COVID Notebook: Poems | Photos | Prose

COVID Notebook Poems | Photos | Prose by

Thomas Zimmerman

COVID Notebook Poems | Photos | Prose by

Thomas Zimmerman

zetataurus press | ann arbor mi usa | tzman2012@gmail.com

3

Words and images copyright Š 2020 Thomas Zimmerman From the Author The poems, photos, and prose in this book were published in various periodicals and anthologies from March 16, 2020 (which I count on my personal calendar as Day 1 of the COVID-19 pandemic experience), through December 31, 2020. So, for me, this book charts my aesthetic experience during COVID-19 in 2020. I want to leave a record.

Brief Bio Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits The Big Windows Review (thebigwindowsreview.com) at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has been active in the small press since the late 1980s.

Among his several chapbooks is In Stereo: Thirteen Sonnets and Some Fire Music (Camel Saloon, 2012). Tom's website: thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com Acknowledgments I thank the following publications where these pieces first appeared, sometimes in different versions: The Arkansan Review, The Beatnik Cowboy, The Beautiful Space, The Big Windows Review, Black Coffee Review, Bombfire, the COVID Winter blog, Ephemeral Elegies, Goat’s Milk Magazine, Going Viral: Pandemic and Protest, Grand Little Things, Green Ink Poetry, Horn Pond Review, The Huron River Review, M58, Mineral Lit Magazine, Molecule, Origins, Pure Haiku, These Lines, Tistelblomma, Trestle Ties, and Versification.

4

Contents Poems on the Pandemic Stay at Home 8 Sonnet with Four Requests 9 Between the Pages 10 The Morning After 11 Channeling the Anasazi 12 Birds 13 I Think of Things I Love 14 Other Poems Blowing Smoke 16 Brimming Over 17 Conjugal Space(s) #5 18 Conjugal Space(s) #6 19 Conjugal Space(s) #7 20 Conjugal Space(s) #9 21 crow-flight: black jackknives 22 Entranced 23 Evangelical Home 24 Glance 25 Greeting Card 26 Haiku Quartet 27 Heavy 28 Lighted by the Night 29 Like Poe 30 Lost-Youth Triptych 31 Lullabies and Battle Cries 32 Midlife (II) 33 Midlife (V) 34 Nature Preserve 35 Nightmare Sonnet #15 36 19 Lines on Ancestry 37 Nocturne (II) 38 5

The Oak 39 Romantic 40 Sonnet for the Long Married #3 41 Staring at a Mirror’s Back 42 Time Ghost 43 Warm Ghosts 44 White Spaces 45 Wonder 46 Photos 25 from Going Viral: Pandemic and Protest 48 Four Writing Center Portraits 73 Open Mic 74 1 from The Big Windows Review, Issue 19 75 6 from The Big Windows Review, Issue 20 76 10 from The Big Windows Review, Issue 21 82 15 from Origins 92 Winter Solstice in the Woods 107 Lit (1) 108 Lit (2) 109 Lit (3) 110 Lit (4) 111 Prose Book Reviews

6

113

Poems on the Pandemic

7

Stay at Home “I believe in you my soul,” old Whitman wrote. Your soul’s been quarantined for decades, flitting madly in the attic, drunk on sump-pump swill. You wrote a poem Tuesday with the simile “the soul expands as if put on a ventilator.” Sure.

Spring cleaning’s what you need, but winter’s caught you napping: melting snow on tender tips of spruces, bluejay squawking, feeder fallen off the shepherd’s crook. The coffee’s gone, too soon for beer or scotch. In bed, you read a Polish poet whose name you can’t pronounce.

Wife’s made you fabric masks—one black, one blue— to wear in public. “Bruised,” she says. “So you.”

8

Sonnet with Four Requests Before you speak, please count to seven: gives your demons time of eat themselves, and then your angels can ascend. New virus lives: at large but wildly seeking cells, and when it wormed inside our heads, its shadow killed and sheltered, soaked our speech in poison swirled with medicine that some of us distilled to waves of energy that lit the world.

Before you speak, please put your hand, there, on your heart. We’ll all like better what we hear, the mind and body joined, old lines redrawn, emotion and cognition stronger, freer.

