rabbit, would be the rabbit again
because there simply is no lover
more eager to be in the world.
I have been the boy with his pellet gun, too,
a piece of wheat in my teeth and nothing to do
but wonder what a tuft of hair looks like
when it erupts with blood, wonder the sound
flesh makes when it’s pulled from fur
which isn’t anything like the sound
of denim ripping as you might think.

On CNN there is a man on his knees.
Dirty shirt, holes in his jeans.
Another man grips his hair, dark tufts
sprout between his fingers. In the other fist,
the flash of a murky blade. The man’s eyes
are lurched wide from his pulled hairline.
The shadow of the blade breaks over

a shaking face. This one stops chewing
his cuticles. That one stops pretending
to read. The woman leaves her stockings
alone and the man stops watching her.
All eyes gaze at the TV screen. We don’t see
the rest, but everybody knows what happens
next. With any luck, the man on his knees
will wake up praying near a bed
in a room he somehow knows is his.

Two Poems from Marsha Truman Cooper’s “A Knot of Worms”

I discovered the work of Marsha Truman Cooper when her poem “You Had to Be There” won third prize in our 2004 Winning Writers War Poetry Contest. Since the judging was anonymous, I was quite surprised to learn that this searing account of a young man’s tour of duty in Vietnam was not autobiographical, so convincing was her first-person storytelling.

Cooper’s poetry chapbook A Knot of Worms was published this summer by Finishing Line Press in their New Women’s Voices series. These quiet poems are charged with a sacred attention to healing the wounds sustained by our bodies and ecosystem. In the aftermath of war or illness, the human spirit finds wholeness by recovering our common bond with whales, dragonflies, and yes, even worms. She kindly shares two sample poems below. “Ashes” was first published in Poetry Northwest.

Ashes

She will not do
what you expect, not even
if you make love to her.
She can never tell
what she has learned,
no matter how safely
she rests under your arm.
But one day, she may open a jar
she brought from that place.
She will say
it holds the burnt bones
of hands, just the hands,
of people she has known.
Though it cannot possibly
be true, you’ll believe her.
You’ll pour out
her pieces of calcium
as if they were uncut jewels.
You’ll sort through them,
wondering which bone
was the finger of a thief,
which held a violin,
and how the tiny ones
could have belonged to anybody
but a child.
Then you will see
why she can be so positive
that we are all joined.
There will never be a way
to separate these friends.

****

After the Man Who Counted Dragonflies

died, he opened his eyes and discovered
he was still in Oregon, his research tent
still pitched in a forest of pines
near the edge of a snow-fed, mile-high lake.
He took off his clothes and walked
across the beach pebbles hot as coals,
splashed into icy water— a contrast which,
if he did say so just to himself, felt heavenly.
Apparently, it was still July. A blue darner
dragonfly touched down on his index finger.
He saw the indelible ink dots he’d used
to mark the animal, a pattern recorded
by date for an insect whose life cycle
ended long ago. He wanted to ask him,
a male he’d decorated, the question
that had deviled him in life. He raised
his arm skyward, but before he could speak
more of his subjects joined them. By tens,
then hundreds and finally by thousands
his friends flew to greet him. Nymphs
he had saved from extinction cracked
their shells, split open, crawled up a reed
and darted into summer. They all whirled
around the man, a blue darner wind. Then,
they landed in a mosaic of iridescence—
their wing tips touching randomly in what
looked like sunshine— while his spirit
skittered over acres of their humming surface.
As the sun lowered, he realized that there
might be darkness. At last, he thought,
they would show him what nobody on earth
could find— where they go at night.

“Crime Against Nature”: A Lesbian Mother’s Poetic Manifesto

Minnie Bruce Pratt’s Crime Against Nature is everything a poetry collection should be. Politically urgent but never one-dimensional, in language that’s always clear but never pedestrian, this groundbreaking book recounts how the author lost custody of her sons when she came out as a lesbian, then forged a beautifully honest relationship with them later in life.

The speaker grieves, rages, yet bravely refuses to take the blame for the impossible choice forced upon her. “This is not the voice of the guilty mother,” she writes. Connecting her loss to other forms of oppression and violence against women, she dares to dream of a world that “will not divide self from self, self from life.”

