Cleveland Spiritual (by Dianne Borsenik)

Dianne Borsenik during her award winning performance of “Cleveland Spiritual” in the Best Cleveland Poem Competition held 1 June 2014 at the Willoughby Brewing Company and sponsored by Tim Misny [photo by John Burroughs]

 

Cleveland Spiritual

Are you thirsty?
Well, we have what you’re thirsty for.
Push open the door, pull up a stool,
and order a draught of Cuyahoga River’s
burnished Cleveland Spirit,
distilled right here
in the Best Location in the Nation.

This Cleveland Spirit pumps
through tap-houses of poetry
and museums of history, Playhouse stages
and West Side Market stalls. It swells
through Nighttown jazz and House of Blues,
Severance Hall and Beachland Ballroom,
it floods the rooms of Gordon Square Arts
and Tremont restaurants, it sweeps into
FirstEnergy Stadium and Progressive Field—
everywhere you go, there’s ”Dog Pound”
and “Go Tribe,” Spirit enough
to fill the televisions of grills and pubs
and bars, Spirit enough to fill the seats
and paint this city in brown and orange,
red, white, and navy blue.

This is Cleveland,
come slake your thirst; make yourself at home.
Pour another draught and drink deeply
of the music that inspired, invited
and inveigled the Rock Hall of Fame:

Michael Stanley, Eric Carmen, Tracy Chapman,
Machine Gun Kelly and Bone Thugs N Harmony,
Steve Adler, The Dead Boys, Nine Inch Nails, and
that “Skinny Little Boy from Cleveland, Ohio.”

Quaff that Cleveland Spirit driving the special
personalities who’ve called this city “home”:

Daniel Thompson and his Alley way,
Carnegie and his Avenue,
Daffy Dan and his tee shirts,
Dick Goddard and his wooly bears,
Neil Zurcher and his One-Tank Trips,
Les Roberts and his Milan Jacovich mysteries,
Lanigan and his mornings,
Ghoulardi and his “aaaaaaaaamraaaaaap”,
Hoolihan, Big Chuck and Little John, Barnaby,
Captain Penny and Halle’s Mr. Jingaling.

Down another fine draught of Cleveland Spirit:

Great Lakes Brewing,
Home of the Buzzard,
It’s Live on Five,
See the USA. in Your C. Miller Chevrolet
World-Class Care Close to Home,
Garfield One Two Three Two Three,
I’ll Make Them Pay.

We’re here to intoxicate your senses
and blow down your fences!
Kick back, hook your heels in this city’s rungs,
relax and stay awhile. Hold out your hand
for another round of Cleveland’s finest.

This is Cleveland—my home,
and when you’re here, it belongs to you, too.
This is Cleveland;
come as you are—
but do come thirsty.

 

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“Cleveland Spriritual” by Dianne Borsenik will appear in the book #ThisIsCLE: An Anthology of the 2014 Best Cleveland Poem Competition, to be published in January 2015 by Crisis Chronicles Press.

Dianne Borsenik is active in the Cleveland poetry scene and regional reading circuit. Her work has been widely published in journals and anthologies, including Slipstream, Rosebud, Lilliput Review, The Magnetic Poetry Book of Poetry, and Haiku World: An International Poetry Almanac. Recent books include Corpus Lingua (Poet’s Haven), Fortune Cookie (Kattywompus), and Blue Graffiti (Crisis Chronicles). She is founder of NightBallet Press, and lives in Elyria with husband James and dogsons Bodhisattva and Michael-Angelo. Find her on Facebook, or at www.dianneborsenik.com.

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.

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