Poetry Month 2012: Raymond P. Hammond - Snowfall

Raymond P. Hammond is a poet and critic who, originally from Virginia, now resides in Brooklyn and works at the Statue of Liberty NM as a law enforcement officer half of the week and as editor-in-chief of The New York Quarterly the other half. He holds an MA from New York University where most of his classes were intense studies of poetics with William Packard at the Chelsea Gallery Diner over a hamburger.

The following poem Snowfall was previously published in LIPS #34/35.



SNOWFALL

I love how the snow slightly

salts on shoulders, in hair

of the darkly draped women

whose sole earlier accent

of color was powder blue

pink, red, green, fuchsia scarves, hats

a contrast of dark to light

daguerreotype to color

old, young, ancient to modern

a colorized timelessness

of vision that I can pass

through and get chillingly wet




*Note – Photo of Raymond P. Hammond by Amanda J. Bradley.

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Poetry Month 2012: Heather Haley - HANS

The Siren of Howe Sound, trailblazing poet, author, musician and media artist Heather Haley pushes boundaries by creatively integrating disciplines, genres and media. Her writing has been published in numerous journals and anthologies including the Antigonish Review, Geist, the Spoken Word Workbook and the Verse Map of Vancouver. Haley was an editor and reviewer for the LA Weekly and publisher of the Edgewise Cafe, one of Canada’s first electronic literary magazines. She is the author of collections, Sideways (Anvil Press) and Three Blocks West of Wonderland (Exstasis Editions), described as, “Fierce, racy, full of stiletto irony, verve-yet rife with sensitivity.” Haley has directed five video-poems, including Dying for the Pleasure and Purple Lipstick, official selections at dozens of international film festivals. A renowned performer, she has produced and toured two critically acclaimed AURAL Heather CDs of spoken word songs, Princess Nut and Surfing Season.

For more information, visit Heather at http://heatherhaley.com/.

HANS

Under the bridge a blanket rests,
Knave rising, tapping to a bush beat.
Static fussy, hearing reproach in birdsong,
Flak in the bending willows

He may see through concrete
But do not call him clairvoyant or infrared.
Merely tenacious, tenacious is he,
Tenacious as the wild life

Lured
From the ribbon of road
To flail
Against the vortex of personality.

All furious downhill from here.
Bloodstream
Engulfing triumph
One drop at a time.

I paid the toll.
Where is my protection? Favor.
Boat. Deliverance. Red tulip.
Simmer you, still. Still no loosening

Of your grip around our lovely, long Jane Doe necks.
Confinement has not freed
Nor contemplation illumined.
Are we not macerated into mash,

Pulp enough for paper? Fiction. Fusion
Of forms so 21st century, so now,
So damned imperative.
We aren’t about to quit abeyance, balking,

Irrupting or being pricks. Hiding, stalking, preying
upon squirts. Being obsolete. Polysyllable.
Anemic. Let it leak. Glow. Gush around your finger
in the hole. All the time in the world.

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Poetry Month 2012: Rob Rolfe - Tecumseh

Rob Rolfe was born in London, Ontario. He was a trade union leader and librarian in Toronto for many years. Rob has published two books of poetry, Saugeen (Quattro Books, 2011) and The Hawk (Quattro Books, 2008), and two poetry chapbooks with LyricalMyrical press. His poems have appeared in The Fiddlehead, Grain, Windsor Review, Our Times and many other Canadian publications. Rob was featured in The Toronto Quarterly’s – Toronto Poets 5 Questions Series last December.

The following poem is from his book, The Hawk.


Tecumseh

you are on a train
from toronto crossing
a bridge at night
over the thames river
from your seat you
look out at the passing
silhouettes of farms
or the lost record
of your own footprints
from decades before
you’re halfway there
between river and stars
dreaming of tecumseh
the train forges on
you think you know
where you are but
in your half sleep you
are a fox a crow or
think you are seeing
tecumseh in the forest
and the real blood
of the battleground

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Poetry Month 2012: Desi Di Nardo - Mayflies

Desi Di Nardo's work has been published in Canadian and international journals and anthologies, performed at the National Arts Centre, featured on Toronto's transit system, and displayed in the Official Residences of Canada. She has worked as a writer-in-residence, literacy facilitator, and English professor. Desi is the author of The Plural of Some Things, (Guernica Editions, 2008).