And don’t forget to breathe. A million dead, toll mounting. Dream of better days ahead.

9

Between the Pages for Diane and William Between the pages of a book, I tuck this moment. Which book? One by Faulkner that I read in school, that changed my life, that rubbed my nose in art so rich and dark and strange, familiar as my mother’s scent, mysterious as a future wife. What is this moment?

One of many that have passed and many that will come (I hope), the past and future pouring into “now” like wine from earthen jars admixed with tinctures of a windswept river—heady potion! Everything I’ve ever done, undone, or let be done, those moments pile like grains of sand, or coil, strung like diamonds, lifting me to now.

Bright sun and dark green shadows in the spruces, thud of a dribbled basketball next door, clock ticking on the desk, and two old friends, they’re writing, muted, here on Zoom. My wife is napping on the couch, her paperback facedown and rising, falling, rising. Coffee’s gone, too late for more. Too early for tonight’s mindbender. I and I, that’s it: A showdown on a Western movie backlot, square-jawed hero, shag-eared villain. Or two swirls of color: reds and blues and yellows of impression and emotion, plus the thousand grays of thought, smeared thickly on an artist’s palette, permeable as a mask.

10

The Morning After A grim freewrite last night: “Subconscious COVID poem,” a fellow poet said.

This morning, out with Ann and Trey, I photographed a frozen pond, the etchings in the ice like synapses, the reedy tendrils fossilized, an ancient giant’s thoughts locked down, a ghostly ruin traced, museum piece.

Piano music playing now: the sounds like cracking ice.

“Beloved dead still hover round me, black but spangled with some matter shedding light”: I thought this true last night.

If not epiphany, at least a little comfort. Coffee’s gone but coursing through me. Trey’s asleep, his belly full. And Ann is making toast.

11

Channeling the Anasazi We took the gravel road off Highway 4, northwest of Santa Fe, to reach Tsankawi: prehistoric Anasazi pueblo village.

Clouds hung low, the Jemez Mountains sawed at the horizon, earth and stone glowed orange-blue: no other humans there.

We hiked the mesa, climbed the ladders, stooped within the dwellings scooped out of the cliffs, saw petroglyphs. But this was seventeen years ago: no photographs, just memories that drift like smoke in wind.

I felt the spirits there. Your reading and your mythic bent just conjured this, my Western mind’s kept telling me.

I crease a journal page, I’ve tried to leave my record.

So, what drove those people there? What made them disappear? Now we can answer feebly but more feelingly as schism and pandemic scatter us.

12

Birds The bluejays, finches, wrens, and mourning doves that haunt our backyard prompt my wife to fill three feeders twice a week. The big and small, the bullies and the bullied, find a place, I like to think. The crows, my shadows, hoard their knowledge high, away, and I stay blind.

My parents bought encyclopedias I read when I was young. Andean condors snagged me: carrion-eaters, wingspans bigger than a man, grim scythes that sharpen mountains, wingtips’ fingers charred by heaven’s smudge.

Sweet angels nest such birds within, as birds do dinosaurs. Oh, let our minds embrace extinction and eternity, at peace.

13

I Think of Things I Love When things are going really bad, I think of things I love: this Glenn Gould Bach that’s on the playlist now; my memories of Pink Floyd’s caustic Animals, the vinyl gone; there’s Giant Steps and Kind of Blue: the first jazz albums that I bought; Bob Dylan, yes, my fetish; Otto Klemperer, the burst of thunder in his Beethoven; the press that published my first poems; verse by Bly, two other Roberts, Frost and Lowell; plays I’m teaching: Hamlet and Macbeth; the sky on fire at dusk or dawn; hard rain on days I need to read; pandemic dogwalks; hiss of coffee brewing; chance to live through this.

14

Other Poems

15

Blowing Smoke When I play my dad’s old record albums— Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson— I smell his cigarette smoke in the sleeves.

I smell it too in his leather bomber jacket I’ve worn for 15 years. A little long for me: he stood 6’1”; I got my mother’s height.

Smoke killed her: emphysema after five decades of two packs a day.

They had her on oxygen near the end.

