July 2016 | poetry
Jimmy was a dreamer, a handsome James Dean kind of guy.
Jimmy decided at 17 he was in love, so he eloped with his child bride
and kept it a secret until nobody would question her age.
He loved his bride and she loved him. They had a baby
daughter who was a dreamer too.
Jimmy had tiny flecks of gold in his eyes that looked like the sun
had burned right through them. Sometimes he wore a patch.
Jimmy loved to dream but he loved his child bride and daughter
more than any dreamer would think possible.
When Jimmy was 20 he was drafted in the Korean War.
He didn’t like war so he pretended he was blind in one eye
and when that didn’t work he bought a sunlamp and stared
into the light for 29 minutes a day
Jimmy was never really blind in either eye but his dreams
began to be slightly blurred.
When the army said he could still see well enough to kill
a man, Jimmy went off to war.
Years went by and he sent love letters home to his child bride
and daughter who were both growing up, alone.
Some of the letters spoke of the things he missed most
from back home. All of the letters had a pencil sketch
of wild horses running through a field.
When Jimmy returned from Korea he was different. He stayed
out all night and played cards. He drank a lot of whiskey
because his dreams were more like nightmares.
He went to strip-clubs and bars parading around with prostitutes
or cheap whores according to his child bride.
He started talking about the men in his platoon.
He wore a fedora with a long duck feather wedged beneath
the black satin ribbon.
Jimmy loved Winston cigarettes.
Sometimes Jimmy drew horses but they weren’t running free
anymore. They looked sickly, their heads hung down, their tails
never flowing in the wind.
Jimmy’s mother was concerned. She asked the doctor
to straighten Jimmy out. She ordered electric shock therapy
to get rid of his nightmares.
Jimmy told his daughter he was being followed. He said people
slipped things in his drinks. He said he chewed bubblegum
to get rid of the taste.
He started hallucinating. His dreams were not dreams anymore.
Jimmy couldn’t tell the difference between his child bride
and a cheap whore.
He acted funny, told his daughter not to look at his eyes.
Not to stare at the sun and never trust anyone, especially
other men with fedoras who started hanging around after
hours leaving ashes on the steps.
Jimmy liked to smoke but those ashes weren’t his. Jimmy
feared for his life and his family’s lives too.
He began to lock the doors feeling paranoid.
He wrote crazy stories in a secret black binder.
One night, Jimmy took an overdose of sleeping pills
His daughter found him with his eyes closed.
Jimmy didn’t need a patch anymore.
When they buried Jimmy they draped his coffin
with an American flag. His daughter kept it with his drawings
of horses, the ones with their tails whipping through the wind.
Years later someone told the family that Jimmy was in a special troop.
That the government had given him LSD in something they called
* ‘Operation Midnight Climax.’
Jimmy had been part of an experiment that went terribly wrong.
Jimmy had been playing Black Jack at a safe-house
set up by the CIA.
Jimmy died an unsung hero. But his daughter never doubted
his dreams were real, even when they became more like nightmares
than dreams.
Some days she turns on the sunlamp for 29 minutes and lets
the warmth surround her face. She wears a patch on both
eyes to protect her from the light or anything else she doesn’t want to see
She says Jimmy’s dreams are still alive in her. She runs
her fingers over his pencil sketches and reads herself to sleep
with the crazy stories he wrote in the secret black binder.
She dreams of horses and unsung heroes and all things that sound
too impossible to be true.
On his birthday every year she takes out the folded American flag
and drapes it over her bed. She puts on his feathered fedora
and smokes a Winston cigarette then chews one piece of bubblegum.
Jimmy would have liked that.
by Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas is a seven-time Pushcart nominee and four-time Best of the Net nominee. She has authored several chapbooks along with her latest full-length collection of poems:Hasty Notes in No Particular Order newly released from Aldrich Press. She is the 2012 winner of the Red Ochre Press Chapbook competition for her manuscript Before I Go to Sleep and according to family lore she is a direct descendant of Robert Louis Stevenson. www.clgrellaspoetry.com
July 2016 | poetry
To My Son, Home from College
You’re home complaining how crowded
our house feels with the new baby,
question the noise, her crying.
These rooms used to be yours.
Then you speak of going to live with your dad.
The dad who wanted to show you the alternatives.
I always asked him, alternatives to what?
I walk down Sixth Street alone,
big black umbrella carried in front,
tears falling faster than the rain.
I could come home and sit with you,
but what could I say?
I love to see you;
that could be enough.
Though you ask nothing about me.
You belong to your father now;
your little finger lifts off the cup
the way his does.
You rub your face hard on both cheeks,
rub your chin several times
when you feel something important.
Like how you can’t stand it here any more.
You laugh, when you really laugh,
with his guttural growls.