Crime Against Nature was originally published in 1989 by Firebrand Press and won the 1989 Lamont Poetry Prize, a second-book award from the Academy of American Poets. A Midsummer Night’s Press, in conjunction with the lesbian literary journal Sinister Wisdom, reissued it this year in an expanded edition with historical notes and an author essay. It is the first book in their “Sapphic Classics” series reprinting iconic lesbian poetry that is now out of print. Subscribers to this excellent journal will receive future Sapphic Classics (one a year) as the equivalent of one magazine issue. Crime Against Nature does double duty as Issue #88.

Sinister Wisdom editor Julie R. Enszer has kindly given me permission to reprint a sample poem below. I chose this one because I could relate to the speaker’s dilemma between speaking and not speaking about trauma. In the end it is better to speak, even when it hurts. It sets free others’ “tongues of ice”, as well as your own. Thank you, Minnie Bruce Pratt.

Justice, Come Down

A huge sound waits, bound in the ice,
in the icicle roots, in the buds of snow
on fir branches, in the falling silence
of snow, glittering in the sun, brilliant
as a swarm of gnats, nothing but hovering
wings at midday. With the sun comes noise.
Tongues of ice break free, fall, shatter,
splinter, speak. If I could write the words.

Simple, like turning a page, to say Write
what happened, but this means a return
to the cold place where I am being punished.
Alone to the stony circle where I am frozen,
the empty space, children, mother, father gone,
lover gone away. There grief still sits
and waits, grim, numb, keeping company with
anger. I can smell my anger like sulfur-
struck matches. I wanted what had happened
to be a wall to burn, a window to smash.
At my fist the pieces would sparkle and fall.
All would be changed. I would not be alone.

Instead I have told my story over and over
at parties, on the edge of meetings, my life
clenched in my fist, my eyes brittle as glass.

Ashamed, people turned their faces away
from the woman ranting, asking: Justice,
stretch out your hand. Come down, glittering,
from where you have hidden yourself away.

 

Two Poems from Donna Johnson’s “Selvage”

Award-winning poet Donna Johnson was an assistant editor at our Winning Writers online publishing business from 2009-2011. I’m glad that the demands of updating our contest database didn’t keep her from completing her remarkable first poetry collection, Selvage, now out from Carnegie Mellon University Press. I had the privilege of reading it in manuscript and providing the following blurb:

Selvage, a precise yet uncommon word, refers to the self-finished edge that keeps fabric from fraying. Like that cloth, the girl-turned-woman we follow through these electrifying poems must weave strong edges for herself to keep from being pulled apart by others’ desires. She flirts dangerously with alternative selves–the prostituted woman, the fierce nun–to understand her body’s potential as it chafes against the proprieties of Southern white girlhood. Selvage sounds like salvage, too, the hardscrabble work of children seeking nourishment and mementos from the wreck of their past. Every poem digs up treasures of insight, words pungent as the air outside the tannery, ineradicable artifacts like the bullet in a slave woman’s unearthed spine–not always comfortable to contemplate, but satisfying as only the truth can be.

Donna has kindly given permission to reprint two sample poems, below.

Notions
(for Della)

Your mother had notions. Wouldn’t buy Ivory soap–
not because she saw the irony, that whiteness
equals purity, not because it reminded her
of all the carved tusks looted from Abidjan ruins
curled around the wrists of Belle Meade denizens–
she thought it smelled common. Cornrows
and Kente cloth were out of the question.

She clung to her book of proper, as if
it could keep one from harm: the hands of boys
inching down your pants, police slowing,
tinted windows rolling down, all because you crossed
the highway that divided the two halves of town.

She taught you to look ahead (like you don’t see nothin)
balancing flute case across handlebars,
approaching the house of the first clarinet,
with its lawn boy positioned at the gate,
coat and exaggerated grin, freshly painted red.

****


Eve Gets a Makeover

I don’t like to say anybody’s hopeless. But, that yellow Dotted Swiss you just bought–you know, the one with the full dirndl skirt and gathered waist–makes you look wider than you are tall. Enough material in it to patch the Hindenburg. Don’t fret, though hon. You got your charms. Jes gotta make use of em before they’re gone: a little contour cheek powder, a shade darker than your natural, some highlights. What you waitin for? Plenty women gettin all their stuff done. Who’s gonna throw stones? Your kids are clean, their hair is combed. Your make cakes from scratch; once a week you bring that broccoli casserole to the nursin home. I know what they told you. Jesus first, others second, yourself last spells J-O-Y. But joy ain’t beauty. And I don’t see you displayin much of the former, anyhow, worryin about your husband workin late, maybe findin someone younger. Anyway, the King James did get one thing right: all flesh is grass. That’s why you best be ruthless with it. I can help you there. I know flesh. And I know ruthless.

