July 2019 | poetry
The Truth About Eternity
The happily ever after is the return to the disenchanted life. —Ruth Daniell
Check the refrigerator door,
the photos of your son at six, at ten,
graduating from high school,
gone, lost to the skirr of time,
of your wife before the pain set in—
the hikes, the ski trips, vacations
to lands with grapes and siestas,
yourself fifty pounds ago holding
a little boy on your lap, your arm
around a gorgeous woman with hair
the color of a midnight fairytale,
of Fred and Toots in Michigan standing
in front of the largest birch tree you’d
ever seen, cut down by Fred shortly
before time’s timber felled him and Toots,
of Dave Fick, your wife’s sailing instructor,
whose swim trunks slid south exposing sailors’
crack when he launched his boat from your dock,
and whose ashes now mix with sand and soot
in the depths of Walloon Lake,
of Art and Cee Culman, multimillionaires who spent
a summer laying tile in their kitchen only to realize
that what they’d learned was useless since they’d never
use those skills again before they died—and they didn’t—
of Bill Mackinen who taught you that no politician had
the right to define a “family” as a man, a woman, and
their children only—Bill who died watching the Tigers
route the Braves on his hospital TV, and
today, photos of Chuck Kinder, the best writing teacher
you ever had who, in the midst of criticizing a boring story
you’d written, fell into a raucous coughing spasm and,
once recovered, proclaimed, “that’s what happens
when you smoke seven joints in a row.”
Your refrigerator door gives the lie
to eternity—the door from whose surface
someone, someday, will remove your photos,
put them into a shoebox, and store them
on some disenchanted shelf.
The Truth About Conspiracies
What about those nitwits that won’t vaccinate
their kids against measles—the same screwballs
who criticize climate change deniers because
they denigrate science? Didn’t god invent jail cells
for parents who refuse to vaccinate their children?
What do you think happens when an
antivaccine ninny gets wheeled into
an emergency room gasping for breath
and holding her chest? Does she shout,
“Don’t touch me with that EKG!” Or,
“Keep that oxygen away from me!” Or,
“Don’t you dare take my blood!” No,
once in the ER, she becomes a big booster
of medical science. Just as there are no
atheists in foxholes, there aren’t many
antivaccine nutters in cardiac care units.
What about extended warranties?
A company has so little confidence
in its product that it sells you a warrantee
on top of the warrantee that already
comes with the oven, iron, refrigerator,
or the most shameful appliance of all—
the electric can opener. Isn’t a sign
of adulthood, of entrance into what Lacan
called the “Symbolic Order,” the ability
to operate a manual can opener? Doesn’t
that old-timey can opener allow us to assume
our place in Western Civilization? The truth
(and this poem is about the truth) is that
the company knows these gismos will last for years.
They play on our insecurity and incompetence: sell us
warrantees that make us pay twice as much for the widget
than it’s worth. Thank you P.T. Barnum!
Speaking of what lasts—every day I put cat poop
in the plastic bag my newspaper comes in
and it will stay in that plastic bag as long
as the plastic bag exists, which is forever.
Think of that—the only proof we have of eternity—
a plastic bag full of cat poop! Wait, there’s more—
I shave with the Gillette razor my father bought
in the thirties and used all through World War II.
Stainless steel doesn’t rust! The Gillette company
realized in the sixties that, if they kept making
this quality product, something that never needs
to be replaced, they’d go broke. So they turned to
the plastic disposables they make today that occupy
our landfills and compete for space in our oceans.
What about expiration dates? I get it with mayonnaise.
When green spores or brown splotches spoil its virginal
perfection, it’s time for the garbage bin. No problem there, but
everyone knows that salsa and Tobasco sauce never go bad.
They’re too hot to go bad, like my wife whose body may
be gnarled in places and is often wracked with pain,
but her essence, her bedrock goodness, her passionate
kindness and understanding will outlast any date etched
on a tombstone or printed on a death notice.
The Truth About Obituaries
The one time you absolutely must read
the obituary column and you can’t
because you’re dead! You will never read
what the amorphous “They” wrote about you.
And no fair writing your own obit. That’s cheating.
Talk about a conflict of interest!
The point of reading your obituary
is to see what others thought about you.
After all, as Sartre said in rebuke to Heidegger:
My death is not only not my ownmost possibility,
it isn’t my possibility at all. I’ll be dead!
