Dear Shawn, Remember in America (For Shawn and Ke$ha)

By David Tomaloff

how I sent you flowers on your birthday,
& you tried to eat my name.

I don’t understand
birthdays,

is the thing I am trying to tell you.

help me, Shawn–

tell me why you disbanded Whitesnake like that;
tell me why you broke up with CCR just like that.

I want to know what love is.
I want to unravel in a storm in a parking lot;
any parking lot–
that is to say that any one of them will do.

if Michigan is a place, then I am glad you are in it.
I am glad to hear you love Michigan, Shawn–

I don’t know exactly where that is.

if Michigan is in America, Shawn,
or if Michigan is American,
then I think we need to talk about it more,
need to be better Michigan Americans.

but I want to know why you hate America, Shawn,
which is to say, specifically, Ke$ha–

because Ke$ha is somewhere in America, Shawn.
because Ke$ha is alive & American somewhere.

in Ke$ha, we are taught, we are somewhere
over the map of it–
let’s draw a spot on the map of it,

Shawn, let’s begin to learn to live,
or let’s begin to live like Michigan,

or let’s begin to unravel
in a metaphor
for a storm in a parking lot in Michigan,
in America.

let’s remember like DJs to turn it up.
let’s remember the are in we are who we are.

let’s remember to roll our ars.
let’s see that poetica.

I want you to froth-chug the anthem;
Shawn, I want you to love the whatever.

may all of our future mornings
be outsourced to Diddy–

Shawn,

let’s make the most
of the night
like we’re going to die young.

I love you both.

I love the way you look in a lariat necklace

By Mark Young

To add spice to the
mix, layers of
orchestration—in
that present-day sense
of the word. Real
answers from real
people to unreal
questions. Why is
the lone masterpiece
of Soviet construction
fiction hung on a nail
on the wall? Who
offers evil in polymer
& stainless steel
housings? How
can I learn to stop
singing with my nose?

A note entitled ‘The Good Truth’ (found with our divorce papers)

By Michael Ashley

It turns
the trees against the sky,
a giant hamster wheel in our home,
dainty fingers come away
from the mechanism,
It turns
a meal in the light
of a microwave oven,
a dead pig on a spit,
oars in the row lock,
It turns
the milk in my fridge,
the bread in my metal tin,
that knot in the pit
of my empty stomach,
It turns
over time
good, bad, ugly, beautiful,
eventually
It all turns

A Day in My Life

By Neil Ellman

I killed a whale on the way to work today
I swallowed the moon
I shot an arrow into the air, it fell to earth, I think
I struck out in the bottom of the ninth

I saw an angel at the zoo

I was face-to-face with God on a slice of toast
I fell asleep in the middle of a dream
I played the clown who swept his shadow with a broom
I suckled at the breast of a wildebeest
I laid a platinum scrambled egg

I made love to her behind the monkey house

I kissed the buckle on Orion’s belt
I solved the riddle of the dwarf and bird
I climbed to the top of a mammoth’s head and into its ear
I spoke to eternity and it spoke back

I watched her leave with sawdust in her mouth

I spoke at length with a dragon in its lair
I found the tooth of a coelocanth in a can of beans
I took a bubble bath in a mermaid’s tub
I dove without air to the bottom of the Mariana Trench

I never knew her name.

Stage Fright

By Marie Nunalee

tell me if you can
(without opening your mouth)

what it is about the
casting of the light
upon your brow

makes you think it
can be here makes
you think it can
be now

faces forward
manes grizzled
coiffures straightened
apertures caked shut
with super glue

pupils opened and
unended and unblinking
they await
your rainbow beam ejaculate

will it greet them with a
start in the dusty darkened
corners?

will it shower down
upon their heavy
calcium crowns
thin copper chips

from amber nimbus
clouds?

Inn

By Fred Pollack

I have a desk, and light,
and meals, and know
that such a bare assertion of the case
would once have hinted at imprisonment
and called for pity, which
has gone out of the world, like hate.
The window looks onto a bay.
Fish have returned, and gulls,
while some swift tree reoccupies
the peaks, accompanied by animals.
Are words, I wonder, more or less
inert, now that they show
mere undistinguished life among
these other lives; is thought
a species of hysteria that proves
only a failure to assimilate
the return of silence and of space?

The dead were always the great critics,
determining the taste of the unborn.
The after- and before-life seemed,
however crowded, less so than the cities
where they were the major employer,
whatever someone hoped to serve or earn.
And the cities in turn relied
on convict labor to illuminate
the endlessly unrolling scroll
whose burden was the myth of personal fate.
Why am I thinking
of prisons, those particularly dark buildings?
Last night a bear sighed
audibly in the foyer.
Those neighbors on the hill across the water
are dogs becoming wolves again,
their moon-cries neither hungry nor forlorn.

I go downstairs with vague
atavistic or premature
hopes of an audience, but mostly wanting
voices. Perhaps, as trade revives
over millennia, layer on layer
of grand hotel will encrust this place.
Yet hopefully, when the stranger,
however ugly or unsure,
enters, the woman
stirring the hard- and collectively-won
soup will look upon him still
as precious, only humbly
to be approached, addressed, or touched,
as she herself is viewed; the big
competent hunters make
an automatic place for him,
as if exclusion were itself the plague.

Grace of Our Fathers

By Dave Hardin

My Grandfather wore the pants in the house,
a pair with a hole in one pocket through
which he would slide a hand and, in a feat

of manual dexterity, extend
one gnarled index finger up and through the
fly which he had quietly undone while

leading grace, the rest of us heads bowed, hands
clasped, eyes closed in silent reflection, save
for me, I must confess, my prayer a plea

to Him to steady the hand of this man
about to bless our Sabbath meal with a
trick so amazing who could dare resist

one quick peek; his intentions telegraphed
with a twinkle of the eye, chair pushed back,
rising to utter a stentorian

Amen, waggling his erect digit at
the hungry multitude, punctuating
the benediction with a lewd salute.