Offer up unexpected belches and animal sounds
while other people just talk.
He pours you a whiskey.
Knowing your history and his,
I wonder what else.
I don’t need to know the rest.
What I know is that
he’s showing the other choices
that may change you as they did him.
Six Maple Trees
lined the edge of the farm
we called Ye Dascomb Aerie.
We could not reach into the first two.
They limbed up too high.
We climbed the last one
near the raspberry patch.
The one with the rope swing Cecil made.
That strong limb just above our heads
made for us to swing up on,
into branches high above the ground.
We carved our initials there, the taller cousins
toward the top, the shorter ones
near the bottom. I loved cutting
into the bark with my green Girl Scout knife.
It made the tree ours.
Cousin Alan and I would climb as high as
we could, then Alan went
higher. We could talk up there
about Fats Domino and Elvis.
When we were alone, Jerry Lee Lewis.
He married his thirteen- year- old cousin.
The maple branches strong
enough to hold twelve cousins each summer.
Fat green leaves in summer, red in fall,
they held our secrets, then dropped
them without ceremony to the ground.
Everyone who visited had to pass
the test of our maple tree. Could they
climb it and how high? Could they
hang upside down from the high
branch, then jump all the way down?
Ending War
The Liberian women made a last stand in the market.
They took off their clothes and stood before the guerrillas.
The young men stepped back. The war was over.
In a time when sexual assault prevails
as often as we hear of young boys killing villages
of men and women in Syria, in Afghanistan, in parts
of Africa, some policemen on American streets,
what will end mindless cruelty and revenge?
Will taking off our clothes work more than once?
We are your sisters, sons, your daughters not yet born,
your mothers and grandmothers.
We stand in the place where you find comfort.
You kill yourselves.
by Donna Emerson
Some of Donna Emerson’s publications include Alembic, CQ (California Quarterly), CALYX, The Chaffin, Dos Passos Review, Eclipse, Edison Literary Review, Fourth River, Fox Cry Review, The Griffin, The Los Angeles Review, LUX, New Ohio Review, Paterson Literary Review, Passager, Persimmon Tree, Praxis: Gender & Cultural Critiques (formerly Phoebe), Quiddity, Sanskrit, Slipstream, Soundings East, So To Speak, The South Carolina Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Spillway, Stone Canoe, and Weber—The Contemporary West. Donna’s work has received numerous prizes and awards including honorable mention in the 2015 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, nominations for the Pushcart Prize (2013), and Best of the Net (2012). Her second chapbook, Body Rhymes (2009), nominated for a California Book Award, and third and fourth chapbooks, Wild Mercy (2011) and Following Hay (2013), have been published by Finishing Line Press. Donna’s work can also be seen in anthologies such as Echoes (2012), Keeping Time: 150 Years of Journal Writing (Passager Press), Chopin with Cherries, A Tribute in Verse (Moonrise Press), Music In The Air (Outrider Press), and The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed (Sixteen Rivers).
July 2016 | poetry
Vegetation
After Neruda
To unnumbered nameless lands
wind dived down from other dominions,
trailing celestial threads of rain;
and the god of the impregnated altars
restored the lives and the flowers.
In the fecundity, time grew vast.
The jacaranda uplifted its spume
of transmarine splendors.
The araucaria with its bristling lances
was pure magnitude against the snow,
the primordial mahogany tree
distilled blood from its crowning cup,
and to the south of the larch pines,
the thunder tree, the red tree,
the spiny tree, the mother tree,
the vermillion ceiba, the gum tree,
were earthly volume and sound,
were terrestrial entities.
A new aroma was propagated,
passing through the earth’s
interstices, converting its breath
to smoke and fragrance:
wild tobacco lifted
its rosebush of imaginary air.
Like a spear tipped
with fire, corn appeared, and its stature
was threshed and grew anew,
disseminating its flour; the dead
were held beneath its roots,
and then, from its cradle, it witnessed
the emergence of the vegetal gods.
Wrinkle and extension, the seed
of the wind was dispersed
over the feathers of the cordillera,
dense radiance of germinal stalks,
sightless dawn suckled
by the earthly unguents
of relentless rain-drenched latitudes,
of enshrouded fountainous nights,
of whispering cisterns of morning.
And even so, over the llanos,
like planetary plates,
beneath a fresh pueblo of stars,
the ombu tree, lord of the grasslands, detained
the susurrous flight of the open air
and mounted the pampa, subduing it
with its bridle of reins and roots.
Arboreal America,
savage bush between the oceans,
from pole to pole you balanced
your verdant treasure, your lushness.
Night germinated
in cities of sacred seedpods,
in sonorous timbers,
extensive leafage that covered
the germinal stone, the early births.
