Skip to main content

Drew Pisarra

Image
By
Erbium

For lack of anything better to do
at 4:30 a.m., I decided to
break out the Ouija board to see if we
might reconnect so that you could tell me
where I’d flamed out for from the looks of things,
life’s burned to ash. Is it common to cling
to a past that did not last? I would ring
you up if you were still alive. You’re not.
You know that better than I. What we’ve got
are A through Z above zero through nine,
the words yes and no, plus the phrase good-bye.
So… Are you game? Shall we give it a try?
Calling Keith, I mean Ken, or was it Carl?
I forgot your name whoever you are.

Drew Pisarra is currently at work on a series of sonnets inspired by the Periodic Table of Elements, a project funded in part by the Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation. His first book of poems, Infinity Standing Up, was released in 2019 by Capturing Fire Press.

Labels:

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