August 2003 | back-issues, Kelley Jean White, poetry
Brickhouse Blues
See these men out shooting craps
up against the brickhouse wall,
these men all shooting craps
up against that brickhouse wall,
hear them dice click on the pavement,
see them dollars fall.
Here come this little man
bouncing his basketball,
along come a little man,
bouncing a basketball,
hair all done up in plaits,
don’t hear his Mama call.
See him fanning out his hand,
see eleven-twelve dollar bill,
he be fanning out his hand,
got eleven-twelve dollar bill,
lays ’em on the sidewalk
and that grifter start to shill.
If I had me a dime
I wouldn’t play you wicked game,
no, not even a dime,
I wouldn’t play that wicked game,
I’d hold up my head,
walk right by you all the same.
Woman walk by
she got two big mean-eyed dogs,
woman walking by,
with those two big mean-eyed dogs,
they go snarling at those mens,
all those useless little dogs.
July 2003 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
and it’s not that
i want to see you bleed
it’s that i want to be the one
who makes the wound
do you see how power
differs from action?
do you believe in addictions
other than your own?
we are all
so fucking desperate
July 2003 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
this man who writes
to tell me what
he’s sacrificed for his art
these children
who weren’t even born when
the land mines were planted
their missing limbs and
ruined faces
and small painful deaths
all of the reasons i
hate what i’ve become
July 2003 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
or these animals in
their tiny cages
and the way they go insane
the way money
exchanges hands
twenty bucks he says
as his girlfriend walks into the room
and i think i might know her
i think i may have
been here before
was promised nothing but
came back again
again
learned finally that
hatred was
the only drug i needed
to feel alive
by John Sweet
July 2003 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
and sometimes
they write to talk about
discipline
and sometimes to lecture
about the need for
hope
sometimes
i send them pictures
of nuns hanging raped and
murdered from the trees
of central america
we all need to
believe in something
July 2003 | back-issues, Janet Buck, poetry
I expect we will always argue about
fixed conclusions of a chair —
that image of defeat so raw
it could be hanging, stinking beef
unabated by the wind.
Call it fealty to dreams, to rivers
drying as we speak —
if you guess I’ll yield
to rolling wheels with arioso grace,
you’ve not met my real soul
who thinks that even tortured legs are still
a poem with missions in their syllables.
You will say I have more strength
than monuments of will I know.
You will say that chancre is a cornered bird
in rooms we never knew were there.
And I will say I’m featherless,
a brittle corpse that mourns
the facts of wings erased.
I will see these body parts
as idle, feckless, useless strings.
Health is blind and illness sees
what happens to the fallen leaf.
I won’t be sitting happily
in soft green sarsaparilla grass
salving the going bone —
reading a book clothed
in chamois leather flesh —
liking who I am inside.
Ugly as this honesty may be
to such defensive love,
I will be staring at lightless stars
glued to an onyx sky — reaching
for a .38, if only in a metaphor.