No, my death, wrote Sartre, is some other
poor sod’s possibility (I’m paraphrasing here).
Someone other than me will discover my body—
maybe my sweet wife as she struggles to
find warmth in our bed only to discover
the cold hulk that was me; or some overworked
cop, called after a neighbor saw too many
newspapers bunched on my front porch;
or some luckless EMT who has to pry
my broken body out of twisted metal.
Will that final scribe highlight my kindness,
my fortitude in resisting the government as
a conscientious objector during Viet Nam?
Or will she focus on my disgust with academia
and the ever-dwindling psychoanalytic mirage;
my disappointments about growing up
in Cheyenne, Wyoming—a dusty, backward,
one-horse town that might as well have been
in the deep South—with an alcoholic father
and a mother who chose an alcoholic man?
Will she emphasize how ill-tempered I am
after my daily walk? How crabby I get
before dinner? Will she find some scandal
I’d forgotten or didn’t even know about?
As I rethink this now, it will be good
to be dead when my obit appears.
I’m with Sartre’s—let the other
deal with my demise.
Charlie Brice
Charlie Brice is the author of Flashcuts Out of Chaos (2016), Mnemosyne’s Hand (2018), and An Accident of Blood (2019), all from WordTech Editions. His poetry has been nominated for the Best of Net anthology and twice for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Main Street Rag, Chiron Review, Permafrost, The Paterson Literary Review, and elsewhere.
July 2019 | poetry
The opposite of anything is the thing itself— Say, a face or a body.
Say, lilacs blooming from within the barrel of a gun.
As it pertains to the living, say then: each day is a crash course in survival.
Say, under extreme conditions,
a mother may kill and / or abandon her young.
As such, say it possible at every baptism, we arrive as low-hanging fruit.
That we are as strange & as meek as thy neighbor. Say, especially, this means
what we can’t say otherwise: say— of guilt & love, only the smallest
child can explain the difference …
Say, then, you believe the sun burns as extremely as it hungers. That violence figures
as a mercy which yields great returns on a body.
Say then: I am worthy.
Say, this time, I will be more than the slow infinity of my name in God’s mouth.
That should night come, I will be given
proper burial. At the very least— say: one day,
a perfect animal will make a house from my bones.
Susan L. Leary
Susan L. Leary’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in such places as Posit Journal, The Christian Century, Heavy Feather Review, Arcturus (Chicago Review of Books), and Into the Void. She is both a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, and her chapbook, This Girl, Your Disciple, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in August 2019. She teaches English Composition at the University of Miami (FL). Find her at www.susanlleary.com.
July 2019 | poetry
1.
Oh, bigot cry morning,
but it is too late to change, poor children,
for their words only echo what you have taught.
2.
Reluctant one, coarse and grate,
go mend your ditches and drink your harvest,
it is your prejudice that disturb the heart’s contentment.
3.
Together with two dark boys on foot under a sharp Chicago sky,
they wander in and out of consciousness (but warrant no response),
only to be ridiculed from behind the closed window.
4.
Struck down by conversations teeming with acronyms.
Our weak ears forced to listen to the difficulties,
by which you happily donate to the schoolyard, beat by beat.
5.
A childhood robbed of its pleasures, deprived of running and playing,
merely arguable by the fate of our daily bread.
I heard the sound of your voice, casually suggesting accusations.
6.
Befriending a crime is your chosen approach,
for you must take in order to banish the rocks from your path,
while upholding the nothingness, which you consider to be life.
7.
Your hoary head rears, spewing unattractive complaints,
the luckless and weary ones begrudgingly listen.
Deluged and left divided by the reasoning that you project.
8.
You cast your fears outward like a claw, only to intrude upon us.
Laying open your tasks corrects the despair of rejection and dismissal,
but you announce with sincere intention the inferior ones.
9.
We are haunted by your performance, casting its spell,
Presumptuous and volatile and ever the inescapable liar,
attired in the necessary costume to scale a bloody Kansas wall.
10.
Little ones sent to say: You just don’t know how hard it is to have two.
Why you ask of the given aggressiveness—just like a peevish child.
Ah, sing your song, you fool, I will love you tomorrow, I will love you tomorrow.