For more information, visit Desi at: http://www.desidinardo.com/

The following poem "Mayflies" is from her book, The Cure Is a Forest (Guernica Editions, 2011).

Mayflies

The soft-spoken take nectar with their tongues

We spread out idly in swards of wild grass

Confide secrets without moving our lips

The silence carries jauntily over waves

Surges on morning light and laughter

Our eyes wetted and bleary still

Sway from sunbirds to seabirds

A pale thistledown of plumes

Cascades as astral mayflies

We glance up with wonder

Lock our hands and capture

Their steady drift and cling

Lambent over mere water

Here only for an afternoon

*Note - Photo of Desi Di Nardo taken by Rick O'Brien.




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Poetry Month 2012: Asa Boxer - An Old Skulldugger's Testament

Asa Boxer’s poetry and articles have been published in Poetry London, Arc, Books In Canada, Maisonneuve, and Canadian Notes & Queries. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal Editions, 2007), and, most recently, Skullduggery (Signal, 2011). He is a past winner of the CBC/enRoute poetry competition and The Mechanical Bird won the Canadian Authors Association Prize. He is the son of poet Avi Boxer, who was active in the Montreal writing scene through the 1950s and 60s. He resides in Montreal, Quebec.

An Old Skulldugger’s Testament

When you’re done, you’ll have my heart
in a jar; for now, take my sixth finger
as deposit. Come, let’s make a saint of me.

Shrink my head, grind my bones
for fetish dust; break me up into a bric a brac
of conversation pieces. Pass me round.

Some say there is an extra gland
that cheaters and liars grow,
but either I lack the sense to smell it,

or I’m like one who having eaten
of the garlic, has lost his nose to it.
Others say they’d first be clipped

before becoming a hermit and a miser.
But, no sir—I will not be herded;
I will not give up my prairie-oysters.

Don’t roll your eyes. Consider
my bottomless fondness
for all creatures that cannot harm me;

consider that to keep my whole self
before you at every exchange
would be an act of penance

and no way at all to wangle a gain.
In my defence, I was nursed upon
the milk of fairy-tales; I was bred

upon gossamer philosophies.
Pursuing happiness, I rubbed up
against the limits of my heart,

and found the walls slide
and felt the moral ground give.
For what you choose to trust

is circumstantial. Wicked finds
wickedness wherever he seeks.
And love is baffled by her own cruelty.






 
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Poetry Month 2012: Dina Ripsman Eylon - There Are Days

Dina Ripsman Eylon is an author and publisher, and has a Ph.D. in Post-biblical Hebrew Language and Literature from the University of Toronto. For the past fifteen years, she has served as the publisher and editor-in-chief of Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal. She is also the founder of the Vaughan Poets' Circle. Her chapbook Songs of Love and Misgivings was published in September 2006, and in 2007, she edited a collection of poems entitled Waging Change: Vaughan Poets Engage in Politics. In 2010, Sisterhood Press published Dina’s second chapbook In the Heart of the City. In 2011, Dina published two poetry collections: One in Hebrew, entitled On the Horizon in the First Person (Tel-Aviv: Eked) and the other is entitled, The Heart of the City and Other Urban Poems (Toronto: Sisterhood Press).

There Are Days

There are days when summer’s heat
scorches a burning heart.

There are days –
Feet aflame, throb, incapable to keep on striding,
limp on sharp edges. Far is the day when they
would climb to the inconceivable summit.

There are days –
The brain wonders how rapidly leaves wilt.
Mad moments dissolve into eternal lunacy.
Sharp pains envelope in generations’ boredom.

There are days –
Hungry for legacy, she wants to rest amid notorious
tombs, put her head down, and forget how the ship 
of days sail swiftly with barrels of fumbled memories.