On the rest-home patio, my sister and I would yank the tubes, light one up (the nurses knew she kept a stash), and let her puff till her lips turned blue.

I was stoned to the point of vertigo the night I met the woman who would be my wife.

I saw it only darkly.

When we lived in North Dakota, I swear I swallowed smoke one time: squatting over the portable grill, bratwursts sizzling, skin cracking, wind 30 miles an hour, bellyache just short of puking.

I remember a crop duster coming in, horizon line miles away.

Topsoil from the sugar-beet fields like brown smoke suspended in air, tractors tearing the veil from Earth.

16

Brimming Over Coffee’s left its ring.

The journal page lies puckered, stained. Bashful artist, finally, you’re engaged.

17

Conjugal Space(s) #5 —fat bluejay / pregnant mama / screeching // there // the backyard feeder rocking with her weight // and you // you fight a headcold / drink your coffee / try to leave a record // just how badly do you need this // stay outside and play awhile / your mother told you // morning getting darker you as write // and when the dusk had thickened / come inside / the call almost eternal // come inside / dark angel sings / like Mother / turn a page and lift a pen / there’s light enough to sort the gathered darkness // coffee’s gone // the sky has paled to milk // the thing delivered might just horrify / but you must nurture it and not ask why ///

18

Conjugal Space(s) #6 —a John Cage composition squeaks and hums / a random headiness you’ve come to like // the speakers / even though they’re inexpensive / aren’t liars // nor are you / it’s just that truth keeps changing // all this need / the way that speaking clouds it / seeing clears // a bluejay hogs the backyard feeder / spruces suck the filtered sun // your slight hangover now receding / like your hairline / like your gums / and like the tide on Marco Island ten / eleven New Year’s Eves ago // remember scotch / the ocean’s moan / the married sex // collecting shells / at least // you kept them zipped in plastic // lasted till spring cleaning came ///

19

Conjugal Space(s) #7 —your dog’s got wounds he can’t stop licking much like you / a motel room in northern Michigan but could be anywhere / your wife is in the shower humming / plumbing vent fan thrumming / you imagine other guests in flipflops milling swilling lobby coffee all self-medicating / from his bed the dog looks up at you like Adam up at God absurd / the phone’s half-charged you check the scores your team blown out again / your life you like it well enough / you like it well / the stars invisible in daylight / reason blinds you sometimes / up to you to see tonight’s sky full of scattered stars like salt that burns or that you savor //

20

Conjugal Space(s) #9 —that Escondido open mic / your nephew killed it on guitar // you kept your folded poems / pale vagina / in your pocket // sunburned forehead flaking snow / you’re drinking local beers you brought back warm / packed like ingots in your dirty clothes // when flying in and out / you saw the ocean / never touched it // socks got wet while walking shoeless / drunk / in midnight rain around that gated subdivision // cell-phone photos just a husk / the wispy kernel’s here / between the ears / the hauntings of all travelers so lightly here // last morning hike / your brother’s wife said / “god / your legs are so damned white” ///

21

crow-flight: black jackknives crow-flight: black jackknives play mumblety-peg with peace songs harsh, wild as life

22

Entranced You muse this morning, Mozart lilting on the playlist, window cracked to let the breeze and birdsong in, the coffee not quite gone, the twinges in your shoulders and your knees receding like your hairline and your gums.

Expand your spirit: aging’s just the cost of staying here. The ceiling fan that hums like Magna Mater overhead, the tossed and tangled PC wires’ writhing roots that bind you closer to some precious ore, the winking tech-gear lights like tribal fires that fleck a song-swept midnight hillside: fruits of the unconscious, buried psychic lore, dark trenches in the ocean of desires.

23

Evangelical Home A misty night, a little wind, and too much black and slick: tough driving town to town without a buzz. I bring a toothbrush and a peanut butter sandwich, cell phone charger, murder novel. Dog’s in back. I’ve cracked the windows: he can poke his nose and sniff the mystery of dark and wet. A roundabout, a lightless stretch, a flashing yellow, truck lights in my rearview mirror. Scherzo on the playlist, whoosh of cranked defrost.

To feel a rhythm to our consciousness, to beat or meet our short deadlines: no answers, only comfort. Then, so soon, arrival.

