GIANT DIE WASHES ASHORE ON LAKE COEUR D'ALENE

by Martin Ott

Coeur d'Alene resident Mark Sales told KBOI 2News that he and his father spotted the floating object on Saturday near the boardwalk. (Photo courtesy Mark Sales) —KOMONEWS (Seattle), March 22, 2017

Perhaps Paul Bunyan was rolling bones to stake Babe
against enough food to last the winter, the errant throw

skidding over the Rockies and into the soup. Theories
on how lake monsters could transform into any object

hung on rearview mirrors don’t account for this die
castaway forever tumbling toward its opposite or twin.

Alien vessels were round until the Borg sucked us in,
this camouflage of games and chance rolling in waves,

an invasion of our psyche, lust for numbers, and desire
to be on the last square. Dice, after all, are about turns

and seizing the next piece of land, inexorable steps
in an American game where there is just one winner.

Sometimes the die would disappear in evening mist,
the makeshift worlds we build ephemeral and slick,

until that last passage onto shore, final roll stuck,
the deity of odds nowhere to be seen in the picture.


A previous contributor to TheNewVerse.News, Martin Ott’s most recent book is Spectrum, C&R Press, 2016. He is the author of seven books and won the De Novo and Sandeen prizes for his first two poetry collections. His work has appeared in more than two hundred magazines and a dozen anthologies. He tweets and blogs.

BRADBURY LANDING

by Alejandro Escudé

The canary yellow L.A. home where “Fahrenheit 451” author Ray Bradbury resided for more than 50 years was demolished last week, according to the Los Angeles Times. The culprit: none other than Thom Mayne. The Pritzker winner has never been known to be nostalgic; in the wake of MoMA’s decision to raze the Tod Williams Billie Tsien's American Folk Art Museum, he had noted simply that, “All of our work issomewhat ephemeral.” So it comes as little surprise that shortly after he and wife Blythe Alison-Mayne purchased Bradbury’s former property for $1.76 million, the Times reports, the walls started coming down. --Janelle Zara, Architizer, January 20, 2015. Photo by John King Tarpinian, File 770.

"Bradbury Landing is a place on the planet Mars located in Gale crater. It marks the landing site of Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover on August 6, 2012. The location was named by NASA for Ray Bradbury on August 22, 2012, his 92nd birthday, in honor of the author who died a few months earlier, on June 5. The coordinates of the landing site are: 4.5895°S 137.4417°E." --Wikipedia

In a dream last night
My young son and I
Descended the steps
To the Bradbury house
Basement, where he
Wrote most of his work,
The walls lined with
Posters of book covers:
Fahrenheit 451 and
The Martian Chronicles,
Scent of used books
And typewriter oil.
And there, as I placed
An arm around my son,
Sat Bradbury’s desk,
The man who has a
Spot on Mars named
After him, untouched,
And I’m sure untouched
Even when Mars itself
Is finally developed
By future architects.
My life is ephemeral,
My son’s life too, yet
I recall, in that dream,
Thinking with absolute
Wonder, how the house,
The Ray Bradbury House,
Smelled of used books
And typewriter oil.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems, My Earthbound Eye, in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.