There are days –
Desperate desire for change ceases, as people
dear to her are unable to hold on to each other
in this chamber of pitch-darkness.





 
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Poetry Month 2012: Kirk Ramdath - babel death star

Kirk Ramdath is a Trinidad-born Calgary poet and author of Love in a Handful of Dust, published in 2011 by Frontenac House. Kirk also organizes poetry and music events in Calgary and is editor of Wax Poetry Magazine. Read it for free at http://kirkramdath.ca/wax/

Here is a short overview of Love in a Handful of Dust:

When Kirk Ramdath was a child, his mother came from Trinidad to Calgary to give her family a life of greater opportunity than the one she left behind. Love in a Handful of Dust, his first book, is in many ways the fulfillment of that opportunity. Though in its romance, it might seem to be far away from the conservative values of the world he came from, in its extended riffs on sex, politics, faith, on ecstasy – not the drug, but the feeling surging up from an excess of the sensual, the emotional, the poetic, it is, in many ways, a thank-you love poem to his mother, and a man’s understanding of the meaning of the women in his life.



babel death star

god deciphered the binary code for infinity and vanished
leaving us to quarrel
in this paradise of flesh and death
leaving us to shoot bullets into the sky

chalk outlines
formulas upon a blackboard
instantaneous death
in a series of equations

peel back the skin of the earth
the soft parts are eaten
by time and worms
nothing remains but bones

bridges of imagination
last longer than bridges of stone
but even they will crumble
and be washed out to sea

elsewhere, herds of caribou flee
crows scatter with plans to return
but one day they will do as the buffalo have done
they will flee the earth
as breath flees the body
until not even bones remain

Poetry Month 2012: Robin Richardson - Citing Dimensions of Mad and Mundane Counsel

Robin Richardson is 26-years-old and recently launched her debut collection of poetry Grunt of the Minotaur (Insomniac Press, 2011). She is a Toronto native pursuing her MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College in New York City. Her work has appeared in many Canadian and international literary journals including Cv2, The Puritan, The Toronto Quarterly, Filling Station, The Cortland Review, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Misunderstandings Magazine, All Rights Reserved, Dandelion, and The Literary Review of Canada. She is the recipient of the Joan T Baldwin Award for writing and visual art and, with the generosity of the Ontario Arts Council, is currently working on her second collection of poems, Nervosa.

For more information, visit Robin at her website.

The following poem is from, Grunt of the Minotaur.


CITING DIMENSIONS OF MAD AND MUNDANE COUNSEL

Little is known of the Middle Ages,
though rococo chairs have long been
the common man’s failing memory.

With clauses apt to tongue-tie,
takes the walnut-panelled locks
from faces, torches

carried over textbook spines,
courtier or crooked brass basket
wove too tight to clasp the finger.

Or likewise fight the obligation
of an arm offered up in buttermilk
abduction. This is how duty implores,

intimated by the watch, tyranny
of tin and magnet, gentle in a kind
of ennui. Without the boastful

noble enemy of high official rank,
there’s only task: talk to her, cook
the dining room drabble to a gold,

good-humoured wrap of conversation.
Afternoon is plain. Ten pages make
the brisk walk from Wagner’s minor

chords to the low sliding grunt
of the Minotaur.

Poetry Month 2012: Rafael F. I. Alvarado - Faith Needs A Better Salesman

Rafael F.I. Alvarado was born in Hollywood in 1965, and has been writing poetry since he was ten. His granduncle Luis Cardoza Y Aragon was a famous Guatemalan poet who knew people like Pablo Neruda and called them ‘friend.’ Rafael wishes every day to write as well as his granduncle. His grandmother Laura Cardoza Muller was also a published poet, and a big influence in his writing. He is the cofounder of The World Wide Radio Network where he hosts The Moe Green Discussion. He has interviewed numerous poets such as Robert Pinsky, Andre Dubus III, and Sonia Sanchez. He is also the cofounder of The Hollywood Institute of Poetics with SA Griffin, and promotes and hosts many readings in Los Angeles. Many of Rafeal’s poetry influences, such as Nikki Giovanni, have performed at Beyond Baroque when he has asked them to perform their work. He works as a publicist and promoter of all things poetry.


