Sticky with summer mosquito swarm and candy apple sweat I stood on the corner in a town you can’t pronounce selling my wares. One dry frigid cunt for rent. Ten toes to suck. Two abnormally enormous nipples to chew. My mouth sucks like a greedy maw but that like most things is a big fat lie. The only thing I am greedy for is McDonald’s money. I like the coffee and hot apple pie. I don’t think about the hands, the hands that have touched my pie and put it in a bag. I also have plastic petunias for sale for people who are too afraid of Jesus to dilly dally in my murky waters.
Tonight the Neighbors Spell JESUS on Their Lawn in Christmas Lights by Carrie Fountain
Walking by tonight, we’re reminded there must’ve been a first time for everything–one green shoot, a drop of bluish water, a few red cells. The letters wink at us as if they know what they’re for, and we go by, saying “Oh God, look at that,” as if we did, too.
Mornings, the lights are left on to call very palely to the large, uninterested sky. “We are all alone,” they cry. And the sky answers back by not moving an inch.
I was nine when I watched my mother cough until she couldn’t breath; I never thought that would be me. Now sixty-three, my lungs collapse and my heart is worn out; a flower fighting to survive slow murderous frost.
I long for just one more cigarette – I sit on the white bench stained with rust on the back porch and imagine the ember blazing against the last cold bite of April air. I would die to feed on the filtered tip, to feel the darkness tingle my tongue.
Instead oxygen is fed to me through a tank like a mother feeds a child.
Husbands? Who needs ‘em? I had a few, I’d be lying if I said they didn’t mean anything. I have all I need now – an oxygen tank, and a daughter who lives in my house, and brings me vodka.
I look up at my soon-to-be garden through an empty glass, vision distorted, the glass used to be filled with a vodka tonic this garden used to be filled with growth my body used to be filled with life.
In a month, “Will I make it another month?” I ask out loud, to make sure I’m still alive. Tina and I will shop for flowers to fill the space the winter cold has taken hostage: Widow’s Tears, Bleeding Hearts, German Irises, Panseys
The world lives to see another spring, everything comes back to life. Curtis, the little black boy from down the street will ride his bike to come chat with me on the back porch. Rebirth and youth come together while emphysema picks another victim to meet Death. What about the grandchildren? I promised the oldest, when she was the only, that I would live forever. She will remember this while she sits at my side…
While I was getting a drink at the bar a half hour ago I saw you deciding, she said, whether you should talk to me, I tried making your decision easier by smiling at you, but you started talking to someone else. I’m your second choice. Just like Avis has to try harder than Hertz, I have to try to outshine the other women. Knowing you picked her over me makes me want to tell you to just go back to square one.
After We Saw What There Was to See by Lawrence Raab
After we saw what there was to see we went off to buy souvenirs, and my father waited by the car and smoked. He didn’t need a lot of things to remind him where he’d been. Why do you want so much stuff? he might have asked us. “Oh, Ed,” I can hear my mother saying, as if that took care of it.
After she died I don’t think he felt any reason to go back through all those postcards, not to mention the glossy booklets about the Singing Tower and the Alligator Farm, the painted ashtrays and lucite paperweights, everything we carried home and found a place for, then put away in boxes, then shoved far back in our closets.
He’d always let my mother keep track of the past, and when she was gone—why should that change? Why did I want him to need what he’d never needed? I can see him leaning against our yellow Chrysler in some parking lot in Florida or Maine. It’s a beautiful cloudless day. He glances at his watch, lights another cigarette, looks up at the sky.
It’s the birthday of poet Kenneth Patchen, born in Niles, Ohio (1911). He came from a working-class family — coal mining on his mother’s side, farming on his father’s, and while he was growing up his father was a steel worker in Youngstown. His Scottish grandfather loved to read aloud Robert Burns poems. And Patchen said that in Burns’ poems and his grandpa’s stories, “there was what you would call magic.” He started keeping a diary when he was 12 years old, wrote poems throughout high school, went to a handful of colleges, and traveled around the country working as a migrant laborer.