I kiss my wife at her mother’s deathbed.

24

Glance It’s like a book, a piece of music: glance from someone you believe is beautiful.

In fifty-mile-per-hour wind, or under skies as white as Grandpa’s thighs, the fire-core of this vision burns. A Beethoven late quartet, those fine brown eyes: the soul expands as if put on a ventilator. Even if you’re diving into darkness (luxury it is compared to falling), reading Lowell or Plath, let’s say, the alchemy of pure delight transmutes the words and rhythms into his or her or their remembered face, now lovelier, of course, full moon seen underwater as you’re rising breathless from the depths.

25

Greeting Card A greeting card with Hemingway’s big noggin on the front, a pack of batteries, hand sanitizer, grocery bags, a stainless steel dog dish, a jar of peanut butter, Fuji apples in a hand-thrown bowl: my housespace and my braincase play on “shuffle.”

Neighbor’s mowing: need a lover now to shave my back. That’s Brubeck’s “Take Five” breathing cool and smooth: if not salvation, just a little help. So make things personal?

Be grateful? Questions nurse my now. “Relax,” my better angel murmurs. “Leave a record: keep your poems. Won’t smother you with answers, only comfort.” Right. That is the answer.

26

Haiku Quartet 1 swaying sunlit spruce perpetual hope machine shadows come and go 2 cold rain, empty page darker muse’s fuzzy wings crocheted, crotchety 3 stay out of the weeds good advice for life, not art seeds cling high as knees 4 Mozart concerto violins sawing coffins teach us how to live

27

Heavy It’s all these years piled heavily: a stacked deck shuffled, dealt: a fate. No wonder that my shoulders slope, my middle’s spread. I build a house of cards: the woman that I think I want. I tower all my quarters: manhood I’ve been fed. Yes, I could take it to the river, old-time song and faith. A bluesman’s there, waist-deep in water, fingerpicking a guitar, his cab parked back behind the buckthorn-strangled scrub, his singing achysweet, his neck: taut cords and well-worn leather.

“Be like him,” I tell myself, but we must meet to share our stories. Wide and deep, the water. Heavy with the years, my legs.

28

Lighted by the Night Dog’s bony, silken head, your veiny hands that smooth it. He’s as black as any night.

Tonight, let’s say. The wind is licking stars and streetlights into shimmer. Wife is gone but coming back. Obligatory stout’s half-drunk in front of you. Sensations, all your favorites are lighted by the night.

That shimmer: some’s synthetic wiring, some’s wildflowers in your mind. There’s skronky jazzrock on the playlist: album’s called Blackstar.

Back when you read and wrote a lot of goth, you curled blind in the nexus of sex-death: it clung as birth-caul. Nearly sixty now, you see in cycles, lighted by the night.

29

Like Poe You’ve learned old girlfriends don’t stay dead and buried.

Everything’s inside your head: the eddies, maelstroms, male-storms in the tarn of angst.

Been here before: dead-drunk in Baltimore, a Ravens fan, a border state between deep dreamless sleep and every morning’s wake.

You can’t imagine ever sitting down to breakfast, not with what’s walled-up, bricked-in, floored-over, and entombed. It’s not the body— hair, feet, tits, ass, dick, and lips—it’s more the feeling: cool black rain that breaks your fever, motherlove, and tomb-as-womb reflexively.

You force a respite from your martyrdom, you free some headspace to create. Till they return.

30

Lost-Youth Triptych

1. mosh pit souvenir there flare-red guitar pick nope someone’s thumbnail

2. can do memory of a cartoon caption hung-over morning you sprayed paint in your armpits then tried to deface a public monument with a can of antiperspirant

3. Leave Home old Ramones record beer smell still in the sleeve

31

Lullabies and Battle Cries Small talk, the kind you say you hate, just think of it as lullabies we sing to one another, padding pain and easing us, like Mother or a surrogate once did or does, or otherwise we’d all be dead.

