TOO MUCH OF NOTHING

by John Azrak

On this day in literary history

Bob Dylan did not show to pick up

his Nobel prize in literature 

Maybe the laureate’s in the kitchen
with the Tombstone Blues
High Water everywhere
or he’s found TS Eliot and Ezra Pound
at Odds and Ends on Desolation Row;
maybe meeting his pal Sam Shepard
in East Texas to sing Brownsville Girl
or dancing with Shakespeare in the alley
in his pointed shoes and bells
Stuck Inside of Mobile
with the Memphis Blues Again
waiting to find out what price
he has to pay to get out of going
through all these things twice:
the degree from Princeton University
honorary but the Song of the Locusts
off stage left him pining to be free

Or he’s busy looking for his Lo and Behold
no longer wed to Isis, the mythical child,
who breaks Just Like a Woman
among the missing Absolutely Sweet Marie,
the Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,
Sally, Sara, Little Sadie, Saro, Ramona too
in a Series of Dreams, Saint Augustine;
if nothing else, these Visions of Johanna
have kept him up past the dawn
dog-tired A Million Miles from the ever
(it’s now or never more than ever)
he's forever chasing, Just Like Tom Thumb
too wasted for the Million Dollar Bash
drinking One More Cup of Coffee
for Too Much of Nothing:
he's got a million people at his feet
singing Under the Red Sky
What   Good   Am   I?
and all he sees are Dark Eyes

Maybe he’s visiting with Baby Blue
who’s changed his last name too
where he’ll strike a match and start anew
with Queen Jane whose mother
has sent back all of her invitations
until Nothing Was Delivered;
or off to see Judas Priest and Frankie Lee
who won’t go mistaking Paradise
for that home across the road;
he could be Watching the River Flow
Spirit on the Water, Heart in the Highlands
listening to Johnny Cash, reading James Joyce;
or he Went to See the Gypsy
searching for a New Blue Moon
the sun rising in that little Minnesota town
where the Foot of Pride leaves no prints
Love Minus Zero has no limit
and My Back Pages reveals:
I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Forever Young at seventy-five
Dylan Ain’t Talkin’ just walkin’
through this weary world of woe
passing on his Nobel speech this day
but put some bleachers out in the sun
and maybe he'll deliver it on Highway 61
where a thousand telephones don’t ring
and Dignity can’t be photographed;
Ring Them Bells but not for him unless
they’re Chimes of Freedom flashing
for Stockholm, Sweden holds no key
to truths outside the Gates of Eden,
and if the committee has been left
Standing in the Doorway, crying
with blues wrapped around its head,
Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
(Sooner or Later) One of Us Must Know
that he really did try to get close to you:
hey, If Dogs Run Free, why not he
or we all One Too Many Mornings
and a thousand miles behind
Tryin’ to Get to Heaven
before they close the door.

John Azrak, a native New Yorker, has published widely in literary journals. He thought Dylan's excuse, "pre-existing commitments," for not attending the awards ceremony was pretty funny and more like "conditions," uninsurable and the inspiration for this poem. Azrak highly recommends Todd Haynes's aptly titled Dylan movie I'm Not There.

MY LITTLE TYRANT

by Sergio A. Ortiz

Image source: The Onion

And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.

—Donald Trump

You stopped to desire what you looked at,

you stopped to invent what you looked at,

but you were never at a standstill. 

You understood the docks, the places
where salt is a blind lady seated on your soul,
where foam gnaws at the base of everything,
with its small teeth resembling
the quicksand of what is forgotten,
the sites where old anchors and barges
of oversize engines oxidize in droppings
of seagulls and pelicans, the small white tumults
where peace and movement intertwine
their nets in the old-fashion-way of the sea,
the landscapes that surrounded you
without you knowing how far from your imagination,
your most intimate arguments could travel.

There is a sky full of vessels that eyes contemplate
from below tears, from where your gaze runs out of breath.

An eternity that anyone could say,
is worn out by extreme use, fondled by the dead,
softened by the complaints of the sick,
an afternoon that is sinking like a boat
in a landscape that belongs to nobody else but you.

You understood most of this,
you distrusted your desire, but it was your saliva
that shone on the teeth of your desire,
you were the doughy dough someone chewed
the dough that ended up in your stomach.
It was your hand, the one with which you said goodbye.

That is why you hesitated in the middle of the night,
you heard the trees get lost in their branches,
you felt the wind halt, as if in search of something
between the folds of the curtain, you heard the dead
laugh in their holes imitating moles,
you will discover oblivion, let it walk into your bedroom
dressed as a butler to announce what is already served at the table.

