A Poem From Back a Ways

I don't have much going poem-wise. I'm prepping two books right now, my collection of stories that will be out soonish, and my novel (endlessly), whose ending I'm rewriting and whose polishing will take forever if I let it. It's been two years now since I 'finished' it. I hope it's worth doing.

Anyway, as promised, a poem I've probably linked before, from Girls with Insurance.

How Terror Might Work for John Smith, IT Guy

With the formless voices that bitch in his ear!
Instructions: cap your appearance off with a balaclava.

No one but the people on the mask's other side
will know. True terror does not require identity

revelation; otherwise one might set goals
for vengeance in one's yearly situation report.

This year was very poor for Terror Investors LLC: little
Jimmy from next door escaped our 23-hour-vigil,

lived to ram candy into sister Suzy's cute dark hair;
Mama had to cut it off. George at the office moved

to a corner suite with high-rise view and a leggy
blonde assistant taking dictation on her knees every day

at 12:15 as you stand by the coffeepot that never
works. Your wife and the coffee-brown pool boy

(ye gods, the hits just keep coming), licking batter sensuously
from the paddle of the Kitchen-Aid mixer you bought her

on anniversary ten: the blowjob anniversary, she said.
Somewhere in Pakistan Osama bin Laden aerates

his blood in an expensive machine as the United
States of Indecency sits on its hands. He laughs in his

beard. Homeland Security can't contain the domestic
rage of the auto industry or the corpse-fucking

of the banking industry. It’s time to go home. The baby
too lies like one dead on the sofa, sleeping off her future.

Comments

David Oliver Cranmer

Not Just Another Playlist Often, I sit in my swivel chair looking out the window, while jazz, country, or rock music plays. This pleasure goes on for many hours a mystic trance of sorts streaming—the glue maintaining my soul. I turn the best songs into playlists (once we called them mix tapes) puzzling over the perfect order. Does Satchmo’s “What a Wonderful World” kick off my latest list or make it the big soulful closer? And does “Mack the Knife” go higher in the set than “Summertime?” That’s an Ella Fitzgerald duet! “Foolishness? No, it’s not” whether you are climbing a tree to count all the leaves or tapping to beats. These are the joys that bring inner peace and balance (to a cold universe) lifting spirits skyward. David Oliver Cranmer ’s poems, short stories, articles, and essays have appeared in publications such as Punk Noir Magazine , The Five-Two: Crime Poetry Weekly , Needle: A Magazine of Noir , LitReactor , Macmillan’s Criminal Element , and

Amy Holman

My mother made herself the deer with a broken leg We saw a deer through the pane into someone else’s yard. The leg moved like a tube sock pinned to the hip and half filled with sticks. I did not like to see it suffer, either. She was upset —my mother —that no one helped the doe. Was it a mother, too? As if we were the first to observe the scene. We weren’t. All had been told to let her be. My mother had suffered a destruction of the self, a divorce, and no one cared. That wasn’t true. We were grown, on our own. I agree it was hard. Yet in those moments of a cold November day, we watched a doe, disabled and enduring, walk across a yard and eat a hedge. I wish she could have seen it like that. Amy Holman is the author of the collection, Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window (Somondoco Press, 2010) and four chapbooks, including the prizewinning Wait for Me, I’m Gone (Dream Horse Press, 2005). Recent poems have been in or accepted by Blueline,

Corey Mesler

I think of you tonight, my Beats I think of you tonight, my Beats, and I am grateful. I walked the narrow lanes of Academia and never felt at home. There were men and women in the flowerbeds, their heads full of theorems and poems. There were teachers who could lift their own weight in prose. I was lonely. I was too loose. I was a lad from the faraway country of Smarting. But I had you as so many before me. I had you and I knew secret things. I could count on you like a percussion. And now I want to say: I love you. If not for you, what? I want to say. If Allen Ginsberg did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South . He has published over 25 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain , is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On , which won The Me

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