The skin along your cheek and neck and chest, drum-taut for brush-like fingers, pulses from within, a jazz band’s riff, a battle cry for tactics, acts, engagements, and improvisations in love’s name. Your liquid eyes burn dark then light, fresh campsites on the night’s hillside, and circling round, the tribe, the fall and rise of songs, the rhythm in the blood, the humming rib bones of the whale that eats us all, that feeds and cradles our next change, that spits us out like seeds so bright the fires dim.

32

Midlife (II) At last, as darkness falls, you strip off all your clothes, you walk in woods, the starlight blue on skin, your breath the only human sound, and on and on, with snap of twig and crackling leaves, the moon once pulsing, now a glow, a tablet melting in a water glass, your pain recedes, you feel the waking beast inside, heart wild with dream of claw and fur and tooth, the scents of musk and blood, not numbness but raw howling all along the aching instincts you and night embrace

33

Midlife (V) Chorizo, couscous, thin-sliced gala apples in a bowl: a bachelor’s hash a husband married many years can love, with spiky jazz (that’s Braxton morphing Monk), cold beer in front of you. Your wife has turned in (headache), so it’s you and Trey, adopted greyhound black as dreamless sleep. Linked memories, your private myths—first Ali-Frazier fight (on German radio), a gradeschool English teacher and the story of his scar, Andromeda’s bare bottom in a painting

by Burne-Jones—rise glistening as boulders in a river. Have you journeyed well enough to know the boulders, be the river?

34

Nature Preserve Black river cuts like glass through deep-woods pine.

You see this even from the Ford’s back seat.

And later, sun-stunned aspens gird the interpretive center. Inside, photos, maps, and taxidermy: heron, river otter, black-bear cub.

The pelts of foxes, elk. A video your friend has made plays on a loop: it’s Bach as background, shots of meadows, reedy ponds, a sketch by Audubon, and interviews with scientists now dead. Back home, your injured dog, Elizabethan-collared, snoozes in his crate. Your knee’s still killing you, your shoulder crackling. Hell it is, getting old. Remember you’re no better than grass.

35

Nightmare Sonnet #15 You’re driving home in icy moonlight, straddling that flat roadkill skunk below your moaning tires, lapping mulled guilt oozing from the cleft your marriage makes between your eyes.

Pale girlfriends curse within your house’s walls and gnaw the nails on which your artworks hang like weapons. When your rub your demon lover’s scars, she rolls her Rs, and your reflection bobs, a shrunken head in her salivaslicked incisors. Then it’s kiss, kiss, kiss, your torsos grinding, hot gears misaligned and belching putrid smoke—just like the stars tonight. The blind mad god that built the engine of the world is giggling at its wreckage.

36

19 Lines on Ancestry My youngest sister’s into ancestry: we’re German, Irish, Danish, mostly. Dad and Mom had told us that. The geek in me, now three beers in, is paddling back to Hamlet, barking mad in Denmark’s rot. Love glows so wanly from his words. The Ghost, his father, goads him (Why do I keep typing “gods him”?).

Now Olivier’s popped up, bleach-blond, theatrical: our funhouse-mirrored GIFs disintegrate and shift. The silver screen?

Urn ash. So exeunt to ’66, with Dad in Vietnam, and Mom and I, up watching TV late: it’s Waiting for Godot, Mostel and Meredith a blur, my sisters long asleep. Ah, violins!

A playlist Haydn string quartet has slipped me back to me: I’m sixty, time-warped, tipsy, smiling at the nighttime window’s rain-streaked face I try to take a selfie of.

37

Nocturne (II) You’re in the kitchen, leaning on the counter, beer in front of you, dog at your feet, and trouble in your mind. Breasts pressed against the sliding door, the darkness is a succubus, inverted muse that has you disbelieving that a deck is there, then shaggy spruces, neighbor’s house, the woods, the high school football field, the university, downtown, then M-14 and US-23, the interstate, the road to anywhere, perception’s shadows decomposing so damned fast you doubt the Earth, its curvature.

You listen to a record by an artist that you love who’s died, your heart a kite in lightning that’s been lurking in the wiry wind. Your father gave you something in a dream last night: you can’t remember what.

No time for revelations now. Just ask of what you’ve lost: Why did you leave? Where have you gone? And are you ever coming back?

38

The Oak we sat beneath that night, the one that lost a limb six years before (I heard it crack and saw it drop when I was at home plate).

