Skip to main content

Brian Harman

To the Priest Who Stole the Eulogy
I Wrote for My Uncle’s Funeral


Standing, kneeling, sitting on repeat
on a front row pew at a church
in Riverside, California, with welled tears
in my eyes after my heart was gutted
the day before at my uncle's open casket
viewing, I was in shock when I heard
the priest plagiarize to family and friends
in mourning, the eulogy I had written
about my uncle, that I was about to
deliver minutes later, that the church
strangely requested I email to them
earlier that morning, so they could get
an idea of who my uncle was, which
I blasphemously learned the real reason
was so the priest could thieve my words,
my sorrow, my full on sentences as if
it was his own sermon, and when the priest
stammered and ad libbed “Carlos loved
Pepsi… Pepsi is life… ” I couldn't help
but shake my head at the absurdity,
and I looked around and saw my cousin
did the same – yes, my uncle loved Pepsi,
he drank a liter everyday with extra ice
to the very top, yes, Pepsi was a big part
of his life, but I wouldn't go so far as to say
it was life itself, unless I worked for
Pepsi or I was in a Pepsi commercial –
and my family sat sadly bewildered as
the priest made up some other random facts
about my uncle, the only consolation,
I guess it broke the ice of heavy hearts
hanging in the air, but still, what the fuck
happened to the sacred covenant, oh
father of snakes and bullshit, the eighth
commandment, Thou shall not steal,
you holy fucker.


Brian Harman is a poet living in Southern California. He received his MFA in creative writing from Cal State University, Long Beach. His work has been published in Chiron Review, Misfit Magazine, Nerve Cowboy, and elsewhere. He is the author of Suddenly, All Hell Broke Loose!!! (Picture Show Press). He loves craft beer, creating music playlists, and writing poetry into the night.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

                                               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 disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony

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

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