Faith Needs A Better Salesman 


the first time
I heard bout death
was when Father Kelly died
I think I was in 3rd grade
not sure
when I was young
the sister nuns
told me God
took care
of the ones that love him

when Father Kelly died
no one told me how
I thought in my head
he must have pissed God off

years of nuns
telling me
that good things
come to those who pray

my Granduncle Rafa
is the only holy man I believe in
I was named after him
it saddens me where I have taken his name

I met him when I was 4
again when I was 11
in Guatemala
he loved the church
& God, he believed
faith
is a hard thing to hold
it is easily lost

I lost mine
every time I took a punch
every time
I knelt before God
and prayed
made me think
maybe
I'm not a good person
or I don’t love God enough
because Johnny Walker Black & Red
were what lessened the beatings
not God

I use to love the bible
but Catholic school beat God out of me

one of my exes was raped by a priest
when I met her she was still broken
yet still she loved God

another ex raped and beaten

my ex was gentle
was kind
and it pisses me off
that good people get hurt

I blame God

sometimes when faith creeps in
I ask God not to forgive me
because I don’t want it

I need to forgive me
I need to let go
of every punch
every broken girl I couldn’t save

it’s funny being angry
at something you really don’t believe in

Poetry Month 2012: Dr. Melissa F. Alvarado - Grief Tours

Dr. Melissa F. Alvarado is a narrative poet from Nebraska, now living in Los Angeles, who recently performed with the legendary Wanda Coleman and Laurel Ann Bogen. She is a Nebraska Center for Writers author with work published in journals including The Midwest Quarterly, Chum, The Toronto Quarterly, Plains Song Review, as well as Looking Past (Goldfish Press), and Times of Sorrow, Times of Grace (Blackwaters Press). Her first break occurred when she received the honor for best work from the Poet Laureate of Nebraska, William Kloefkorn. She holds baccalaureate degrees from the University of Nebraska in both English and Biology, and a Ph.D. in Pharmacy from Creighton University, a private, Jesuit college in Nebraska. Melissa’s forthcoming chapbook It Wasn’t Like In the Movies is a work dedicated to her late niece, Dakota Cierra Christina Moler, who lost her life at the young age of 14 to drowning while heroically trying to save the life of another child.


Grief Tours

             (For Susan H.)

Grief tours
are when
it’s more wrong
to get out of bed
at all,
but more right
to decline
bouquets of flowers

We might bundle them
with a string
hang them
upside down,
and watch them
dry away,
dry all away
until
we have so much

Poetry Month 2012: Daniel Scott Tysdal - for Albert “Slim” Redstone’s visit to Body Worlds in Taipei, Taiwan

Daniel Scott Tysdal is the author of two books of poetry, The Mourners Book of Albums (Tightrope 2010) and Predicting The Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method (Coteau 2006). Predicting received the ReLit Award for Poetry (2007) and the Anne Szumigalski Poetry Award (2006). His work has appeared in a number of literary journals and anthologies, and has earned him honourable mention at the National Magazine Awards (2003) and the Matrix Lit Pop Award (2010). He currently teaches creative writing and English literature at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

Excerpt from: Thereminist Sing the Body Plastic

for Albert “Slim” Redstone’s visit to Body Worlds in Taipei, Taiwan

                                                                Oh my Body!
                                                                        —Walt Whitman

1. The exhibit is alien enough for a thereminist. And Slim
would welcome that otherworldly trill, one of those
ghost-voiced scores from films with titles like The Day
the Earth Stood Still, Mars Attacks! That would make sense.
Aliens doing this: turning a tarred lung plastic, making
a skinned man’s hide plastic for him to offer in his plastic
muscled grasp, making plastic

                                             the dead. Slim waits for them
to show, these aliens, emerging tentacled or bipedal
with moon-shaped skulls to fuse plastic with his skin, flayed, say,
after they torture him. “Admit we’ve saved you,” they’d demand
before preserving each of his wounds, his flesh peeled back
into thousands of tiny mouths sticking their tiny tongues out

at decay. He reaches for the cheek of a plastinated boy
when no one but the boy is looking, and he wonders if
the aliens are right there, genuinely synthetic beneath
his touch, feeding on the boy’s decomposing decomposition,
an alien, like a parasite, perceptible only where it mangles its home.






