Open Season on the American Experience: Poem By Kathleen S. Burgess

Image of hunter during open season, an American experience

Mark

Silhouetted by a sun about to fail,
this man takes aim. On the other side
his face must gleam, as a cartridge
case, ejected, tumbles wingless.

Skyward. Into clouds. Gray eyes
focus from the shade of a wide brim.
Sweat-curled hair spills from the hat
back, down his neck and collar.

The rifle butt narrows to its dark
barrel as a fist to an eager finger.
Clouds explode. Birds scatter.
His target convulses. Spins away.

In his holster a pistol sits snug,
walnut grip and trigger ready
for the short shot. To make sure,
he’ll cock again. Fire. And again.

At first, only the moon’s flushed
face begins to fade. An eye
rising into less light. Then
the red mist sudden, and fine.

 

National Anthem? “What the Lead Guitars in Hotel California Say and Do Not Say”: Poem by Roy Bentley

Image of Hotel California remagined

Who would believe ultra-rich Hollywood
would slander itself? This dilapidated hotel
has mirrors on the ceilings, pink champagne
effervescing 24/7 in lighted fountains—
all right, it’s California and, by extension,
the republic of sunlight and worn-out souls.
If you listen, what you hear is the vox populi
of Failure. Hear it? You could do worse

than remember the message of some music
is the truth because what it says, in any case,
is We Have Blown It. Which is accurate and
true. And so after “you can check out anytime
you like but you can never leave” breaks off,
that other national anthem, beautiful light,
plays and the wrecked world assumes
an ordinary but recognizable shape.

A Winter’s Tale: Lyric Poem By Roy Bentley

Image of a harsh winter's tale moment in Eastern Kentucky

A Woman Hanging Out Her Family’s Washing
During the Harsh Winter in Eastern Kentucky

Like my grandmother, the dress doesn’t fit her.
And it’s thick sweaters instead of an overcoat.

Like my dead mother, she has wild black hair
and props up a clothesline with a yew branch.

A dark moves by the creek. A snake perhaps.
Ice stalactites from the eaves of a row house

testify to what’s necessary to survive here:
to let pain melt then forget to summon it

even once as the sound of a slow freight.
When she was a fleur-de-lis too beautiful

for the snapshot moment, she showed up
the sun and moon. Now, she is filigreed

with tattooing and scarring and starlight
in laceless, newspaper-filled work shoes.

Soon, she’ll glimpse herself in a mirror:
a ghost straight out of Dorothea Lange.

The place is a heaven of snakes, though
seeing one in winter is always a bad sign.

Poem: Great Britain’s Stonehenge—Sun-Worship Or End-of-World Prophecy?

Image of Stonehenge in Great Britain

Stonehenge

It’s all we have, he said, he said.
He said it’s all we have
Something,
anything, to leave behind:
a mark, a song, a word, a deed,
a stone overturned,
a monument.

But alas, he said, alas and alas,
that, too,
it shall not be.
Concentric forms upon a plain
or geometrical tombs at Giza,
all of it, he said, he said,
are nothing, are nothing to me.

Put there by
a man,
they will not last,
mankind
will see to that.

 

John Steinbeck, Charlie Hebdo, and the Prophet Muhammad in a Cab: Poem By Roy Bentley

Image of Brooklyn welcome sign traveling from New Jersey

Brooklyn Cab Ride

Did the Turk wearing Levis and a Knicks hoodie
think he needed to proclaim he was a secular Muslim
after the religiously motivated murders of the cartoonists
at Charlie Hebdo in Paris? Did he imagine his applause
for freedom of speech was anything but its own gratuity?
The driver could have been John Steinbeck’s doppelganger.
Hair and face and age were that close. John Steinbeck who
died in New York in ’68 with a fat FBI file for speaking out,
for believing that what we write and say matters. That day,
January in the streets like any lucky stiff from New Jersey,
the Turk in an NBA hoodie said the Prophet Muhammad
was a camel driver who married once when the world
has a polygamous heart. Was that blasphemy or was
the driver’s impertinence the sort of thing that a man
of a certain age will say to feel good about himself?
He wasn’t saying there isn’t a God. He was saying
that being alive and American isn’t easy. Idling
on Smith and Pacific, maybe The One God
was in the rippling reverberations before we
said what we said over the blare of car horns.

Three Lyric Poems by Jane Ann Devol Fuller

Image of three chickadees

Bird

One of them is dead beneath the window.
The others, blind to him, flit to seed,
their cumulative weight making the feeder swing
as the light shifts to contain it.

The bird has been there for days
as if paralyzed mid-state,
too cold for odor or parasites.

I think it’s a chickadee. That black mask muffled
by the other black mask. The eyes half-slits,
the head turned the other way.
We try to identify it from inside the house.

On its back, it’s body gray and downy,
the beak stays ajar like the blade of a scissor
I might take from my drawer. A smudge of red
makes us curious whether blood made it so, the dog
scratching to go out.

I will wait until she sleeps on the rug.
I will probably not look long
at the small body, beautiful still.

The tail-feathers will make an easy
handle for hitching into the woods.

At the Feeder, Early November

At first it seems a mostly social situation,
the nuthatch clowning around upside down
on the post, a tufted titmouse
pretending to be somebody else,
looking, through the glass, like a mute cardinal
in that gray get up.

Hulls they litter to the breeze interminably,
I sweep. So I feed them

bacon, raw, on a cracked “bird
of paradise” plate, its blue
positioned so the wings are circling
something else.
Breakfast after twelve. They are about as interested
as their painted mates and prove it
in perfect proportion to their plan:
if they feed us, we will come. We watch them as if
they were a religion we’ve invented.