“Prayer”: A Poem from “The Voodoo Doll Parade” by Lauren Schmidt


Lauren Schmidt’s The Voodoo Doll Parade was selected by Terry Wolverton for the Main Street Rag Author’s Choice Chapbook Series. The profane becomes sacred under this poet’s unflinching attention, in earthy poems about illness, sex, and prayer (and sometimes all three tangled up in bed together). The heart of this chapbook is a series of unforgettable narratives about homeless and mentally disabled clients of The Dining Room, a soup kitchen in Oregon where the author volunteered. The poem below is reprinted by permission. See her author page on the MSR website for more samples and purchasing information. Please order books from MSR to support this excellent small press that publishes writing with a social conscience.

PRAYER
for Jeremy

When I clear your table after you’ve gone, there’s a small scrap
of paper which reads: “God Bless You. You are Beautiful.
I Promise to Pray for You.” Pray for me? Pray for me?
Then pray for me that I wake up in the morning in a bed
and lie there, that I give my blessings their proper names
and faces, the blessings that keep me from a life too like
yours, pray for me. Because the first thought of my day

is hunger, pray for me that I eat. But pray for me that I know
hunger, pray for me. Pray for me that I feel myself in
the growl of your belly, that I remember I am more like you
than I remember, pray for me. Pray for me that I am Rodney
with his weary eyes who is all at once teacher, cousin,
neighbor, friend, and the stranger who held the door for me
when my arms were full of bags, please pray. Pray for me

that I am the woman with earth-rich skin. Pray for those hands
that slammed her plate face-down into the table for me to clean.
Pray for me that I know no such grief, pray for me.
Pray for me that I am Larry whose fingers shoot music
into the belly of the piano; those same seven songs spark
from its upright head. Pray for me that I have the comfort
of knowing what comes next, pray for me. Pray for me that I am
the blind man because the room knows to make room for him.
People move tables, chairs, themselves, part a path for him as if
he were a king. But pray for me that I make way, pray for me.

Pray for me that I am Amber with her Vaseline face,
whose words are frenzied centipedes that scatter from her lips
and braid above her head. She stares at them like a mobile
or a noose. She stares at them like she would a heaven. Pray for me

there’s a heaven. That the demons inked along Leanne’s spine
do not exist, pray for me. Pray for me that my back can carry
such blackness if it needs to, pray for me. Pray for me that I am
the pregnant girl who is allowed a second plate. Pray that I know
the power I hold in my body, for a tiny king can grow eyes in my body,

please pray. Pray for me that I am the man in this same room, seated
at another table, the man that gives the girl his milk. Pray for me
that I remember to give up my milk. Pray for me that I am the milk.

Two Poems from “Slouching Towards Guantanamo” by Jim Ferris


Jim Ferris is an award-winning poet and professor of disability studies at the University of Toledo. His first full-length collection, The Hospital Poems, won the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award in 2004. In The Hospital Poems, Ferris writes about the multiple surgeries he endured as a child to correct skeletal abnormalities. He questions the purpose of the isolation, pain, and stigma he experienced as a perpetual patient. Was this course of treatment really for his benefit, or primarily to bring him closer to society’s idea of a proper-looking human body, to make others comfortable looking at him?

In his new book Slouching Towards Guantanamo, also from Main Street Rag, Ferris extends this radical inquiry to our body politic. Our discomfort with the body’s vulnerability forces certain lives offstage–the lives of the crippled, the war-wounded, the oppressed–and once we can no longer see them, we can allow ourselves to think that they don’t have feelings equal to ours. Who sees and who is seen? What is the difference between being seen and merely being looked at?

This prophetic poet asks us to shed the burden of our ego so that differences between ourselves and others can simply coexist without comparison or judgment. Notwithstanding the spiritual weight they carry, these poems are playful, musical, satirical and passionate. The poems below are reprinted by permission. Read more on his MSR author page.