 

Poetry Month 2012: Kateri Lanthier - Small Hours

Kateri Lanthier was born in Toronto and has lived in St. Catharines, Sudbury and Kingston. She has a BA and MA in English from the University of Toronto. After working as an editor in educational publishing, she became a freelance writer for magazines, television, and the web, specializing in design, architecture, decorative arts and fine art. Her poetry has been published in literary journals and magazines in Canada, the United States, and England, including Descant, Grain, Matrix, The Antigonish Review, Acta Victoriana, The U.C. Review, The Greenfield Review, Saturday Night, Quarry, The Toronto Quarterly, Writing Women and London Magazine. Her first collection of poetry, Reporting from Night, was published by Iguana Books in December 2011. She lives in Toronto’s Beach neighborhood with her husband and three children.

Small Hours

I am Orpheus to my own Eurydice.
Look back and disappear.

Or, at 4 am, think of nothing
but Hour of the Wolf,

of Max von Sydow's sorrow-face,
the drowned boy's shoulder.

Nightingale, rooster, lark, owl.
Night hawks, morning folk.

The security guard nursing
the bouncer and the pilot.

Red-eyes weeping
for the hair of the dog.

My Baby Was Sick All Night
blues. A Delta classic.

I'll sing my scratches
on a--what's it?--telephone.

This heavy black hand-cranked
wallflower that toes the party line.

I do your birthmark inventory
just in case, just in the nick.

All sleep is a catnap.

I will never graduate from
The School of Late Clocks.

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Poetry Month 2012: Stephen Brockwell - Molly’s Irish Pub, Toulouse Street, New Orleans

Stephen Brockwell runs the small business http://www.brockwellit.com/company/. He spent the first half of his life in Montreal, and the second half in Ottawa. Where he will spend the third half is uncertain. His poetry collections include The Wire in Fences (Balmuir Book Publishing), The Cometology, and Fruitfly Geographic (which won the Archibald Lampman Award), The Real Made Up (ECW Press), and Excerpts from Impossible Books, The Crawdad Cantos  (above/ground press).

The following poem is from Cantos of the 1%


Molly’s Irish Pub, Toulouse Street, New Orleans

You know when the young, solo bartender
pulls a sweater over her t-shirt in 80 degree
afternoon heat that the two fellas at the bar,
deprived of a handful of teeth, are too

depraved for yet another plastic cup of liquor,
Their eyes articulate more than their slurs,
Their rope-and-scrap-metal callouses
reach for the cups beyond the cup.

Ply them with car bombs, smile, and pray
they stumble back up the Mississippi
to load another bulbous-bowed Shanghai
vessel with bales of scrap metal harvested

from junkyards beside overgrown fields that once
grew the same weight of cotton plucked by hands
no more black. To think that one of these crackers
loaded the raw material for my iPhone.


*Note - Photo of Stephen Brockwell courtesy of rob mclennan.



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Poetry Month 2012: Mel Sarnese - Birthday Woman

Mel Sarnese is a poet/writer living near Toronto, Ontario. Her work has been anthologized broadly, and broadcast on CBC Radio and TV Ontario. She has been writer-in-residence at the Markham Stouffville hospital 2009-10. Mel facilitates poetry workshops at the Canadian Mental Health Association in Toronto.