Green uterus, seminal American
savannah, overladen bodega,
a branch was born, like an island,
a leaf took the shape of the sword,
a flower was lightning storm and tentacled medusa,
a cluster rounded off its outline,
a root dropped into the tenebrous depth.
The Rivers Approach
I:
Lover of rivers, lover attacked
by turquoise water, transparent droplets—
it’s like a tree of veins, your specter
of a somber goddess who bites apples,
only then to wake up naked;
you were tattooed by the rivers,
and in the soaked heights your head
filled the world with fresh drops of dew.
You shook the water in your belt.
You were shaped of springs
and lakes glittered in your brow.
From your maternal thickness you gathered
the liquid like vital tears,
and you scratched the riverbeds of sand
all across the planetary night,
traversing rough and dilated rocks
on the path, breaking apart
the entire geology of salt,
cutting down forests of compact walls,
parting the muscles of quartz.
II: Orinoco
Orinoco, let me be on your shores
that hourless hour,
let me go naked, as then,
and enter your baptismal darkness.
Orinoco of scarlet water,
let me plunge my hands so they may return
to your maternity, to your course,
river of races, homeland of roots,
your broad burbling sound, your savage lamina
comes from where I come, from the poor
and haughty solitude, from a secret
like a stream of blood, from a silent
mother of clay.
III: Amazon
Amazon,
capital of aquatic syllables,
patriarchal progenitor, you’re
the secret eternity
of fecundation;
like birds, rivers rush to you, covered
by conflagration-colored pistils,
the great felled trunks fill you with pueblos of perfume,
the moon can neither watch nor measure you.
You’re charged with green sperm
like a nuptial tree, you’re silvered
in savage springtime;
you’re reddened by timbers,
blue between the moons of the stones,
wrapped in ferruginous vapor,
slow as the passage of a planet.
IV: Tequendama
Tequendama, do you remember
your lone passage, unwitnessed
along the heights, your thread
of solitudes, slender willfulness,
celestial line, arrow of platinum;
do you remember, step by step,
opening walls of gold
to the point of tumbling from the sky into
the terrifying theater of empty stone?
V: Bío Bío
But speak to me, Bío Bío,
yours are the words that slide off
my tongue, where you extended
your language, your nocturnal song
mingled with the rain and the foliage.
You, without whom no one would notice a child,
sang to me of the dawning
of the earth, the power
of your peaceful reign, the hatchet buried
with a quiver of shattered arrows,
all that the leaves of the cinnamon laurel
have been telling you for a thousand years;
then I saw you give yourself to the sea
dividing into mouths and breasts,
broad and florid, murmuring
a history the color of blood.
Some Beasts
After Neruda
It was the twilight of the iguana.
From its iridescent crest
its tongue like a dart
plunged into the vegetation;
the monastic anteater treaded
through the jungle on melodious feet.
The guanaco, thin as oxygen
in the wide brown heights,
went walking in his golden boots,
while the llama widened its innocent
eyes on the delicacy
of the dew-pebbled world.
The monkeys were braiding
an unendingly erotic thread
along the high banks of the dawn,
pulling down walls of pollen
and startling the violet flight
of the butterflies of Muzo.
It was the night of the alligators,
the pure and swarming night
of snouts jutting out of the slime,
and from the somnolent swamps,
an opaque clamor of scale armor
returning to its terrestrial origin.
The jaguar touches the leaves
with its phosphorescent absence;
the puma running in the branches
like a predatory fire, while burning
in him are the alcoholic
eyes of the jungle.
Badgers scratch the feet
of the river, sniff out the nest
whose palpitating delight
they’ll attack with scarlet teeth.
And in the depths of the great water,
like the encircling ring of the earth,
lies the gigantic anaconda
covered with ceremonial clay-paint,
devouring and religious.
by Stephen Massimilla
Stephen Massimilla is a poet, critic, professor, and painter. His newest (co-authored) book, Cooking with the Muse, is just out from Tupelo Press. His recent book, The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat, was a selection of the Stephen F. Austin University Press Prize contest. He has also received the Bordighera Poetry Prize for Forty Floors from Yesterday (CUNY); the Grolier Prize for Later on Aiaia; a Van Rensselaer Award, selected by Kenneth Koch; an Academy of American Poets Prize; and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. His volume Almost a Second Thought was runner-up for the Salmon Run National Poetry Book Award, selected by X.J. Kennedy. Massimilla has recent work in AGNI, American Literary Review, Barrow Street, Bellingham Review, Chelsea, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Fiction Fix, Harpur Palate, The Literary Review, Marlboro Review, Paterson Literary Review, Poet Lore, Posit, Provincetown Arts, RHINO Poetry, The Southern Poetry Review, Tampa Review, and many other journals and anthologies. He holds an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University and teaches literary modernism, among other subjects, at Columbia University and the New School.
