Poetry: Various
Poetry by Raymond Farr, Robert Masterson and John Grey
For the [ ], the Missing, & Excluded
Wherever I am
I am what is missing
—Mark Strand
I am Eddy Spaghetti with the meat ball eyes—
A missing major in Majorca
My reasons are Cubism for not practicing aggression
Many sides falter in tumult but Eddy stays cool!
I swing myself up & back into view
Of my life’s cheap imitation of itself
& putting on a parka I get into a Volvo
A bus pulls away from people still standing at the curb
I was balled up in gauze is all I remember
A totality to interpret was all I was given
The very next day the news people come—
If not gravy boat baby…Then ice ice baby? [A frame
Of 9 seconds is missing a function of leafy green
Vegetables]…Then Chesapeake Bay maybe ?
The weather was nice—I walked among peonies
I stroked the black clouds—I was clipped by a
Volkswagen doing 10 or 17 mph
& stealing the butter, I ate what my captors ate
Such is the Oz I remember from the book—
Boughs & boughs of manic glinting crystal
Decorations—my homecoming was a wonder
I became nostalgic for my handcuffs
Raymond Farr is author of Ecstatic/.of facts (Otoliths 2011), & Writing What For? across the Mourning Sky (Blue & Yellow Dog 2012), a chapbook, Eating the Word NOISE! (White Knuckle Chaps 2015), a full length collection of poems Poetry in the Age of Zero Grav (Blue & Yellow Dog 2015), & an echapbook, A Journey of Haphazard Miles (ALT POETICS 2016). He is editor of Blue & Yellow Dog, which is now archived at http://blueyellowdog.weebly.com & publisher of a new poetry blog The Helios Mss at theheliosmss.blogspot.com
LA MALINCHE!
Starring Tab Hunter as Hernan Cortez
Bobby Darin as Moctezuma
And introducing
DebbieGloriana as
La Malinche
It seemed like such a good idea at the time and
For a time it was.
She knew,
If he did not,
Even if he could not,
That they were changing history,
That they were making history,
That they were killing a kind of Mexico
Only to give bloody birth
To a kind of killing Mexico
That could never stop the flow of blood
Or the flight of bullets
Or the snicker-snack of machetes
Just as no jaguar God
Nor XipiTotec
Had stopped the tumbleclack of children’s knuckle bones
The wager onthe sake of the world
On the nights when Cortez came home too drunk to shut the door
Of the house they shared in Vera Cruz,
La Malinche would awaken to a foot of ground fog
Spread throughout the rooms
And she’d think it wise
To pray
To this god
To that God
To a jaguar
To XipiTotec
And she would wash her hair then
Like a prayer
With yucca soap poured from a silver pitcher,
A gift from Tecnochtitlan
To entice Cortez to leave Mexico for ever and ever.
Didn’t work.
In their Vera Cruz courtyard,
By the muddy well
(When they draw from it,
The buckets must stand for
Half an hour to let the
Sediment settle to the bottom
Of the container and
Even then
They strain what’s clear
Through linen),
Red birds and yellow birds and blue birds and birds that are red and yellow and blue
Peck at the spilled kernels of corn and barley, the shreds of cane and rinds of fruit
The Spanish are so eager to let drop anywhere
But, for some reason,
Especially at the well,
Perhaps to free their hands
To drop a bucket down into the thin mud
And set it there to begin to resolve.
When those birds clatter aloft
When, say, a human being or
A dog or a horse or a cat or a priest
Wanders near,
They often drop a feather or three
And La Malinche is there, always there,
To take them for her own
As if someday she could fabricate a pair of multi-colored wings
To fly as far away from her disowning people
From Mexico
From Vera Cruz
From Cortez.
Instead, by candlelight as the conquistador snores,
She lays them in order of size and color
Across the writing desk in the other room
And thinks of their symmetry,
Thinks of their complicated system of barbs,
Wonders at their iridescent reflections,
Makes the lost feather noise deep in the back of her throat.
Robert Masterson is an award-winning teacher and writer (Garnish Trouble / Finishing Line Press; Artificial Rats & Electric Cats / Camber Press; Trial by Water / Dog Running Wild Press). His journalism, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry has appeared in anthologies, journals, magazines, newspapers and websites. Masterson’s creative and academic work has taken him to dark corners around the world He holds server all degrees from a wide variety of colleges and universities.
THE JOIN
we sleep together
like lichen on bark,
persistent mutualisms
two minds thinking
along the lines
of hybridization
but then there's the dog,
barking through the night,
wanting in on the action
obligate relationship
almost achieved
when the phone rings,
wrong number
ectosymbiosis
can't get a look in
when there's
canines lurking,
strangers with fat fingers
not forgetting in-laws,
work, arguments,
the weather,
sickness and sand-flies
so we agree to be lovers,
maybe make a baby
nine months to the night
commensalism
commences
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in New Plains Review, Perceptions and the anthology, No Achilles with work upcoming in Big Muddy Review, Gargoyle, Coal City Review and Nebo.