Skip to main content

M.J. Arcangelini

Lightning Within

inside vast towering clouds
lightning erupts sharp, arcing,
illuminating massive ethereal bulk
as though concealing tesla coils
deep within their wet recesses
the nervous electric flashes
of a mad scientist’s laboratory
in a black and white horror
film flickering out of the 1930s –
we fly west, level with heaven,
as though we were equals -

behind me and far below
my mother is finally in
the ground next to my father
after waiting over 40 years
to have a date carved in stone
she joins him in death at last
having been the devoted,
loyal widow the whole time
mourning him longer
than she ever had him -

outside the airliner window
the lightning doesn’t stop
it keeps cracking the sky
we simply fly past it
racing the sunset west
set from the start to lose

M.J. (Michael Joseph) Arcangelini was born 1952 in western Pennsylvania, grew up there & in Cleveland, Ohio.  He’s resided in northern California since 1979. He began writing poetry at age 11. His work has been published in little magazines, online journals, over a dozen anthologies and four poetry collections: the full length “With Fingers at the Tips of My Words” 2002, from Beautiful Dreamer Press http://www.beautifuldreamerpress.com/; the chapbooks “Room Enough” 2016, and “Waiting for the Wind to Rise” 2018, both from NightBallet Press http://nightballetpress.blogspot.com/; the full length “What the Night Keeps” 2019, from Stubborn Mule Press https://stubbornmulepress.bigcartel.com/. He maintains an occasional blog of prose and poetry at https://joearky.wordpress.com/ He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Kinnell's Book of Nightmares/Under the Maud Moon

Probably everyone knows this poem and this book very well. Kinnell isn't exactly invisible in the poetry world. I loved this poem and this book from the very first time I read it, while I sat on the floor in the old Emerson College at 150 Beacon Street. I've loved kids from a time well before I had any of my own, and I could put myself in this narrator's perspective so easily it was as if I'd suddenly slid from my own life and become a real poet. ;-) I hadn't really read anything that used linebreaks so seemingly haphazard, but powerfully --I got a charge as I read it-- or a voice that seemed so assured of its right to the sentiments expressed. Irony is the rule of the day for many poets, and I don't necessarily cotton to it all the time so Kinnell is a balm for me; I can go back and read BoN and remember how it lit me up the first time and have energy to go back the page with. I'm sort of over his poems now, but the feeling comes back just a little every ti...

PRYING, Jack Micheline, Charles Bukowski, Catfish McDaris, a Review

Roadside Press $18.00 https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/prying/71 Limited Edition of 69 The three poets nesting cheek by jowl in this fetching 2022 reprint of the 1997 Four-Sep Publications chapbook Prying from small press dynamo Michele McDannold's Roadside Press will be familiar to anyone paying attention to even the tiniest of the outlaw poetry scene in the last 50 or so years: Charles Bukowski, Catfish McDaris and Jack Micheline. Bukowski and Micheline need little introduction; their long shadows hover over the outlaw poetry world even now years after their deaths. And the third, the only living poet of the three within, Catfish McDaris, has been building his own small press reputation with considerable success, for nearly as long as the former men. Illustrations are from Scott Aicher. It's most fun to talk about the living McDaris. He appeared and appears so widely it's difficult to keep track and critique, or not, but as his portion of the cover copy says, he doesn...

Ma Yongbo

  Line by line retranslation of Ashbery Waiting makes time democratic, you just said so Then a white horse ran by, repeatedly running back and forth Like a messenger passing straight through various rooms from the front door Out through the back door, I waited like this for twenty-seven years. Initially it was the honey of distortion brewed in the rooms distorted in your convex mirror And that gesture was both an invitation and a refusal Unfolding for me a moment that fluctuated incessantly A crack that exists, the circulation of water in the ocean A ring formed by a self-devouring serpent in motion In between is the void filled with power This mirror of others reflects oneself at the same time Allows all the images of leaves stacked in the depths of the mirror to remain Like a demon in a bottle floating on an infinitely transparent surface Longing for the light of your face, symbolic stones They only stop temporarily in order to focus Forming some kind of meaning, then they are qu...