Birthday Woman

My day to wear pearls
collect smiles cut a rose
Happy Birthday to me
says you and you and you
with shiny teeth
and sashed blue boxes
from the big shop on Bloor

I look forward
as I take backward steps
so I may think clearly
the black and white snapshots

That's me with my Pa
posing in front of the clothesline
holding me tight as with a pin
Ma was probably behind the window
frying up red peppers and onions

The house always smelled like that
when summer was done
and I knew that I would one day get old

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Poetry Month 2012: Jon Paul Fiorentino - SUMMARY: EXCITABLE SPEECH AND PERFORMATIVITY

Jon Paul Fiorentino's first novel is Stripmalling which was shortlisted for the 2009 Hugh MacLennan Award for Fiction. His most recent book of poetry is Indexical Elegies which recently won the 2010 CBC Book Club Award for Best Book of Poetry. He is the author of the poetry books The Theory of the Loser Class which was shortlisted for the 2006 A.M. Klein Award for Poetry and Hello Serotonin and the humour book Asthmatica. He is the editor of 20 books including Blues and Bliss: the selected poems of George Elliott Clarke, Career Suicide: contemporary literary humour, Post-Prairie – a collaborative effort with Robert Kroetsch, (Talonbooks, 2005). He lives in Montreal where he is a professor of creative writing at Concordia University, and the Editor of Matrix Magazine and Snare Books.

The following schematic poem is called:

SUMMARY: EXCITABLE SPEECH AND PERFORMATIVITY

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Poetry Month 2012: Penn Kemp - Naturalized, the Dream Spreads into my Back Yard

London, Ontario activist poet, performer and playwright Penn Kemp has received the Queen Elizabeth 11 Diamond Jubilee medal for service to the arts. As the inaugural Poet Laureate for the City of London (2010-12), she initiated and judged Poetry in Motion both years and performed in many civic functions. She was Canada Council Writer-in-Residence for Western for 2009-10. Since her first book was published by Coach House Press in 1972, she has been pushing textual and aural boundaries, often in participatory performance work.

For more information, visit http://mytown.ca/pennletters/ . Penn hosts an eclectic literary show, Gathering Voices, archived on http://chrwradio.com/talk/gatheringvoices/.

Naturalized, the Dream Spreads into my Back Yard

It is raining. I have fallen asleep listening
to a downpour on my vinyl greenhouse roof.

I have fallen asleep listening to laments by
Natalie Goldberg. Nat, she will call herself

when chiding or coaching or encouraging
more writing. Other gnats have emerged

from hibernation or larvae to buzz around
my face, agitated by the oncoming storm.

Or are these midges? Fungus gnats all
winter have harboured among my too well

watered plants, breeding, eating the sweet
succulence and now gathered to fly, to die.

The pressure before a storm weighs down
upon my head, flattening the scalp, wedging
weird, worried premonition into febrile brain.

Lightning flickers and the computer growls,
regurgitates. It will go on backup if struck,

I hope. Thunder grumbles back, wobbling
the window frame but still safely far off so

such a squall will not shake free more drama
of stirring boughs and pelting rain. For as I

sleep, Natalie softly advises writers to rein in
their wild mind though it might rear and buck.

All night long I listen to her Thunder & Lightning
tape. Now in morning sun, I plant snapdragons,
flowers to preside over our lawn with stately nods.

Dimensions cross over like clear water colour,
merging disparate realities to reclaim and refract

the Light. Like calls to like across the springing air
when all articulation seems not just possible but essential.



*Note – Photo of Penn Kemp taken by Charles Earl.





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Poetry Month 2012: derek beaulieu - a visual poem

derek beaulieu is the author of five books of poetry (most recently the visual poem suite, silence), three volumes of conceptual fiction (most recently the short fiction collection, How to Write) and over 150 chapbooks. beaulieu is the youngest writer in Canada to have his papers collected in extensio by Simon Fraser University’s Contemporary Literature Collection. Publisher of the acclaimed smallpresses housepress (1997–2004) and no press (2005–present), and former editor of filling Station, dANDelion, endNote, Speechless and The Minute Review, beaulieu has spoken and written on poetics nationally and internationally. He has just been named the visual poetry editor at UBUWeb. His first volume of criticism, Seen of the Crime, was published by Snare Books in 2011. beaulieu teaches at the University of Calgary, Alberta College of Art and Mount Royal University. In 2012, Bookthug is publishing his critical edition (co-edited with Gregory Betts) of bill bissett’s RUSH: what fuckan theory and in 2013 Wilfrid Laurier University Press is publishing The Selected Fiction of John Riddell (co-edited with Lori Emerson). 2013 also brings Wilfrid Laurier UP’s No more poetry, please: the selection poetry of derek beaulieu as edited by Kit Dobson.