Unintentionally you will dine with great appetite and at the end,
leaving the napkin on the table, you will praise the menu.

Sergio A. Ortiz is a gay Puerto Rican poet and the founding editor of Undertow Tanka Review. He is a two-time Pushcart nominee, a four-time Best of the Web nominee, and a 2016 Best of the Net nominee. His poems have been published in hundreds of journals and anthologies. He is currently working on his first full length collection of poems, Elephant Graveyard.

LESSONS FROM THE 2016 ELECTION

by David Galef

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS PHOTO ILLUSTRATION

Narcissistic bigotry is never a crime.
You can be a billionaire on a very thin dime.
There’s no disgrace out of which you can’t climb.
One lie will pull another out of the slime.
Though interest rates vary, some slurs are prime.
You can fool enough people enough of the time.


David Galef is an American fiction writer, critic, poet, translator, and essayist. His most recent books are Brevity, A Flash Fiction Handbook and Kanji Poems. He has published over 100 poems in places ranging from The Yale Review to Shenandoah.

THE PASADENA POOL ON WEDNESDAYS

by Jenna Le

“Dr. [Sammy] Lee went on to earn three Olympic medals, beginning at the 1948 Games in London, where he took home a bronze medal in the 3-meter springboard and a gold medal in 10-meter platform diving. He earned his second consecutive gold medal — a first for any diver — in platform diving at the 1952 Games in Helsinki. . . . At the Brookside Plunge pool in Pasadena, Dr. Lee, as well as other Asian, Latino and black men and boys, were allowed to swim only on Wednesdays, in a special session that the pool called ‘International Day.’” —Washington Post, December 5, 2016. AP photo of Dr. Lee in the 1948 London Olympics via the Washington Post.

          for Dr. Sammy Lee, 8/1/20-12/2/16

The diver Sammy Lee took home
two medals, two consecutive
Olympic golds. Our polychrome
America, our putative
post-racial land laves Lee with love;
it splashes pics of Sammy’s splashes
on TV, turning man to dove,
to symbol, as he turns to ashes.

But when the press says “Lee took home
two golds,” what does that word, home, mean?
Lee, born unto the styrofoam
and steel of California, seemed
American as one could get:
a scholar, athlete, doctor, spouse,
parent, and U.S. Army vet.
Yet, when Lee tried to buy a house
in Garden Grove in ’55,
he was told, “You’re not white enough.”

Can home be home if, where you live,
you’re banned from living, barred from love?
Had platform diving—Sammy’s sport—
not given him a platform, might
he still be roaming far from port,
a homeless wanderer in the night?

Jenna Le is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Anchor & Plume Press, 2016). Her poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and translations appear or are forthcoming in AGNI Online, Bellevue Literary Review, The Best of the Raintown Review, Denver Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, The Village Voice, and elsewhere.

NORTH DAKOTA

by Carl Boon




See the snow, the fire
in the snow, a native girl
swinging through the cold.
See what happens
when the water cannons
finally turn away,
the steed retreat,
the acute limbs
of authority and order
look elsewhere.
Hear the temporary joy
of a mother, maybe
yours or mine; listen
as the wind keeps her
eyes still distant
from what we love
and often despise—
the shopping mall,
the restaurant, the news.
It is almost 1823, it is why
we write songs
that tremble in the gut
all-conquering,
that verb that needs
a thousand more
to make a story. Hear
empire’s sound
moving back again,
white hands, white
ears that finally listen
in suburban rooms
of a thousand books
and a thousand quaint
mistaken phrases.

Carl Boon lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at 9 Eylül University. His poems appear in dozens of magazines, most recently Burnt Pine, Two Peach, Ink In Thirds, and Poetry Quarterly. He is also a 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee.

RESISTANCE IS NOT FUTILE

by Howie Good

Genevieve Griesau sat at Chapel of the Chimes, an Oakland funeral home, after the Oakland warehouse fire that killed more than thirty people. Credit: Jim Wilson/The New York Times, December 4, 2016

All it takes is that one guy asking,
“What if there is a fire?”
And now that room is on fire.

We will be here for days and days
to come. Give me some gloves.
I’ve got work shoes. I’m ready.


Howie Good is the recipient of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry for his new collection Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements.

TENDING

by Jeremy Thelbert Bryant

BREAKING NEWS: The Army Corps of Engineers said that it would not approve permits for construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline beneath a dammed section of the Missouri River. —The New York Times, DEC. 4, 2016

A mother bird, in the tree my grandfather planted, drops food into babes’ beaks.
How long have mothers tended this world?
A police officer opens hose on a woman protesting pipeline. A piece of her rips away.
How long have women fought for earth and man?
The babes without knowing to be grateful, blindly eat.
Water washes away blood, but dirt and rocks remember.