Tomorrow’s another day:

nothing to wake to but morning’s dull-gray light;
hickories hold their own in thirty-mile-per-hour gusts.

The birds have disappeared.
For the hell of it I keep watch, remembering.
Some days we did not need to eat,
some days it was all we could do to be nowhere

among the soldiering trees.

How To Understand Desire for An Elsewhere

On the road between my house and yours
a woman walks her lot: children,
two on scooters, one on foot,
and their dog, a big male Airedale.

Who knows where her husband is, probably inside
watching other men beat around a ball,
driving one toward a hoop, or hitting one the size of a testicle
into a small, perfect hole.

I’m no better, watching from the window,
imagining you not watching anything,
nor walking, just floating around like an idea
of somewhere else.

I’m pretty certain elsewhere is measured by the sanity of men
we would not recognize,
alone in their madrigal summers.

Nightfall works this cobalt blue to a Parrish painting I inhabit
and I watch me watch myself cry.

And you, you might

in your willingness to surrender your life
appreciate me grieving now that I have listened.

Now that I know it’s not love you were after.
But order. Something manageable.
Something of another world.

Christmas List: Christmas Poem by Roy Bentley

Image of poet Roy Bentley with parents and sisters in Eastern Kentucky

My mother bought everything. In the stores, heads
would swivel at her pleasure, a gift to the onlookers.
Christmas Eve, although an agnostic on her best day,
she abracadabraed a grandly private stash of believing
and trusting the better story of It’s a Wonderful Life.
An avalanche messaging George Lassos the Moon.

My father (her accomplice) assembled a red bicycle
or a machine-gun on a tripod, hearing in wind outside
Christmases in poverty and scarcity in eastern Kentucky.
For him, it was all about the approximate manner of things
somewhere between the baubles and beads of consumerism
and real joy. A factory job was a house with tile flooring.

For her, giving was a prayer to an angel named Clarence.
She checked off each item like the answer to that prayer.
Toys, in nineteen-fifties cellophane, new and unwrapped,
straight from the retail shelves to a car’s trunk to call out
to a lucky, sound-asleep child as if to an entire country—
Fort Apache. Gunsmoke. Rock-‘Em-Sock-‘Em-Robots.

 

 

 

 

Elvis, 1968: A Not-So-Lyric Poem by Roy Bentley

Handlers had poured him into black leather,
another whole solar system of show-biz dark,
then asked him to go easy on the Benzedrine.

Presley had let a laundry list of pain add up
to trying to knock the Beatles off the charts.
In 1968 you didn’t need to have been born

poor in Tupelo, Mississippi to tire of news
of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Stage lights
fletched the mane of hair with astral dendrites

and I-really-love-you-baby impressive rosettes.
Years of pharmaceuticals had addled his brain.
Maybe he had to slip on a second skin of light,

voices rebounding, the uproar shouting his name,
to refurbish the golden-years tchotchke-as-Elvis.
Lawn-angel luminary with the young-once snarl

sure to be resuscitated on telescreens on starships,
and by the newest cyber-biology of disappointment
leaning over a shoulder to ask, Comeback Special?

 

John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath at 75: New Lyric Poem

Cover image of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath

75th

Great to remember it
and re-re-read it again
on the 75th anniversary,
i.e., The Grapes of Wrath.
Central to Steinbeck’s oeuvre.
One must keep it in mind
to remember and celebrate
this author who went on
to champion the working poor
the concerns of America
and become an international literary figure.
One should remember
their trip down the highway
in the old truck,
the people they encounter
and the bodies buried along the way.
There are the dreams of Casy
The Whole Shebang
The lessons of Ma Joad
The aspirations of Tom
Rose of Sharon’s child on the way
The night skies over the Mohave
The strike-breakers
and the poor farmers
on their way to farms with work
in the distant parts of the state.
There is also
The Flood
and the sad folks who
need, like so many more of us now,
to stay above the rising waters.

Bad Santa Christmas Poem By Roy Bentley

Image of Billy Bob Thornton as Bad Santa

Jehovah’s Witnesses Descend on South Bloomfield, Ohio

The assumption is we’re too stupid to know we need saving.
Too troubled or spiritually numb—too clueless—to seek God.
This one has been ringing doorbells in the bruise-black night.
Offers me a brochure titled Can the Dead Really Live Again.
It’s Christmas, I’d take it, but I’ve got a dog I’m holding.
Though the animal isn’t vicious, it’s old. Unpredictable.
Under a whisk of porch light, the stranger inaugurates

a scripted patter. A smile is born, dies, then is born again.
I’m tempted to quote Schopenhauer, that faith is a process
involving doubt in a synergistic relationship with belief,
that the universe is irrational territory in which humans
must make a clean breast of all suspect knowledge—
“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision
for the limits of the world.” I’m open to hearing him out,

but then my dog lunges as if the Redeemed were fair game.
As if there are limits, even in Ohio, to the respect for others.
Cue me trying to be polite. Cue the retriever with a territorial
growl as deep as the wound in the side of the tormented Savior.
Cue the television left on in a room nearby, Bad Santa on HBO
and blotto Billy Bob Thornton saying What the fuck do I need
with sandwiches, kid? Loud enough for the dead to eavesdrop.

This visitor seems to want to rescue at least one more infidel.
I hold off the dog. Say Quiet dammit and then Shut the hell up.
I stretch for the four-color pamphlet. On the cover is Perdition,
char and brimstone lit as by luminaria, the smoke enwreathing
stick-figure suffering. My pissed-off dog would much rather
I let go his collar. I don’t. An apotheosis of a last snarl rises.
The stranger says Merry Christmas. And I close the door.