The following is a visual poem (untitled) by derek beaulieu.

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Poetry Month 2012: Catherine Owen - Happy Valentine's Day river & you too of course

Catherine Owen is a Vancouver poet, the author of nine collections, the latter two of which are Frenzy (Anvil Press 2009, Winner of the AB Book Award) and Seeing Lessons (Wolsak & Wynn 2010). In 2012, Catalysts, a compilation of essays and memoirs will be released. This poem is from a manuscript in progress on the Fraser & grief called The River Sequence.

For more information, visit Catherine at her website.

Happy Valentine’s Day river & you too of course

Happy Valentine’s Day river & you too of course who brought me eggs in bed

This morning –somewhat dry but well-meant – and him – in absentia – who

2 years ago wrote in a card – To a new life – before dying – his words etched

Ironic on my flesh – love always, again – what does this mean – to have such feelings

Cancelled & yet continue on in other forms – you so different – in age, physique, desires

To him – though kin with sweetness I suppose – which is what matters – and the capacity to

Endure, adore, despite – as I used to write to him – despite everything, thanks for – would the river

Write this letter –I think not – it doesn’t need to forgive or be forgiven, to proclaim allegiance

With a ring, blooms, bonbons or the like – yes it is our fault it has oil in it

& nails, yes it is beautiful at dawn – there is so much they cannot see of what was both

Gorgeousness & dark – who has enough love in them not to judge – the strange salt

In its floods, its mysterious tidal reaches.

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Poetry Month 2012: Jéanpaul Ferro - Arrete! C'est ici L'Empire de la Mort

Jéanpaul Ferro is an 8-time Pushcart Prize nominee. His work has appeared on National Public Radio, Contemporary American Voices, Columbia Review, Emerson Review, Connecticut Review, Portland Monthly, Arts & Understanding Magazine, The Providence Journal, Saltsburg Review, Hawaii Review, Danforth Review, and others. He is the author of All The Good Promises (Plowman Press, 1994), Becoming X (BlazeVox Books, 2008), You Know Too Much About Flying Saucers (Thumbscrew Press, 2009), Hemispheres (Maverick Duck Press, 2009), Essendo Morti - Being Dead (Goldfish Press, 2009), nominated for the 2010 Griffin Prize in Poetry; and Jazz (Honest Publishing, 2011), nominated for both the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize and the 2012 Griffin Prize in Poetry. He is represented by the Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency.

For more information, visit Jéanpaul's website or email him at jeanpaulferro@netzero.net

Arrete! C'est ici L'Empire de la Mort

On that cold October day we escaped the Paris rain
by going down the spiral staircase of seventy-seven steps,
fifty feet below into the graffiti filled Catacombs, into the
supernatural,

deeper and deeper we ran through the revolution of years,
black pools of underground rain collecting on the ceiling,
like years of rain that was suppose to quench and protect us,

you kept smiling, nervously laughing, your hand pulling at
your v-neck shirt, trying to cover over your breasts from the cold,
running and running through the years until we reached the painted
pillars, a doorway between them, where this sign stops you in your
tracks:

Stop! Here is the Empire of the Dead—

Into the room of the dead we rushed, russet and brown stained bones
piled atop each other as walls: arm and leg bones, ribs and shoulders,
men and women, the rich and the poor and the young and the old,

fast death /slow death,

the apple size eyes of their skulls staring out at us as we stood there
together, intricate patterns that are meticulously placed in both dignity
and symmetry, six million dead below the streets of Paris, France
(beating on anyway),

and you held my hand tight and leaned into me; and you whispered
in my ear right then: “I wish I were dead sometimes, too!” you said;
and I knew what you meant, but I was afraid to admit it in fear of
egging you on.



 
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