DON’T MAKE ME REPEAT MYSELF

by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

I dreamt DT was my high school government teacher. Definitely him. Had the waddle in the walk, wore the oversized blue suit (not in the cool David Byrne way), that weird long tie. He’d lecture us, shout at us, breathe like a dragon, then sit sniveling behind his desk. Feeling sorry for himself, I guess. He’d get all red in the face, jump up and down or stamp his feet, and his combover would flap. It was too scary to be funny. The grades he gave totally depended on how much you sucked up to him. I knew I needed to pass this class to graduate high school so my other three degrees would count. I was afraid of what he might do to me, but one day I just lost it. Shouted back. Shouted even louder. Spoke truth to blowhard. You’re wrong! Just plain wrong! About everything. Everything you do is wrong. The only true thing you ever said was that you’d date your daughter. Everyone decent hates you. You are a bad bad boy. People looked at me like I was crazy, fighting him, but I felt like I could finally get some air.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya, retired psychologist, former German Lit major, and restaurant reviewer, has spent much time on both sides of the doctor-patient relationship. She is widely published. Collections include Burrowing Song, Eggs Satori, and Kafka’s Cat(Kattywompus Press), The Book of Knots and Their Untying (Kelsay Books), and, The Beautiful Leaves and Eve the Inventor (Bamboo Dart Press). She co-curates Fourth Saturdays, a long-running poetry series in Claremont, California.

RESISTING

by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

Yahrzeit of Inauguration Day
we don’t have a year any more
maybe not even six months
winter in SoCal         they say
rained for 41 days and nights
but it’s dry as dry rot
dry as dry gel
dry as dry cleaning striped button-downs
they say         He forgot
I say    we’ve run out of doves

and olives

a political snow job
not as important as a blow job
they say they didn’t             but they did
they say we did                    but no way we did
impartial? like my brother
cutting the cake and choosing
I am too fair
you always complain
you never stop complaining
what’s wrong with you
let’s compromise, they say
meet over the cliff
we’ll freeze halfway down
or        I’ll fire the gun 
so the bullet stops 
when the smoke comes out
What’s the problem?           they say
I said, that’s what happened

Karen Greenbaum-Maya’s third and weirdest chapbook Kafka's Cat is available at Kattywompus Press.

OLD WOOD

by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

April 16, 2019 Fallen debris from the cathedral’s burned-out roof lies near the altar. Christophe Morin/Bloomberg News via The Washington Post.

Halfway through my last dinner, I saw the blaze,
unfathomable as the Grand Canyon creaking shut.
The owner confirmed:  Everyone on staff is following

as firefighters poured the river onto the flames.
When the spire lifted as it toppled, people gasped,
wailed as though a suicide had jumped.

The day before I’d walked the quais,
browsed the bookinistes, shot mood pics of the towers,
total cornball, through the mist of new leaves.

Arrow of God, the spire had fallen before the sun was down,
The fire turned the sky red, turned the cross white-hot.

Not all the water in the world, not even the river could help.
People stood and watched, sang and wept.
Rains came only the next morning.

Ash sifted down catching, reflecting coral light
I’d brought my husband’s ashes in a carved wooden box.
No need, no need.

After dinner, the owner walked me to the door. We sniffed the air.
Vieux bois, she shrugged, wincing. Old wood.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya’s third and weirdest chapbook Kafka's Cat will soon be available at Kattywompus Press.

ON THE BUS

by Karen Greenbaum-Maya





On the long bus-ride home, spring day in SoCal, we talked about Simon and Garfunkel until news broke into the top 40 station the bus driver permitted. Dr. King was shot. He was already dead. And we all stopped because what else can you do and we all kept talking because what else can you do. No one at home said a thing, usual routine, tutoring my sister in math, the dishes, my homework. They had hated that I belonged to the Brotherhood Club. Now that too was dead. I held the cats close.

