~August Kleinzahler, Green Sees Things in Waves (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999)

 

          Even though I’ve read that this guy can be a real hot head, he still writes some damn fine poetry. 

 

          ~TM

Mark Jay Brewin, Jr.

 

Mark Jay Brewin, Jr. is a graduate student at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, finishing his first year of studies in poetry.  He has presented papers and read original works at the Sigma Tau Delta National English Convention, been finalist in the North Carolina State Poetry Contest, and was awarded the Fredrick A. Hartmann Award in creative writing.  During his undergraduate studies at Elon University, in North Carolina, he was awarded several grants and fellowships for poetry and photography, which culminated in a Senior Thesis Project that won Best of Show.  His poetry has recently been accepted for publication in New Delta Review and Packingtown Review; his artwork has recently been accepted as cover work for Pennsylvania English, the literary journal out of Pennsylvania State University.

 

 

 

 

What Marie Curie Discovered After Her First Nobel Prize

                        1903, Journal Entry titled, Substance M’s Presence:

           

Two weeks after exhausting the prize money,

after mounting the new tub basin, sink taps

and flush toilet—one morning, using the washroom,

feeling the cold tile on my bare feet—I looked around

to admire the clean cast iron, and noticed

a grimy patch lingering between the porcelain bowl

and floor.  I pulled the cistern chain, washed my hands

before taking a lukewarm wet rag to the mold sprout,

and promptly forgot it.  Two weeks more, I found

three weedy mold blossoms in the mildew’s place.

It looked like a gray, seeding dandelion

the length of my little toe.  I harvested the buds

in an envelope, employed a baking soda paste to tidy

the surrounding area.  Yet, their fuzzy blooms recurred.

The following months I applied vinegar, lemon juice,

rubbing alcohol, borax and salt, but no reward.

How stubborn.  Then, abruptly, it was gone.

I studied each day for some trace of scum, for naught.

One evening, with this taken to Pierre, he surprised me

by news he sealed the gap around the toilet mount

with heavy wax.  It is queer to see my flowers absent—

I never did figure out what solvent would rid them.

 

 

 

Ode to my Ex-Girlfriends

 

I knew what panties my first girlfriend wore

the night we went to the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Green trim, a pocket over the right cheek.

I miss those.  But my sexual education didn’t start there. 

The adult war-cries and hollers, thrilling my closed

boyish doors.  My grandfather’s shelved beaver caricatures.

I watched a video early on—

some cartoon my parents got from the social worker

who lived across the street.  I beheld sperm and ova

dancing: top hat, tails and corsages.

The little swimmer had high cheek bones.

The melon of an egg, a green bow in hair. 

I went wide-eyed at the animated birth,

complete with sound effects similar to the suck and pop

of someone getting his finger caught

in a bowling ball.  A saxophone

in middle school, the AV Club when I quit.

While my first love and I

attended our respective Catholic, single sex,

high schools, we were fucking in her basement

with City Slickers blaring over the television

so no one would hear.  Just thinking of the west

gives me cotton mouth.  Summer after I graduated college,

my parents and I got shitfaced in the living room

watching a documentary on the coitus practices

of Blackfoot Indians, the different types of vaginas and pricks

that best pleasured each other: Hungry wolf

and lame duck, sore Buffalo and asthmatic trout.

That trombone doesn’t look right!

In back bench seats I would joyride women—

skirt hiked, novelty ragtime—with each intercourse,

I brought the lot of my lovers with me: their faces

an Indian casino slot machine’s reels

over a pair of breasts,

an orgy of clashing bells, clanging sounds.

Bareback riding, hands walked over the upholstered terrain

and in between seats, pulling lozenge wrappers,

greened pennies, a g-string off the reservation—

the unmentionables buried in no man’s land.

 

 

 

Dogcatcher’s Science Lesson

 

Dogcatcher starts at signposts, looking

for stapled flyers about lost border collies

and schnauzers answering to Fritz,

but he doesn’t like the lost mongrels

nearly as much as the ones with no past

or collar or housetraining.  At the pound,

he has nests of kennels heaped

like logs on a woodpile.  He moseys along

the pen rows sipping ginger brandy

from a bean can, scribbles numbers

and days and dates in a drugstore notebook,

trying to plot the shelf life of caged dogs. 

Dogcatcher has figured that a natural

“runner” mutt—cooped up—doesn’t last

more than a year, but note taking is still ongoing.

 

 

          ~Mary Jo Bang, Elegy (Graywolf, 2007)

 

It’s clear I’m a sucker for “an eighteen-rib mule.”  I don’t know what the hell it actually means (the larger implication of such a mule), but she has me sold.  That’s it.  I’m easy to please.

 

          ~TM 

~James Wright, Shall We Gather at the River (Wesleyan, 1968)

 

Rodney Jones and I were talking about this poem the other day, and I told him how I’d lifted the image of “the red spider who is God” for my own purposes.  And so it goes in my poem: “Such was your grace.  I was nothing more than a tiny red spider tending to my own needs.”  It then occurred to me that if I were to draw a parallel between Wright’s spider and my own, my speaker has unwittingly become God (a tiny God filled with self-importance, but God nonetheless).  My speaker and I feel honored to be in positions of such eminent power.

 

          ~TM