FACTS OF LIFE

Where’s the glory in it? I am not
a survivor. Whatever the state
of my legs, whatever happened
there, know this: I walk down the street
whole, whether I limp or stumble,
cane or crutches, roll in a chair.
This is my body. Look if you like.
This is my meat, substance
but not essence, essence but not
fate, sum of all its particles
back to the big one but particular
to no single interpretation
in a cosmos of possible ontologies
that we all try to limit with all
our soft might but which accepts
only the most temporary
instructions: you, sir, explain
that birthmark, and you, how about
that nose? We are not signs,
we do not live in spite of
or because of our facts,
we live with them, around them, among,
like we live around rivers, my cane,
your warts, like we live among animals,
your heart, my brace, like we live with,
despite, because of each other.

****

MANIFEST DESTINY

I love Mark Twain and the Mississippi steamboats and Abraham Lincoln’s dogs.
I love the fields of wheat and corn and the smell of Virginia tobacco.
But I am not American.
. . .
Take the stripes of your flag
and give us the stars.
     –SAADI YOUSSEF, “America, America”

I see you, America.
I am your dying son.
I recall your stories
of hope and of glorious
trails to true freedom.
Give me liberty, go west, go deep.
One small step one giant

I hear you, America.
I am your deaf-blind child.
I may have been cute once,
up on that poster, but America,
you are my inspiration.
We hold these truths
to be self-evident,
we who have hands to hold
and eyes to see.

You watch me as I cross the street—
I must be something to see.

Send me your tired,
your poor, your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free—
take a deep breath—now ask
why they look at us that way.
Greatest country on earth—
in the history of the earth.
In the universe. Ever. Top that.

I smell you, America
you are in my pores, you
are the dirt beneath my nails—
you are my nails. All I eat
and drink and breathe are you.
Why am I no longer high?
Why does my head hurt?
Why do I have so many staplers?

You watch me as I buy groceries—
I must be something to see.

I feel you, America,
even deaf-blind I feel you go by,
I am your comatose wife.
Yoked together by a vow
made long ago, now I lie
here, and you lie away. When you love,
when you honor, will you protect
me from yourself? Just who is

your self, America? Do I
count? Three-fifths, say? I
am the crippled newsy on the corner,
the guy on the knuckleboard, not a leg
to stand on. Now I am the standard-bearer,
standing out not up. Stand by, America—
this just in: you need me. I am your face
in the family portrait, just as you blink.

You watch me though you are discreet.
I must be something to see.

I taste you, America,
pilgrims pride and fruited plain,
turkey dinner once a year,
I am your orphan child.
I am your silenced majority.
You would pave me to make me whole,
bronze our laughter to save it,
feed the world on hamburger,
coke, fries, and freedom’s tales,
talk of choice and honor
and a thousand channels.

I watch you, America,
I am your slow son,
your dumb-blonde daughter,
you are what’s on. Is anyone
listening? I am the deaf-blind cripple
who is always listening,
watching, waiting to be fulfilled.
I see you, America, I see you,
see me, hear me, be me too.

You watch me like I am quite chic.
I must be something to see.

I am too hard for poems, America,
too empty. You are too brittle, too small.
One drop overflows me,
the oceans cannot fill you,
nothing soaks through.
The maw of America is open,
friendly is our middle name,
the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
We take care of our own. We’ll take care
of you, too, if you don’t watch out, bud.
We have no room for poems, no time
for poems, no place for the people
of poems. Be one of us, be
a winner, be a saint, be secure
in righteousness, look forward to glory,
and take rewards both here and hereafter.

You watch me as I eat.
I must be something to see.

Liberty or death, America,
and you stand for both, indivisible,
one nation under the wrath of an angry God,
meting out liberty and justice to all
who get in our way. Forty acres and a mule,
America, paddy wagons and loyalty
oaths, banned books and internment
camps, peace pipes and more treaties,
and how about some blankets, too.
The policeman isn’t there to create
disorder, America—the policeman
is there to preserve disorder.

You watch me as I walk down the street.
I must be something to see.