I wore my black dress. Homeroom announcements told us where the service would be if anyone wanted to skip school and go, a church on 17th and Wilshire. I thought I’d go. I thought I should. I was the only kid there from the high school, I was the only white person there, the speakers were bitter and all the words that go with bitter, and how not? I kept my head down. Even at fifteen I got that it wasn’t about me.

The next day I fasted, as on Yom Kippur because that was how you marked great sorrow and great complicity. Fasting won’t bring him back, my folks scoffed, but it was something I could do, though there was nothing I could do. And when Bobby was killed later that year I went inside a little more, a little lower but nothing more, because now this was what could happen, all the time.


Karen Greenbaum-Maya, a frequent contributor to TheNewVerse.News, feels very tired these 50 years on.

STATE OF THE UNION

by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

Graphic by Kevin Kreneck
via The Progressive Populist

While T***p looks presidential
reading words slowly on the networks,
on the classic movie channel
King Kong the giant ape runs amok,
first on Skull Island,
then in Manhattan.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya can't. She just can't. The Book of Knots and Their Untying is published by Kelsay Press.

THE SURVEYOR'S REPORT

a belated Pi Day (3.14) poem
by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

It's a cruel people.
Barbarians, they keep dead trees
among the struggling living, shocked green,
though they must know
the hate they cause.

They ignore the stars,
prefer five-armed simpletons,
castrated travesties
of those scalding selves.

Not utterly beyond redemption, though.
They worship pi,
even dedicate a day,
prepare charmingly symbolic pastries.

These, also called pi, are imperfectly round,
contain round foods,
and, like these primitives,
are perfectly irrational.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya's first book The Book of Knots and their Untying came out last fall. She co-hosts Fourth Sundays, a poetry reading series in Claremont, California.

SALAD OF LATE SUMMER TOMATOES ON ROSH HASHANAH

by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

Sheltered from scorch
at a west-facing wall,
morning spent shaded,
they’re rather small.

Cut in halves, then thirds,
then thirds again.
Eighteen chunks each.
L’chaim. Say when.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya is a retired clinical psychologist, German Lit major, and two-time Pushcart nominee. Her work has won Special Merit and Honorable Mention in the Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial contest of Comstock Review. Photos and poems appear in many journals and anthologies She co-hosts Fourth Sundays, a poetry series in Claremont, California. Kattywompus Press publishes her chapbooks Burrowing Song (2013) and Eggs Satori (2014), and Aldrich Press publishes her book-length collection The Book of Knots and Their Untying (2016). 

CHAMPAGNE AND LACE

by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

Legendary stripper and Bay Area institution Carol Doda, who helped introduce topless entertainment more than 50 years ago, has died at 78. Doda died Monday in San Francisco of complications related to kidney failure, according to friend Ron Minolla. —LA Times, November 11, 2015

            --in memory of Carol Doda, 1937-2015

I think of you, Carol Dodá.
You sold Lycra cat-suit and bra
            to ladies like me
            for whom 34B
was simply inadequate. Ah.

You were out on your own at fourteen.
We speculate what might it mean
            when a girl must contrive
            so that she stays alive.
Was it solely so you’d make the scene?

You frowned as you looked at my breast.
I thought you looked somewhat depressed
            that my ribcage had sprouted
            that which you had scouted
so you’d get paid more to undress.

 Your T-shirted bosom looked chunky,
at least forty years since your spunky
            pursuit of enhancement
            for career advancement,
Lloyd’s London your insurance flunky.

Your voice recalled whiskey and gravel.
Cigarettes must have helped it unravel.
            If you smoked in your shop,
            who could ask you to stop?
I was in no position to cavil.

 The bra looked like lacy sorbet,
a lemony froth-lingerie.
            You should wear it on dates
            with your husband, who waits
conventionally out of the way.


Karen Greenbaum-Maya is a retired clinical psychologist, German Lit. major, and two-time Pushcart nominee whose poems and photos have appeared in many journals. Kattywompus Press publishes her two chapbooks Burrowing Song (2013) and Eggs Satori (2014). She still has the bra.