That oak is where we spoke the words of love (albeit drunk and horny), words that neither you nor I dare use in poems today: abstractions, nothing like the fire that glinted in your hair, your breast skin cool as silk, my stubbly beard that burned your neck. Much later, when you told me of the dark side, side you thought might be my best but not a side for you, I thought of coal, a bluesman’s voice, uranium, life-giving poison fueling any chance we have at art.

39

Romantic Deep in the woods today, the breeze is creaseless as a baby’s hands, the sky the blue of newborn irises. Cells’ births are ceaseless as their deaths: no paradox if true.

The dog and you make three. That unseen other?

Tension. Love. A daemon, in the olden times. That crossroads pine, your shadow brother, whispers while the sunset burns him golden.

Three crows caw. Your first dog, dead now, barked at every one she saw. They swoop, black-bright, then soar. Fanned myths and omens roil, blue-sparked, then flash—four parents’ graves, your wedding night.

Strong fancy is a taker. And a giver.

Nature’s left you crying by the river.

40

Sonnet for the Long Married #3 There ain’t no cure for love, sings Cohen on the playlist. Both dogs barking: hate the music? want a treat? You crank the sound and drink your meds, these cool strong beers. Linguine bubbling, damp dishtowel your epaulet: Commander of the Kitchen Sink. The rain, the time tick-ticking down, hung leashes drip, unfinished dissertation shelved, and Hamlet essays still to grade. Your wife still at the stylist’s: takes him eons. Darkened windows glint like sequined mirrors. All these years refracted and redacted, water droplets, life support. You wipe your hands and glasses: why so warm and wet? Love’s IV on slow drip.

41

Staring at a Mirror’s Back You’re using “you” in poems these days, the dreaded second person. So, you’ve found no way inside yourself—it’s just like staring at a mirror’s back—and “you” might blast a path?

Each new day, you re-enact a dimly lit creation myth. Ten thousand iterations ought to do the trick: from chaos, to an ever-morphing set of forms, to entropy.

The tragedies you love—Macbeth and Lear and Oedipus—have given you a glimpse of this, a life’s small arc refined to art.

Last night, the burgers sizzling on the grill, you sat cross-legged, oracular, and drank a beer. The revelation: shadows, smoke.

42

Time Ghost It’s Shostakovich on the playlist now.

Emotes like Mahler, but he’s closer to our zeitgeist: post-post irony in drag, bright light that mates with shadow. It’s all right.

I’m drinking beer, so mellow and dramatic, glasses sliding down my nose, scuffed dick and balls snugged tight within my briefs. My days stacked up like cards: don’t know the game. Or flapjacks I can never finish on a syrupy plate. I’m happier alone. For now.

Walk down the hall with me, my better self, and save your tears for beauty. Love, suck in your gut: someone good-looking’s looking. There.

Safe travels. See you on the other side.

43

Warm Ghosts Star-crossed, cross-gartered, thinking hard about dead bards. There’s music on and coffee left: my dendrites and my synapses spark stout as fuses treble-twined. My daydreams heft the borrowed stories hammered into forms beguiling and sublime: of villain, fool, and queen; of women bucking culture’s norms; young lovers reuniting; kings’ misrule; heroic ambiguities. Hot blood, cold tears commingle, pool to flood the worn boards of my psyche. Words, words, words: the thud of charged and fractured hearts; I’m healed, then torn, then whole, then wounded fresh again. We’re just warm ghosts: the verse might live; the rest is dust.

44

White Spaces you try so hard to make the ideal real but really you’re just tracing tracks on snowy sidewalks drips in dim mind-alleys of the betters that you trust such trysts now music cool and minimal pours vodka-clear from wireless speakers wife is gone a ball game’s on TV you’re drinking beer relax six decades of your life are in the can and night has cast its spell the windows echo mirrors of all vanity oh well the love you make the love you take the Beatles why are they your favorite it’s mouthfeel maybe but with Dylan they made art of pop you’ve only planted seeds in snow you think you’ll make another one or love another one or live another one clichés and pop Romanticism read or meditate or try this metaphor go shoot your ego in the head and finish that damn beer and cook some food two ears and one fat mouth so listen weigh your options weight your big head down and wait before you speak or make now Arvo Pärt is on the playlist crystalline white space such whiteness haunts so many words of Blake and Melville clear your mind’s debris tabula rasa belly of your spouse blank page or screen an open field a veined hand on the plow

45

Wonder Big world out there, presliced like bread sometimes.

