Oracular Radiation and The Young Orator

2 poems:

Marc Jacobs designs clothes or his team does or whatever. And accessories. And many new stores which are polluting Greenwich Village. So that's the background to "(Marc Jacobs to the West Village.)" And, yeah, I did feel an elephant trunk brush my calves, but that was as I crossed Third Avenue, near 26th Street. See, "As She Crosses." Both poems are in Other Rooms Press' latest issue, Oracular Radiation. That is such a great name I'm not sure poems are necessary. Oracular Radiation conjures old movies and visions of what could be.

Co-editors of Other Rooms are Ed Go and Michael Whalen. Ed Go is a poet and artist - I've oogled with much respect his collaborations several times at the Center for the Book in New York City. He wrote "Heaven, Hell & Middle Earth," an essay about three poems in my collection, The Future Is Happy.

1 story:

Last year my story "The Young Orator" was published as a fiction chapbook by Winged City. The publisher and editor, Teneice Marie, has revamped so Winged City is now under Argus House Press. "The Young Orator," about an eight-year old who spouts quotations from Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. The story also features a '57 Chevy Bel Air with pinstriping.  

Don't miss Sapphire this Sunday, 7/21, t.b.d. bar Greenpoint Brooklyn, ORP reading

*

I'll be reading with Sapphire & 6 other poets this Sunday at t.d.b. bar in Brooklyn in an Other Rooms Press extravaganza get the details H-e=Er & this poem is a blatant lure a siren call without any rocks to crash on except the ice cubes in your glass.  Sunday, 7/21. 1-3 pm. Here's a poem by the astonishing Sapphire.

Breaking Kharma #5

I

It is like a scene in a play.
His bald spot shines upward between dark tufts of hair.
We are sitting in a pool of light on the plastic
covered couch, Ernestine, his last live-in,
ended up with. But that is the end.

We are sitting in the beginning of our lives now
looking at our father upright in his black
reclining chair. It's four of us then, children,
new to Los Angeles--drugs, sex, Watts burning,
Aretha, Michael Jackson, the murder of King,
haven't happened yet.

He is explaining how things will be--
Which one will cook, which one will clean.
"Your mama," he announces, "is not coming."

Two thousand miles away in the yellow
linoleum light of her kitchen, my mother
is sitting in the easy tan-colored man's lap.
Kissing him. Her perfect legs golden like
whiskey, his white shirt rolled up arms
that surround her like the smell of cake baking.

"Forget about her," my father's voice drops like
a curtain, "she doesn't want you. She never did."

II

Holding the photograph by its serrated edges, staring,
I know the dark grey of her lips is "Jubilee Red"
her face brown silk. I start with the slick
corner of the photograph, put it in my mouth like it's
pizza or something. I close my eyes, chew, swallow.

___
From Black Wings & Blind Angels by Sapphire. Copyright © 1999 by Sapphire. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher And yet here I've reproduced it. I will apologize to Sapphire on Sunday.

*info on hoodie ...which I found googling kharma...at Rebels Market  

Era of the There: when dragons were mapped & Great Goddess had mercy (a poem)

Arhats (holy men) Ding Yunpeng. Ming dynasty, 1368 – 1644 B.C.E. Shanghai Museum

Era of the There

One day you stepped off an edge.

Dragons nipped your toes.

Which grew back.

Those were different times.

Your daughter sailed toward There.

She puzzled.

You know how it blushes at

end of light?

Feet flip flopped a cover-

let over turtle-back and loam.

Stilt birds strutted.

You serenaded valleys lying
long on their backs, hands

behind head making of clover-

arms foothills.

Those were different times.

As far as eye could see

greeny willow-leaning and
un-ladle-able soup of alligator-scale. 

Paddle too far and be — like that!

in an instant! all of you! in a gullet

gulped gone — gracefully — 

to not forever flail in the dark

coppery cauldron of mystery.
Oh, even then Great Goddess had
mercy on our miserable lives.

[by Sarah Sarai] [published in Ocellus Reseau: The OR Panthology, 2013] [thanks to Other Rooms Press]

I Rethink Heaven: Roethke's "Heard in a Violent Ward"

In his essay "Heaven, Hell & Middle Earth" (on three of my poems),  Ed Go questions my choices in "Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary in Heaven." I have, essentially, created a Mad Hatter's Tea Party in the next realm.

Go makes a good point.  Do I really want to spend an awfully long time with these malcontents: Humbert Humbert, Nora (from A Doll's House), Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Medea, Jane Eyre. Even Holden Caufield. Holden Caufield?

With the exception of Jane Eyre, sensible and passionate and having, I assume, a keen interest in social issues, what was I thinking? Even my father, a prince among malcontents, was uncomfortable with Holden. (I made him read Catcher in the Rye.)

"He's always squeezing his pimples," my father said. We are a squeamish family.

Ed Go wants to hang out with Mina Harker, whose husband Jonathan introduced her to Count Dracula. That went well. Also Deety Carter from a Heinlein novel, Precious Jones, Lois Lane and Janey Smith, who I don't know. Go has a point. These characters are more in the Jane Eyre-vein, accomplished women who've overcome enough to offer sharp perspective and some laughs.

I wrote the poem over fifteen years ago when I imagined each character would now have (now, in the afterlife) a new vision. Or maybe I was starved for conversation. There were a lot of people in my life back then, but . . .

My Heaven was an endstop in amber and I anticipated entertainment? I'm not renegging, and, yes, it's parlor game-ish to decide who'll I want around me. Reading Theodore Roethke's "Heard in a Violent Ward" got me thinking about all this. Eternity with the poets. Hmmmm.


Heard in a Violent Ward

In heaven, too,
You'd be institutionalized.
But that's all right,—
If they let you eat and swear
With the likes of Blake,
And Christopher Smart,
And that sweet man, John Clare.

___________
Theodore Roethke, The Far Field, 1964

"Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina in Heaven" is in The Future Is Happy. Click to get to Amazon.

While the soup heats: Ed Go, the G train, essay on my poems

Go's pocket. O Smêagol!

Soup? French lentils pink, and thin as orphan about to eat.  They cook down quickly. I saute garlic; spices; add vegetables.  Cauliflower disintegrates into a million microscopic "ettes" so the soup seems creamy.

Chard, kale, beet greens. Carrots and their tops or carrot tops and their bottoms. Sweet potatoes. Add a sliced apple to offset the pleasant bitterness of greens.  So that's what's reheating on the stove. 

As for Ed Go, co-editor of Other Rooms Press, well, he introduced me to the "G" train a few years ago so I could get to an Other Rooms reading.  His instructions on problems inherent in the "G" (many) included cell phone #s, escape routes, promises to catch up with me in the hereafter if I didn't make it. I made it.

Since then my ease with the G has stunned citizens of Queens and Brooklyn and saved me last night when an F train from Manhattan turned into an M. I made it.

Ed Go wrote an essay, "Heaven, Hell & Middle Earth," about three poems in The Future Is Happy: "Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina in Heaven" "The Rebirth Live" and "hAve You Been Married, the Sister asK" (the latter published in Other Rooms).

A poet himself, Go schools the reader on new ways into a poem along routes of transformation, transcendence, sufferings, company. For example:

'. . . for music is that perfect blend of form and substance, and in “The Rebirth Live” it comes in the form of a “compact miracle disk” (27) that reminds the I of the poem of birth, and rebirth, not an interpretation but an experience—a miraculous one that transcends interpretation.'

Take a look at Heaven, Hell & Middle Earth.