Then he went to a friend’s Christmas party and met Miriam Oikemus, a college student at Smith and an anti-war activist. The daughter of Finnish socialist immigrants, she had joined the Communist Party at the age of seven. Kenneth and Miriam fell in love and exchanged letters for a while — Patchen wrote her love poems. They got married in 1934. A few years later, when Patchen was just 26 years old, he suffered a terrible spinal injury while he was helping a friend separate two collided cars. He spent the rest of his life in severe pain, and went through three surgeries. The first two surgeries were helpful, and increased his mobility, so he was able to tour the country and give poetry readings. He partnered with Charles Mingus and the Chamber Jazz Sextet, and he set his poetry to jazz music, for performances and recordings.
But during the last surgery, something went wrong and Patchen fell off the operating table and permanently ruined his back. He was bedridden for the rest of his life, but he continued to write and paint in bed. He said: “It happens that very often my writing with pen is interrupted by my writing with brush, but I think of both as writing. In other words, I don’t consider myself a painter. I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend.”
During his career, Patchen wrote more than 40 books of poetry and prose, much of it illustrated, including The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941), The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer (1945), The Love Poems of Kenneth Patchen (1960), and But Even So: Picture Poems (1968). He dedicated every book to Miriam.
In 1945, two journalists published an article called “The Most Mysterious People in the Village,” about the life of Kenneth and Miriam Patchen. Miriam told the journalists that her husband was “absolutely impossible until he’s had a whole pot of coffee in the morning.” They wrote about visiting Kenneth Patchen’s bedroom: “The bed was massive and so was the man. He wore a faded gray sweatshirt with washed-out blue cuffs and pocket. The shirt was tucked into the waistband of black woolen trousers that were frayed at the cuffs. Patchen wore blue, maroon and tan Argyle socks, but no shoes. His body seemed muscular and powerful; his face delicate and sensitive. His skin was white and his eyes were a deep blue-gray.”
Years later, Miriam described their daily routine: “I’d be up earliest, go for the paper, read it. He’d awaken later, having finally gotten to sleep, have breakfast and look at the news, then get to work. ‘Get to work’ meant writing in bed, lying down. The upright sitting position was painful for him, then. I’d read, wash clothes, house clean, take coffee to him frequently. When we had almost no money life was the same as when we had a little. At 12th Street we always had the rent and money for utilities. With an advance from Mr. Padell we bought a couple windsor-style chairs, one easy chair and a table. What elegance those pieces gave to the doll house.”
Kenneth Patchen died in 1972, at the age of 60. Miriam Patchen remained a champion of leftist causes as well as her late husband’s poetry, and collaborated on his biography Kenneth Patchen: Rebel Poet in America (2000), by Larry R. Smith. Miriam Patchen died in 2000 at the age of 85, sitting up in a chair, reading.
Kenneth Patchen said, “It’s always because we love that we are rebellious; it takes a great deal of love to give a damn one way or another what happens from now on: I still do.”
Mother was agitated all morning. A call had come from her brother Harold, who was spoken of only in whispers and despised by those with a talent for never changing their minds. But Mother loved him.
Somehow I learned that my uncle had forged checks and spent time in prison. And I knew he played the saxophone in small jazz bands.
In late afternoon the doorbell rang.
My uncle stood in the hall. A tall man slightly stooped, he shook snow from his long brown overcoat. He had a high hooked nose and wavy brown hair that fell across his forehead, and he carried packages wrapped in Christmas paper.
My stepfather signaled: disappear.
In early evening Uncle Harold knocked on my door with a gift for me: jazz records, the first I’d seen.
Fats Waller beaming from the album cover is clearer to me now than my uncle’s face. “I can’t give you anything but love, baby.”
A mourning sax backing Lee Wiley: “Once in a while, will you give just one little thought to me…”
At first light my uncle was gone, His footprints vanishing in a fresh fall of snow.
Arthur Magazine 