Cross Talk
CrossTalk
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Several pieces on pith… are published in a book of poems by joesmith. Really. Click the button and buy it if you like. Thank you.
Nativity Scene
There are no camels in this combo crèche, formed in Singapore, assembled in Malaysia. The pieces, each in its place, dominate the living room, diverting our path to where we cleanse and empty and keep my store-bought teeth, neither sneer nor smile in their snap-tight cup. The lone cow’s head is broken, decapitated last season, [...]
He never knows
anyone famous or important enough to land him a job or sufficiently elegant to bequeath him some grace, the names of his favorite quivering trees, the distance from earth to moon or sun to earth, where he last put his keys or where he would go if he could, how many ounces in a pound [...]
Holiday on the Farm
The soap opera organ announces what we can hardly bear to hear. A metal-aproned matron summons the skin ribbon she left on the seat of a Galaxy 500, circa 1969. Her tremolo is a casual torture. We mistake her voice for a choir of a thousand muffled mothers and wobble dutifully in to an Easter [...]
Zeno Whole
I save the spaces. No, I’m no bent surveyor with a three-legged stare bent on destiny, unsettled by innominate expanses, undone by an absence of fences, parsing the plenty. We know how that was manifest. I’ve never been enamoured of wrought geometries and plaid is a bad parody of place. I save only the spaces: [...]
Tagged poetryBirthday
When the planets turned ready in slow-time abeyance for a rendition of lives to clash, maybe Cherokee man or colonial long hunter, maybe English renegade, or would-be farmer plunging his hands in black dirt to tease out a weed’s root system, or maybe highland warrior who puts his tired head to his suffering wife’s breast [...]
Tagged Jenny Benjamin-Smith, poetryDARKER AMERICANA
Strip malls give way to strip clubs One hundred fifty miles grind Alongside mammoth motor homes The land is changing She is more voluptuous Her sins secreted While in dusty towns Proud old resentments Bolted to bricks shout “Get us out of the United Nations!” Greasy truck-stop trading posts Stand between bands of green Separating [...]
Tagged Kathleen Eull, poetryWaukesha Tattoo
Here in the town of the common and the good, only the flashes reach us. There’s no thunder rumble, no sound to savor, no low music to score the out-of-favor soul. No, first it’s the din, carried air away east, then the bright, the flight of sand as light, breaking in waves on main street [...]
Tagged joesmith, poetrySonnet
Alert as the light that changes color with the weather atop the building some mistake as electric, we’re mingling our blood and juices without the dolor that ought accompany a great big age of disease. We are lovely here and welcome the change we bring to each brown room. In the phone booth, we tear [...]
Tagged poetryUtility
When I’m done, love, when the impalpable me has made his sullen exit, scrape clean the meat from my bones. String it in ribbons in the back yard trees. Wait for morning rain and hear the glorified pigeons attempt to sing. Summon then the odiferous ones, the shunned ones, the old utilarians who speak to [...]
NORMAL PEOPLE DRINK WARM MILK
Tonight smells like April Awake and coming hard against March spaces— Forward insistence falling Upon those wakeful and reaching, Touching the way to intersect Before and Not Yet; Navigating unseen language Barefoot, yes! Normal people stand in slippers To drink a glass of warm milk— Eat their days in tiny slices. – Kathleen Eull
Tagged Kathleen Eullde trop
Half-full of someone like a mother or her lover unbuttoned in dad’s traveling robe, turned around in an instant, to the strained grace of pointed cameras. A kleptomaniac of attention, eyes pinched in to lit aluminum, hoarding the latest loss of memory in a cipher nation of nervous oblivion, entertaining what remains of the children. [...]
Revolution Speeds Evolution
While listening to BBC news coverage of Iran on the radio this morning, the words “Revolution speeds evolution” came to my head. At the time, the words fit the current Iran situation very well and time will tell whether there is a revolution, a new election, or crushed hopes and lives. Since it rang in [...]
Tagged aphorisms, copyright, Iran, wordsThe Magician
I can divine these brambles. Or these gnarled flowers at my feet. They obscure my heels as I float on yellow horizons. Tip the diagonal of my arms into the numbers of years set down like dust. I can, you see, lead you somewhere, over rock and highland green. I can conjure stone from earth [...]
Tagged poetry10 Thinking Man’s Books to Read During an Economic Slump
Recently, New York Times reporter Motoko Rich wrote an article about how during a recession, what people want is a happy book, with a happy ending. Incidentally, book sales have soared in the romance novel genre, and, as the masses know, the vampire love story genre. Mass-market paperbacks fly off the shelves of your Walgreens, [...]
Texas Traded to Venezuela
In a bold sign of thawing relations between the countries, Presidents Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez announced today that the state of Texas would be traded to Venezuela for Jesus Moronta, a slick-fielding, hard-hitting 14-yr-old shortstop phenomenon, cash considerations and an undisclosed amount of raw, premium coca.
The Mondays Separate
The lavender aroma of her apartment lends itself to musty carpet and stale cigarette smoke to the eventual car exhaust and bad food smells as she follows me out, heavy glass swinging shut behind her to the morning orchestra of traffic. Her short stature belies her Miss America gait. She is a scarved, lithe stack [...]
The Extinction of Gods
It seems there is a shortage of gods in the universe today. Here on earth, if you mention the name Baal, Njord, Horus or even Krishna, people will look at you like your nuts, or like you’re alluding to someone out of a fairly tale. These gods, now considered to be blatant myths, are basically [...]