Jeremy Thelbert Bryant is a poet and a writer of creative nonfiction who lives in Virginia. When he is not teaching English, he is burning incense, listening to music, drinking coffee, and writing. He finds inspiration in the red of cardinals, in the honesty of Frida Kahlo’s artwork, and in the frankness of Tori Amos’ lyrics.

DISCORD

by Judy Kaber 

A distance of about five feet
separates my car from the mud-
spattered blue pick-up truck
with the Trump/Pence sign
on the cab’s rear window. This
wouldn’t be such a surprise
except we’re in the parking lot
of the YMCA and I can’t help
but wonder which of us is
out of place. Red-necks don’t
come here to exercise, but then
I am not young or male or even
Christian, so maybe the world
splits into more layers than I
can count, maybe the thrum
of feet on the exercise machines
sings songs of longing for
the past that never was, maybe
the man from the pick-up truck
misses the canning factory
and the chicken plant and what
do I know of belief, of prayers
whispered in the night when
you can’t pay your taxes,
your landlord wants you out
by next week and you smoke
two packs a day just to keep
your head on straight.

Judy Kaber lives in Belfast, Maine, and her poems have appeared in numerous journals, both print and online, including Eclectica, Off the Coast, The Comstock Review, and The Guardian. Contest credits include the Maine Postmark Poetry Contest, the Larry Kramer Memorial Chapbook Contest, and, most recently, second place in the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest.

IN OUR ETATS-UNIS

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

the republic is kaput.
We have turned our dhabarkoodas
to the banderas which the Tribunal Supremo
says we can burn,
hoping four anos will pass by like manana.
We live in rebellion secreta.
Our menschen eat shakshuka
and after dinner, play mahjongg.
Only four years. There will still be
algebra, kayaks, canoes, haus katzen,
carne adobada and brassieres.
We are the homogenized parfaits
of years of einwanderung.
We have found chaque autre.

A retired professor of English at Kellogg Community College in Battle Creek, Elizabeth Kerlikowske served 25 years as president of Friends of Poetry in Kalamazoo.

BILLY COLLINS

by Erren Geraud Kelly

People use tents, makeshift plastic coverings and blankets as shelter in a block-long encampment that runs down San Pedro Street. Photo: Theonepointeight for The Intercept

Tried to get a ticket to
The reading, but it was sold out
So, i settled for watching his
Documentary
While i snacked on nachos
And beer.
I read another rejection letter
Earlier, i kept  thinking
Maybe if i wrote "safer"  poems
The New Yorker would love me
But the only safe place is in
My mind.
I tried to eat  Osso Busco once
But i kept thinking about the
Tent cities, strung along
Sixth street.
I want to be P.C., but everytime
I write polite poems,
I see dead black bodies
Floating between the lines


Erren Geraud Kelly is a Pushcart-nominated poet from Los Angeles whose work has appeared in Hiram Poetry Review, Mudfish, PoetryMagazine.com, Ceremony, Cactus Heart, Similar Peaks, Gloom Cupboard, Poetry Salzburg and other publications, most recently Black Heart Literary Journal. He is the author of the book Disturbing The Peace (Night Ballet Press) and the chapbook The Rah Rah Girl forthcoming from Barometric Press.

HAMILTON STILL SOLD OUT ON THE GREAT WHITE WAY

by Albert Haley

"History is happening in Manhattan: Hamilton has set a record for the most money ever made in a single week by a Broadway show."—The New York Times, November 28, 2016. 

That autumn a silver-haired man came
to see what was so highly rated.
The dancing, rapping, the black and brown
bodies bodiced and laced to build
a country from the pink soles up.

It wasn’t the livestock show
at the Indiana State Fair
or Peyton winning Super Bowl XLI
for the Colts stolen from Baltimore.

It wasn’t the cars going around
and around the Brickyard, spewing
fumes on Memorial Day.

It wasn’t even poor James Dean lying
beneath a marble slab in Fairmount
in the shadow of his uncle’s pig farm.

And it sure wasn’t talk radio,
Sunday pass the collection plate
church, or after home-school
milk and cookies. Not a goddamn
Oreo in sight.

Of course, the silver-haired man
knew this, only wanted credit
for trying to love the Founding Fathers
before being Secret Serviced out.
Dust rising, dust settling.

What did they think would happen?
It’s theatre. The show goes on.