Kim Kolarich
Kim Kolarich is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her fiction was long-listed for The Fish International Short Story Prize, and a finalist for the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. Her stories have appeared in the Bridport Prize Anthology, FreeFall, Julien’s Journal, 3711 Atlantic, 34th Parallel, Karamu, Rollick Magazine, After Hours, The Gap Tooth Madness, Streetwrite, Intrinsick Magazine, Paragraph Planet, The Furious Gazelle, Two Hawks Quarterly, and Third Coast Magazine
July 2019 | poetry
Japan’s Revenge
Like a flotilla revenging World War Two
an army of Japanese KonMari acolytes
are assaulting the cluttered disorder
rampant in our consumer laden homes
Mari Kondo, their high Netflix priestess,
advocates testing possessions for sparks of joy
and if there are no sparks
they’re off to Goodwill
For many, Mari Kondo is the antidote
to an out of control modern life
and by following the KonMari method
your home becomes a sanctuary of order
Yet like a time-consuming sponge
order nurtures conventional thinking
and studies show randomness
can spark creative ideas
This repackaged Shintoism
would have castrated the creativity
of Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein,
and Steve Jobs who loved their messy desks
Somewhere on my desk are studies
linking messiness to creativity
but with so many paper piles
I am not sure where they are
Barbie Turns 60
Barbie you razor thin blonde
who mutilated so many body images
who worshipped consumption
of sports cars, fashions and dream houses
who dallied on and off
with Ken but never married
Of course, it’s easy to understand
the lack of long-term attraction
between the model “it” couple
Very photogenic, but missing
some major private parts
Now Barbie you have to realize
your frozen good looks
can’t last forever and
it’s time to face the reality
of hitting the big six o
and let some wrinkles show
and consider a plastic butt tuck
Soon Mattel will have to replace
your suburban dream house
with Barbie’s Assisted Living
No dream kitchen
just communal dining
No spacious rooms
just one room and
God Forbid a roommate
So, Barbie your lack of eros
may not have stimulated Ken
but capitalism will honor you
as the queen of consumption
who stimulated the economy
Barbie is a registered trademark of Mattel Inc.
Sam Love
Sam Love lives in New Bern, N.C. which is as good a place as any to observe the drama that currently passes for Western Civilization. He has published and produced enough material in mass circulation media including Washingtonian and Smithsonian magazines that he has earned the right to be a footnote. After years of work with visual images and linear print he turned to poetry so people can make the movie in their head. His poems have been published in Kakalak, Slippery Elm, Voices on the Wind, The Lyricist, Flying South, Sleet and other publications. Eno published by Duke University has published six of his environmental poems and four of his poems have been featured on Poetry in Plain Sight posters throughout North Carolina. His latest poetry book, Cogitation, is available from Unsolicited Press. His illustrated children’s book My Little Plastic Bag is available in Spanish and English and has won numerous awards including a Nautilus Award. He is currently president of the New Bern local Poetry Group that organizes a monthly open mike.
July 2019 | poetry
Two Indian waiters in snug tuxedos
sit on steps a few doors down from
their deserted restaurant—I just passed it—
sharing a smoke and quiet talk, talk that could
be about the coming end of their run there,
about what other jobs might appear, about
whom they should call or visit:
a strategy session.
Yet so spare and emphatic is their conversation,
its silences inhabited by blue clouds of smoke,
that between their middle-aged declarations
of determination they each may be feeling
an unsparing circle closing in; feeling the
dread approach of the night they fear most:
the night they take their tuxedos off and
never have cause to put them back on—
no more trips to the dry cleaners, no more
updating the bow tie; instead, back to wearing
the loose, patterned shirtsleeves of cab drivers
pulling 12-hour shifts spelled only when parked
to eat curry out of plastic containers from the Bengali deli;
hours logged making drop-offs at trendy, Pan-Asian restaurants
whose young, stylishly dressed doormen—the age of
their own sons?—come right to the cab to open then—
after the fares step out—turn away while
slamming the door.
Mark Belair
Mark Belair’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Alabama Literary Review, Atlanta Review, The Cincinnati Review, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry East and The South Carolina Review. His latest collection is Watching Ourselves (Unsolicited Press, 2017). Previous collections include Breathing Room (Aldrich Press, 2015); Night Watch (Finishing Line Press, 2013); While We’re Waiting (Aldrich Press, 2013); and Walk With Me (Parallel Press of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, 2012). He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize multiple times. Please visit www.markbelair.com