I have a dream, America. Ask not.
I have lost my way, America,
but I’m right here with you.
Oh, you who would eat the earth
and call it free, the only thing we have to fear
is fear itself. Take this hand, you who love arms,
take this hand, America, opposable thumb and all. We
are the people of poems. Let us bind up our wounds
and refit the prostheses we all require.
I need you, America,
I am your child and I need you.
We are all your children, the atoms of your hope.
Let the better angels of our nature
form a more perfect union,
and let us be orphans no more.
The tired, the poor, the high and low—
we are all watching.
I see you, America. We see you.

Two Poems by Nick Demske


“An idea’s value depreciates the moment/you drive it off the lot,” proclaims Nick Demske in the one untitled poem in his self-titled collection from Fence Books, anticipating critics who might carp that his furious, punning, scatological, exploded sonnets are as overstuffed with pop-culture ephemera as the trash can outside Mickey D’s. How long before we need footnotes to understand a line like “Peppermint/Schnapps complements uninsured Hummers like an over/Eager metrosexual”? Will civilization survive that long? (Assuming it isn’t already dead.)

Eleven years after America indulged in a month-long exegesis of certain presidential ballots, many of us will reach back into the mental file marked “old news” and come up empty. Remember pregnant chads? The V-chip? David Schwimmer? The end of history? Ah, those were the days.

Ecdysiast, now: a word that conceals (with its prissy erudition) as much as the act it describes, reveals. A similar double-mindedness is at work in Nick Demske’s poetry. Cheap goods and commercialized words join with sacrosanct ones in a passionate melee. Could be an orgy, could be a fistfight. Sometimes all I see is a cloud of dust, as in the cartoons. But worth watching anyhow.

PREGNANT CHAD

Vote yes on this ballot and get a free
Abortion when you purchase any additional abortion of equal or lesser
Of two evils. Honk if you’re saving yourself for marriage. Hear ye
Sinners; he clave the rock and the waters

Menstruated forth like a head wound—no, a
Boil on Job’s ass! Vote yes if you’re not chicken.
Bu bawk bawk bawwwk. This poem paid for by the
People that brought you natural selection,

Epidurals and baby bibs
With Noah’s ark graphics stitched on. Vote yes and choose to give
A child Life. Vote yes for
Promotional use only, vote yes sir, right away sir,

Vote yes if you love me, vote yes, vote yes, vote yes
Yes, yes, no please don’t stop I was so close.

****

ECDYSIAST POETRY

“the answer to all those rhetorical questions”
-Nick Demske

for Sara Thornton

A finger contours the serrations. A hand with all its digits
Intact caresses these stumps with a wash rag. This is
All my fault. I never should have let this happen.
So liberated we voluntarily bind our librations

Inside this cage; its dimension lines a high art form, throbbing out our rhythm.
She sways like the bangs of a willow. With her bamboo manicure.
With your skin shell hide husk rind etc. But I’ll never die because I am
A god. You, on the other hand, are

Female. It’s so cold the snow looks like diamonds. If we’re
So frickin’ beautiful, we’ll shove our lily hands into the contents
Of this diaper here and mould them to a song. We’ll burrow deeper
Into all our thickly caked integuments, just to dim our radiance’s violent,

Seismic vox. Undistorted majesty demands
It’s own grotesqueness. It’s so cold the coal looks like diamonds.

Book Notes: Stacey Waite, “the lake has no saint”


I’ve been a fan of Stacey Waite’s poetry since I read hir chapbook love poem to androgyny (Main Street Rag, 2007). That collection was both more accessible and more aggressive than hir new work, the lake has no saint, winner of the Tupelo Press Snowbound Series Chapbook Competition. Repeated images of old houses, vines, and being underwater give this book the blurry, yearning atmosphere of a recurring dream, where one searches for the lost or never-known phrase that would make sense of a cloud of memories. Even as Waite offers compelling glimpses of discovering a masculine self within a body born female, womanhood exerts its tidal pull through domestic scenes with a female lover who seems perpetually on the verge of vanishing. S/he kindly shares this sample poem with us.

when an imposition of meaning

naming. kindergarten. i do not like salt water, the class gerbil or writing on the blackboard. i do not like the girls’ line and the boys’ line. i do not like swallowing my gum. i will not tell anyone my middle name. the teacher tells the whole class my middle name.

“it’s ann,” they scream, “we know it’s ann.”

don’t count on it–was what my father used to say to mean no. the trees never mean it. they spit up fire. they sometimes think they can make stars. no one is there to deny them.