The hills still alive with the sound
of that new music, the bold story
that must be sung.

A time-told tale that unleashes
rhyming tongues, night
after night, with men and women
who dance joyfully, freely on the graves
of any who might wish to enslave.

Albert Haley is a past winner of the Rattle Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in the Texas Review, Poems & Plays, and other journals. He lives in Abilene, Texas, which is as odd of a place as it sounds.

MORGAN

by Ann Neuser Lederer

When William Morgan was executed outside a Havana prison on March 11, 1961, his strange story seemed to vanish from the popular imagination as quickly as it had appeared; it was lost in the classified archives of the Cold War; and it was edited out of Cuban history by Fidel Castro’s retelling of the revolution as an epic tale of a handful of men fighting under his direct command at the exclusion of all others. —PBS American Experience

Under the low thorn bush it lurked, planning to pounce.
The white and black cat, named Morgan, for the lady
who gave us his mama as a kit, vowing it was male.
But now I know better: all calicos are girls.

The secret buzz was: Mrs. Morgan’s son was killed in Cuba.
His little daughter was sent to her grandma.
This could happen to any of us: a father runs off
to join the revolution, the "Yankee Comandante"*
falls out of favor, faces a firing squad.

Morgan the cat’s needle teeth poked out
from its cavernous, soundless mouth.
It was born mute, we soon figured out. Maybe deaf, too.

One time too many times it wandered near
the neighbor's fence,waving its feathery tail
at the pacing black-gummed Chow Chow
whose orange mane flared and fangs spit drool.
Morgan didn’t hear those loud barks of warning.

I didn't witness the feline neck fur wet with red,
when the big beast shook and bit.
I never heard yowls, but still can hear them.

I never saw the lineup, blindfolds, smoke or slump.
Often enough I saw the little girl, a quiet waif.
By and by, Castro, frail in his papery shell,
lay on his stark white bed.

Every little instance holds a tidbit to pass on.  
When driving on a winding road,
always point straight toward the curves.

Ann Neuser Lederer was born in Toledo, Ohio and grew up hearing whispers there about the legendary "American Comandante." She also lived and worked in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Kentucky as a Registered Nurse. Her poetry and nonfiction appear in journals, anthologies, and in her chapbooks Approaching Freeze, The Undifferentiated, and Weaning the Babies.

DEATH COMES FOR THE COMMANDANT

by Bruce Dale Wise

Castro will be buried at the Santa Ifigenia cemetery in southern Cuba. Photograph: Jonathan Watts/The Guardian.

        "Cambiar de amos no es ser libre..."

                —José Martí

The flags are at half-mast, beside the palms out in the air.
The Sun is shining over Revolutionary Square.
The people stroll about, meandering. Not much has changed.
The silence shows. The individuals are rearranged.
The statues and the towers, still, remain . . . another day.
The avenues, the walkways, and the latest news are gray,
as are his ashes, his cigars: Fidel Castro is dead.
Havana cannot hold him longer in white, blue, and red.
It's time to go, to leave the capital, alone, uncoil,
to Santa Ifigenia in Santiago soil.

Bruce Dale Wise is a poet and essayist who writes under various charichords (anagrammatic heteronyms). The creator of new poetic forms, like the tennos (10 lines of iambic heptametre), his publication credits include magazines and ezines under his own name and various pseudonyms. This tennos is an example of his docupoetry. Among poets he admires are Cubans José Martí and Nicolás Guíllen.

CUBA, NOVEMBER 2016

by Clara B. Jones 

Ropa Viejo

Yet soul food & southern food are the same thing though Inga is a common tree flowering in March when raucous monkeys peer up at toucans near the dam at Havana where you chose principle over compromise . . . reading Galeano thinking—Life isn't simple after all & Birds fly North of the tropics & Ordering the Daily Special is usually a bad idea—you exchanged chaos for order . . . form inverted function [like Jakobsen said media changes poetry] as écriture noire was a separatist movement in Martinique where fruit bats roost in caves with Didelphids . . . by June rains soaked roaming tapir alert yet cautious as you were vigilant at El Barracón eating Ropa Viejo amid the sounds of crowds & the smell of tap beer . . . you were privileged but everyone has a cross to bear since Phyllis Wheatley was a member of the Black Arts Movement after Che Guevara called you a “belligerent force.”

Clara B. Jones is a retired scientist, currently practicing poetry in Silver Spring, MD (USA). As a woman of color, she writes about the “performance” of identity, alienation, and power and conducts research on experimental poetry, as well as, radical publishing. Clara is author of three chapbooks, and her poems, reviews, essays, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous venues.