Skip to main content

Poem Draft

Image
By
Revere at 92 Degrees

Cops swirl the rotary like feral cats or cock-
roaches while in the beachhouse bathroom

someone is fucking someone or having it out
with their violent bowels at 10:30 AM.

If I were a horse I’d be split-hoofed but sedate,
a little out of my field lathered with ocean

spume the dirt of a thousand filled diapers
abandoned to sand or caught in kelp

washed up from Nahant or the Back Bay
or fuck--the Azores? England?

On the road opposite the beach cops stop
a latino kid on a skateboard (I don’t know

why it takes three cars) and send him off
in a different direction. My kids are yank-

ing at my shorts so we hit the beach sand
and broken bottles with the occasional

needle or nip bottle. It’s a grand public
place America’s first public beach.

A horse cop trots along the beach but
the horse leaves a sodden dump in

front of kids who have nothing to
do but play with it while their dark-

skinned mothers scream in three different
tongues to stop. The horse doesn’t seem to care.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Karl Koweski

By
retaliation it was two weeks after you returned from rehab, dad I found the first vodka bottle, a Smirnoff pint, stashed beneath the driver's seat of your Ford. I propped the empty on the dashboard like a bobble-head. I didn't tell you this then, but... going into my room and leaving my dog-eared copies of Penthouse on my pillow next to the Vaseline... that was a pretty good comeback. Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Day now living in a valley in rural Alabama. His latest collection of poetry from Roadside Press "Abandoned By All Things" is out now.
Post a Comment
Read more

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

By
                                               from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disa...
3 comments
Read more

Charles Rammelkamp

By
Doped with Religion, Sex and TV “Working class hero, my foot,” Darleen spat. “Pampered British rock star’s more like it. He don’t know nothin’ about no working class,” she sneered, “and that Jap witch he married. She’s probly the one who put them ideas in his head.” Darleen and I worked on the assembly line at the Capitol Records plant, putting fresh-pressed LPs into sleeves, the packaged albums into cardboard boxes, the boxes onto pallets for the forklift guy to take them away to the loading dock. “I used to like some of them early songs. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ but you can have this stuff. Working class hero! Who does he think he’s kidding?” I stuffed my impulse to defend Lennon, point out his poverty in postwar Liverpool, the broken family, the absent sailor father; mainly offended by Doreen’s naked racism, pitying her for the misogyny she’d absorbed from generations of farmers on the prairie. I was a college student, working part...
1 comment
Read more