She Was Lactating And Crying To Big Band Jazz The Last Time I Saw Her Sweet Face (by Paul Tristram)

She Was Lactating And Crying To Big Band Jazz
The Last Time I Saw Her Sweet Face

She would be sat just there
by the early evening window
of the downstairs front room
each day as I returned
to my lodging house
deep in the French Quarter.
I had never actually spoken to her
but I had heard the Landlady
call her ‘Mary’ as she gossiped
with visiting strangers
about her bad luck and problems.
That was 14 years ago this Fall
and she haunts my evenings still.
I remember the rhythm
of her melancholy
climb up the stairs
and slide under the door of my room
just like late night swamp mist.
I wondered long about her then
and I wonder long about her now
as she watched that dirty street
holding her fatherless child
close to her young tear-wet breasts.

© 2014 by Paul Tristram, used with permission

Paul Tristram is a Welsh writer who has poems, short stories, sketches and photography published in many publications around the world.  He yearns to tattoo porcelain bridesmaids instead of digging empty graves for innocence at midnight.  This too may pass, yet.

a bone to pick with time (by Chansonette Buck)

on barton felch, poppa ray facing us

a bone to pick with time
for poppa ray

sitting out back
in the sun
near my magenta
mini-field of phlox
i look up to see
copulating dragonflies
careen through air
to ricochet off foliage —
drunk, directionless,
on their dizzy way
to lose themselves
in dogwood
blossoms

4/18/14

author’s bio

chansonette buck had the great good fortune to be inducted into the obermayr family at three years of age. she grew up among would-be-famous (many of whom achieved that fame) writers, artists, and musicians, and suffered the consequences of being a child erased by those ambitions. in the course of her life after childhood, she has accomplished many things, not the least of which is surviving. other than surviving, she earned a PhD in English at UC Berkeley, wrote a (still unpublished) memoir “Unnecessary Turns: Growing Up Beat” about that childhood, has had her work published in a variety of venues (and been nominated twice for a Pushcart) and has had the very great privilege and pleasure of performing from those works in berkeley, cleveland, and manhattan. ray obermayr, to whom this poem is dedicated, is her heart’s poppa, and her idea of an artist/poet through whom light moves, effortlessly. she knows herself blessed beyond measure to have been his “daughter.” he passed from this world on her birthday, 4/22/2014.

A Whispered Tale (by Siegfried Sassoon)

A Whispered Tale
by Siegfried Sassoon
[from The Old Huntsman and Other Poems, 1918]

 I’d heard fool-heroes brag of where they’d been,
With stories of the glories that they’d seen.
But you, good simple soldier, seasoned well
In woods and posts and crater-lines of hell,
Who dodge remembered ‘crumps’ with wry grimace,
Endured experience in your queer, kind face,
Fatigues and vigils haunting nerve-strained eyes,
And both your brothers killed to make you wise;
You had no babbling phrases; what you said
Was like a message from the maimed and dead.
But memory brought the voice I knew, whose note
Was muted when they shot you in the throat;
And still you whisper of the war, and find
Sour jokes for all those horrors left behind.

*

Putting a Finger on It (by Merritt Waldon)

 

Putting a Finger on It

Putting a finger on the
moment’s reality.
Lukewarm skin, twisting
turbulence beneath
the ancient death mask
armor.
Streets outside sporadically
hum with traffic.
Dragons never sleep.
They are always hungry
always merciless
in their rule.
Visceral swells of a
tortured machine
puttering away at a
more meaningful motion.
Through every doorway
imposters await
a further
quieting of songs.
The momentum changes.
The sacred strangled
by the moans of steelgirders
& glass & tons of
sculpted metal.
The finger now being
used to nervously
light another cigaret.
Too distant a stare
into the future bog
of hours. 



Merritt Waldon is 38, has been writing since he could write. He says it’s the only thing that makes sense to him most of the time.  He lives in Austin, Indiana.

Sausalito (by Paul Corman-Roberts)

Paul Corman-Roberts

Sausalito

Here
liquid runs uphill
4 AM always a festival
of incandescent light enough

to recite poems
from the cold black water
of Richardson Bay
to blackened art galleries
and distant seafood grottos

Here
you can’t throw a hissy
without hitting a musician
a writer
an artist
or one of their installations. 

Funny
how the smell of money
draws the perpetual
abstract hustle of the mind.

And it colors in so nicely
and lights up so vivid
and everyone owns a business
or is a contractor
and no one has a job
and everyone knows their place
and it’s all good.

Because your next meal is pre-destined.
the roof over your head pre-ordained
and there won’t be any other jobs
and there won’t be openings in residency
any time soon.

Thanks for coming
to buy us out of our
artisan crafts and
our custom gourmet foods. 

Thanks for admiring
our festive decorations.

Now please be on your way;
you can’t spend the night here.

[“Sausalito” originally appeared in issue 6 of Out of Our magazine in 2011.]

Paul Corman-Roberts is co-founder of the Beast Crawl Literary Festival
in Oakland, California.  He is a compulsive organizer and writer of
frequently subversive words.  His out of print collections of poems and
flash are 19th Street Station from Full of Crow Chapbooks, 2011; Neocom(muter) from Tainted Coffee, 2009; and Coming WorldGone World (The Abomunauts Are Coming to Piss on Your Lawn) from Howling Dog Press, 2006.

Aborted Meditation (by Merritt Waldon)

 

Aborted Meditation

Towering truths and various misfortunes crawl like worms.
No mouths really. Just holes, like vacuums.
Concrete breeds with nature.
Nature becomes a solidified scab being picked
& opened– giving birth to the darkest
theories.

 

Merritt Waldon is
38, has been writing since he could write. He says it’s the only thing
that makes sense to him most of the time.  He lives in Austin, Indiana.

Could live — did live (by Emily Dickinson)

Emily Dickinson 

[1859]

Could live — did live —
Could die — did die —
Could smile opon the whole
Through faith in one he met not —
To introduce his soul —

Could go from scene familiar
To an untraversed spot —
Could contemplate the journey
With unpuzzled heart —

Such trust had one among us,
Among us not today —
We who saw the launching
Never sailed the Bay!

*