ALMA MATER / SOUL MOTHER

by Annie Rachele Lanzillotto

a womb
a place we encourage our youth to strive to go 

to hope to go, 

to set their sites on,
Thayer Street where we promenade our thoughts, 
The SciLi where we fill ourselves with knowledge, 

thousands of hours reading reading everything we can get our hands on,
Soul Mother my heart aches for you
Soul Mother we send our young for your warm embrace,
Soul Mother we fail you, 
Youth we fail you,
Youth full of promise we fail you, 
Fail to protect you from the excesses of rage that is both a byproduct of our society, 
and rage that wells up from within, Rage that is armed.

Oh if it could only be a fair fight again, if only a raging man could have just fists and wits
Oh if only 

But that era is gone
And only one such as Gandhi could put out a meaningful call for all to lay down weapons,
and in the end, 
it was a bullet that got him too
a bullet kills a peacemaker

cursed bullets
cursed designers of bullets
cursed rage that had no better way to explode
cursed testosterone gunpowder rage
cursed whoever politicizes this killing of youth of brilliance of hard-working teenagers striving to carve of this world a better place 
Soul Mother, Alma Mater I ache for you

Annie Rachele Lanzillotto, class of 1986, Brown.

MADE FOR THESE TIMES

by David Rosenthal

     In memoriam Brian Wilson

If everything is upside down
and backwards, as it seems to be,
then we should see fragility
as virtuous, and hear the sound

of weeping love as strength. We should
behold a penchant to break down
with awe, and bless the hallowed ground
of teary joy and childish good.

A guy I knew in grad school said,
“I’d hate to see the freak who’s well
adjusted to this world.” We tell
ourselves that isn’t us, we’ve fed

our egos with a comforting
belief that someone who adapts
survives. But without a collapse,
without an aching, broken string

of failures, we can never be
resilient, never truly sing
a harmony that makes a wing
of sorrow, fluttering but free.

David Rosenthal is a public school teacher in Berkeley, California. He has contributed to Rattle, HAD, Rust & Moth, Birmingham Poetry Review, Teachers & Writers Magazine, and others. He’s been a Nemerov Sonnet Award Finalist and Pushcart Nominee. He’s the author of The Wild Geography of Misplaced Things (Kelsay Books).

HOMAGE TO WAYNE (AND MY FATHER)

by Dick Altman

In a 2014 interview, the saxophonist Wayne Shorter was asked how often his working quartet rehearsed. His reply was evasive and illuminating: “How do you rehearse the future?” This was classic Shorter—gnomic, gnostic, mischievous, wise. It was a bit of a humblebrag too. For more than six decades, he conjured the future of music into being, with or without the benefit of rehearsal. Shorter, who died yesterday at 89, was a giant of jazz as an improviser, bandleader, and thinker, but above all as a composer—arguably the greatest in jazz since Thelonious Monk, and inarguably one of the greatest the genre, and the United States, has ever produced. —David A. Graham, The Atlantic, March 3, 2023

                               “All or nothing at all

                                 Half a love, never appealed to me

                                 If your heart, it never could yield to me

                                Then I'd rather, rather have nothing at all…”

 

Wayne—I once thought Sinatra’s voice was the best one alive

to interpret the ballad that launched his career into the musical

stratosphere—until I heard yours—heard your sax—above

a hundred-and-fifty other memorable voices—wrap its breath

around my soul—your intimate—languid purr—as if stroking—

rather than playing—the notes—imbues “longing” with the blade

of desire unshared—I imagine us conversing at The Five Spot—

Greenwich Village’s storied jazz dive—your “All or Nothing at All”

doing all the talking—softly—soothingly—trying to mend

a twentyish broken heart—you keep it low and slow—no evidence

of Sinatra’s signature swing—you’re standing at the other side

of the table—answering the sadness you see in my eyes—my face—

so very you to sing as if I were the only person in the room—

 

                                 I said all, or nothing at all

                                 If it's love, there ain't no in between

                                 Why begin then cry, for something

                                 that might have been

                                 No I'd rather, rather have nothing at all

 

Your sax bewitchingly mouths the words—shares their ache—

this is your magic—to get beneath the skin of the music—to find

the pulse—to release its essence—I close my eyes—draw into me

the air filled with your genius—wonder if there will ever be another

like you—like her

 

Note: The poet’s father Arthur Altman composed the music to “All or Nothing at All.” Lyrics used in the poem by permission.

Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, riverSedge, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Blue Line, THE Magazine, Humana obscura, The Offbeat, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The RavensPerch, Beyond Words, The New Verse News, Sky Island Journal, and others here and abroad. A poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has in progress two collections of some 100 published poems. His work has been selected for the forthcoming first volume of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry to be published by the New Mexico Museum Press.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ANTI-MASK MOVEMENT

by Andrew Frisardi

Abbott Collection 27-KITSCH-WB-155 Sm Trump Bust Water Globe-3" H, Small, Multicolor

When pixel storms had snowed their mind
And crystal balls had gone opaque,
A kitschy star so brightly shined
Its fascination made them blind.

Reality itself was fake,
And every breath they took would bind
And spread a virulent mistake,
When getting duped had left its ache.

Andrew Frisardi’s new books, published or about to be published this year, are a poetry collection The Harvest and the Lamp (Franciscan University Press) and a prose book Love’s Scribe: Reading Dante in the Book of Creation (Angelico Press). Originally from Boston, he lives in central Italy.