the poetrysheet
whimsy, subversion, bowling
Number 488, April 16,
2004
Ivan Stepanovych
Mazepa (1644-1709)
“The First Amendment is a tragic amendment because everyone is
going to have his or her feelings hurt and your government is not here to
protect you from having your feelings hurt.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, "The Joe and Kurt Show," an interview
with Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, by Carole Mallory, Playboy 39:5, May 1992
By Lee Ingalls
The happy hour at Harry's is just beginning to hum when a tall woman in a bright red blazer strides through the door, her eyes sparkling for all to see as she scans the room for the girlfriends she is late in meeting. Ah, there they are! Now to wade through all the loud chesty men milling near the bar. Excuse me, she says to one, tapping the padded shoulder of his suit coat. He turns and calls her name and says This is my friend Bob and Bob and says Hello! and introduces his friends and soon the woman finds herself the happy center of boisterous circle of loud chesty men.
Given her smile and admirable poise, this is not the first time she’s found herself in this situation; that, or she has seen enough Barbara Stanwyck movies to know the drill: She takes in their admiration and sends it back with a ravishing lighthouse sweep. One of the chesty men asks if he can get her a drink and she says as a matter of fact she was meeting some friends for a glass of wine. Glass of wine! Glass of wine! the man calls gallantly to the bartender. Glass of wine! and then spins back so as not to lose his place in the happy circle. Another chesty man brakes from the circle and flags down the bartender and pays for the wine and returns triumphantly to the circle with the Glass of wine! Glass of wine! I paid for your glass of wine! Yet another man offers her a string attached to a red balloon he was brought with him to the bar for some reason. It matches your jacket!
The string turns out to be the one thing in her situation the woman cannot grasp. She gasps as the balloon shoots for the stamped tin ceiling high above. The chesty men let out a home-team touchdown cheer. And while men cheer and point, the woman drifts away from the circle and moves toward the table at the other end of the bar where her girlfriends are waiting with sympathetic eyebrows raised.
The
balloon bobs along the swirling currents above the bar, raising only to be
forced back down by a trio of ceiling fans. Gradually, the men lose interest
and the happy circle becomes once more a milling group. The balloon works its
way between the ceiling and the blades of the slowest fan and is forgotten
until clumps of dust and fuzz that have collected on the backsides of the
blades begin to fall and people are saying excuse me but you have a piece of
fuzz on your head, on your shoulder, in your drink. The bartender looks up and
says, It's that balloon! People laugh and duck and hands cover vulnerable drinks.
Eventually a clever busboy tapes a bread knife to a broom handle, then tapes
that broom handle to another broom handle and pops the balloon, ending the rain
of fuzz and raising another cheer from the assembled throng. Several chesty men
give the clever busboy hearty backslaps, as he grins sheepishly with his
improvised spear. The burst balloon and string hang tenaciously to one the fan
blades, circling and circling as the happy hour hums on.
Elementary April
By Philip Miller
How quickly everything shifts
direction, the sky blue as a dream
thunders up into a black broil
and the rain and wind impose
a new order, bring deluge down
on the microcosmic orders, living
under stones and in the earth,
on leaves and on the blades of
grasses, in the clutch of dead
leaves in the mouths of sewers
and in dark waters underneath:
the third deluge this week,
and this, only death by water,
later rain and more rain starts
the landslide‚s muddy fall into
the valley, leaving its slimy skin
on everything, swallowing animals,
houses, bodies˜death by earth,
and somewhere else in a dry pine
forest lightning sparks a snicker
of fire taking the land faster
than anything can run, death by
fire, and tornado season arrives
too, the great windy screw that
implodes a trailer like a breadbox,
flattens a whole neighborhood
in one long sweep of this
death by air: all of these demises
crowded into one short month
we call April, the month that each
dull, gray February day
we stare out windows and wish for.
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Unclench!
SHIRTS
STICKERS
SWAG
WHERE THE LEFT IS ALWAYS RIGHTEOUS