An Elegy for One Living and Dead (by John Thomas Allen)

 

 

An Elegy for One Living and Dead

(Dedicated to Prisoner Number : : : 🙂  

 

“And Cain rose up and slew his brother”

 

      — Genesis  4:8

 

 
“Go to your room and cry you little bitch.”

 

I unzip today’s breakfast.

Brine boils in a bowl’s

 

glass cranium

 

penciled kitsch rose.

 

 
Steam raisin,

 

brown sugar

 

slime my palette.

 

 
Hot mush sizzles all the wrong areas.

 

 
I think of you

 

 
and all ways a woman’s womb

 

squirms, milks, kicks

 

 
nursing a shadow.

 

 
Swallowing I wonder

 

 
does

 

 
a neuron steroid,

 

an angry ganglia spool

 

down my throat?

 

 
Rolling my eyes back

 

 
I slide inward looking for

 

pieces.

 

 
Eye sea with my little I.

 

 
Standard issue,

 

for the most parts:

 

your capillaries snap

 

bloody knuckles

 

 
a Fifth of Jack Daniels’ Parade.

 

 
(No month was ever necessary.)

 

 
The heart was its sad slab beating

 

a manic urge to stop

 

to still

 

 
beneath a dove’s green breast

 

 
Mary?

 

 
or some other calm virgin.

 

 
To lie quiet with truisms

 

surrounded by a few

 

modest headstones.

 

 
It passed inspection as it always will

 

till I carve you one all my own.

 

* * *

 

“An Elegy for One Living and Dead” comes from John Thomas Allen’s chapbook

The Other Guy, published in August 2012 by Crisis Chronicles Press.

 

 The Other Guy is 16 pages, lovingly hand assembled, with a saddle stitch white and black card stock binding and cover art by Steven B. Smith. It is available for only $6 from Crisis Chronicles Press, 3344 W. 105th St. #4, Cleveland, Ohio 44111.

John Thomas Allen is a 29 year old poet who lives in New York, for the moment. His work has appeared over 40 journals and he has been known to say that his chief ambition is “to write a real poem one of these days!”

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The feet of people walking home (by Emily Dickinson)

Emily Dickinson

[1858]

The feet of people walking home
With gayer sandals go —
The Crocus — till she rises —
The Vassal of the snow —

The lips at Hallelujah
Long years of practise bore —
Till bye and bye, these Bargemen
Walked singing, on the shore.

Pearls are the Diver’s farthings
Extorted form the sea —
Pinions — the Seraph’s wagon —
Pedestrian once — as we —

Night is the morning’s canvas —
Larceny — Legacy.
Death — but our rapt attention
To immortality.

My figures fail to tell me
How far the village lies
Whose Peasants are the angels —
Whose Cantons dot the skies —

My Classics vail their faces —
My faith that Dark adores —
Which from its solemn abbeys
Such resurrection pours —

Storm Fear (by Robert Frost)

Storm Fear
by Robert Frost
[from A Boy’s Will (1913)]

When the wind works against us in the dark,
And pelts with snow

The lower chamber window on the east,

And whispers with a sort of stifled bark,

The beast,

“Come out! Come out!”–

It costs no inward struggle not to go,

Ah, no!

I count our strength,

Two and a child,

Those of us not asleep subdued to mark

How the cold creeps as the fire dies at length–

How drifts are piled,

Dooryard and road ungraded,

Till even the comforting barn grows far away,

And my heart owns a doubt

Whether ’tis in us to arise with day

And save ourselves unaided.



   

Above It All (by Shelley Chernin)

Shelley Chernin at the Hessler Street Fair, 2012
photo by John Burroughs

Above It All

     Imagine you’re a girl on ten mile stilts…………
                                                  Nicky Mehta

I take great strides
carefully; it’s easy
to trip over
the Rockies or knock
Boeings to the ground.

Nearly stratospheric,
I fill my backpack
with sunblock. Never
visit the ozone layer
without it. I also carry

a red Duncan yo-yo
with an extra-long string
and astronomical
binoculars. Sometimes
it’s hard to find

loved ones without
magnification, even
on a clear day. Once
a man in Callicoon
tried to look

up my skirt, but
I was too high
for his aperture. Long
distance romance
is for the birds.

I watch them pecking
in their family nests,
built on tree tips
far below me. I see
specks on specks.


* * * * *

Shelley Chernin is a freelance writer and ukulele player. Her poems have appeared in Scrivener Creative Review, Rhapsoidia, Durable Goods, Big Bridge, What I Knew Before I Knew: Poems from the Pudding House Salon, the Heights Observer and the 2010 and 2011 Hessler Street Fair Poetry Contest anthologies. She was awarded 2nd Place in the 2011 Hessler Street Fair Poetry Contest, and the Akron Art Museum awarded her Honorable Mentions in their New Words Poetry Contest in 2009 and 2010. She is the author of The Vigil, published by Crisis Chronicles Press in 2012.

“Above It All” won an Honorable Mention in the Akron Art Museum’s New Words Poetry Contest in 2010, and was previously published at the Akron Art Museum’s website.

She slept beneath a tree (by Emily Dickinson)

Emily Dickinson

[1858]

She slept beneath a tree —
Remembered but by me.
I touched her Cradle mute —
She recognized the foot —
Put on her carmine suit
     And see!

Stars (by Robert Frost)

Stars
by Robert Frost
[from A Boy’s Will (1913)]

How countlessly they congregate
     O’er our tumultuous snow,
Which flows in shapes as tall as trees 
     When wintry winds do blow!–

As if with keeness for our fate, 
     Our faltering few steps on
To white rest, and a place of rest 
     Invisible at dawn–

And yet with neither love nor hate, 
     Those stars like some snow-white
Minerva’s snow-white marble eyes 
     Without the gift of sight. 
 

– * –

   

Maggot-pie (by Shelley Chernin)

Shelley Chernin at the Hessler Street Fair, 2012
photo by John Burroughs

Maggot-pie

That dead writer ruined five women
but I’d gladly be sixth
to read another page

and when he touched me
I’d slip into his finger pores
hide there overnight and
jump his keyboard
in the morning

conceiving in the words
he’d decompose.



* * * * *

Shelley Chernin is a freelance writer and ukulele player. Her poems have appeared in Scrivener Creative Review, Rhapsoidia, Durable Goods, Big Bridge, What I Knew Before I Knew: Poems from the Pudding House Salon, the Heights Observer and the 2010 and 2011 Hessler Street Fair Poetry Contest anthologies. She was awarded 2nd Place in the 2011 Hessler Street Fair Poetry Contest, and the Akron Art Museum awarded her Honorable Mentions in their New Words Poetry Contest in 2009 and 2010. She is the author of The Vigil, published by Crisis Chronicles Press in 2012.

“Maggot-pie” originally appeared in Scrivener Creative Review, Issue #28, 2004.

A Late Walk (by Robert Frost)

A Late Walk
by Robert Frost
[from A Boy’s Will (1913)]

When I go up through the mowing field,
     The headless aftermath,
Smooth-laid like thatch with the heavy dew, 
     Half closes the garden path.

And when I come to the garden ground, 
     The whir of sober birds
Up from the tangle of withered weeds 
     Is sadder than any words.

A tree beside the wall stands bare, 
     But a leaf that lingered brown,
Disturbed, I doubt not, by my thought, 
     Comes softly rattling down.

I end not far from my going forth, 
     By picking the faded blue
Of the last remaining aster flower 
     To carry again to you. 

– * –