Sometimes, like art or sex, it screams out, “I’m alive!”

Sometimes it squeaks along its seams just like that fat conductor’s tux: the thorny violin a cry.

And later, oh, pale curves of you.

The hotel windows framing moons.

46

Photos

47

Going Viral (1.3)

48

Going Viral (1.5) 49

Going Viral (1.7) 50

Going Viral (1.9)

51

Going Viral (1.13)

52

Going Viral (1.14)

53

Going Viral (2.5)

54

Going Viral (2.6)

55

Going Viral (2.7)

56

Going Viral (4)

57

Going Viral (6)

58

Going Viral (10) 59

Going Viral (13)

60

Going Viral (22) 61

Going Viral (25)

62

Going Viral (27) 63

Going Viral (36) 64

Going Viral (43) 65

Going Viral (48)

66

Going Viral (55) 67

Going Viral (59)

68

Going Viral (63)

69

Going Viral (64.1)

70

Going Viral (64.4) 71

Going Viral (64.6)

72

Four Writing Center Portraits

[Sharpie on cardstock]

73

Open Mic 74

BWR 19 (15) 75

BWR 20 (1) 76

BWR 20 (2) 77

BWR 20 (23) 78

BWR 20 (36) 79

BWR 20 (42) 80

BWR 20 (48) 81

BWR 21 (1) 82

BWR 21 (2) 83

BWR 21 (4)

84

BWR 21 (7)

85

BWR 21 (16)

86

BWR 21 (21) 87

BWR 21 (27)

88

BWR 21 (44)

89

BWR 21 (45) 90

BWR 21 (46) 91

Origins (1) 92

Origins (2) 93

Origins (5) 94

Origins (11) 95

Origins (15)

96

Origins (17)

97

Origins (19)

98

Origins (21)

99

Origins (23)

100

Origins (28)

101

Origins (30)

102

Origins (32)

103

Origins (35)

104

Origins (39)

105

Origins (40) 106

Winter Solstice in the Woods

107

Lit (1)

108

Lit (2)

109

Lit (3) 110

Lit (4) 111

Prose

112

Book Reviews Laverty, Christopher: The Ballad of Lorianna, Ever Brush Away the Sleep, To Winter, and Other Poems. Cyberwit.net, 2020. 68 pp.

One night I met a traveller, here from an oriental land; he little spoke, this wanderer, held a Shamisen in his hand.

His fingers danced across its strings, the music told of far-off things This is the lovely opening stanza of “The Shamisen,” one of 52 works in Christopher Laverty’s fine collection The Ballad of Lorianna, Ever Brush Away the Sleep, To Winter, and Other Poems. This stanza is emblematic of the book, which is grounded firmly in the aesthetic of the English Romantic poets. Take these examples from the title poems: Quaint Lorianna all adore; with love’s divine disease I sleepless pace, and thirst and bleed— yet can’t the pain appease.

--from “The Ballad of Lorianna” morning breaks—come see the dove joyful circle skies above— come climb mountains castle-crowned— view the silvered scene around.

--from “Ever Brush Away the Sleep” Winter—descending from your glacial throne, you cross the tremulous waters, laying siege with hands of ice to all that Summer’s grown, binding the barren landscape to your liege.

--from “To Winter” 113

So, yes, rhyme and meter dominate the collection as far as form goes; and, regarding content, Laverty makes good use of romantic love and nature worship.

However, he also visits darker regions of the sublime. Take these lines from “The Valley of Melancholia”: Still is the wind. With cries that fill the air, the haunted voices of the valley share their secrets awful and enthralling, of nameless sins and tales appalling Or these, from “The Children of the Serpent”: Where are your children, silent knights? To fields and hills they’re gone, there in orgies of sensation revelling; down pathless ways they have strayed. A kingdom rich with fruits forbidden they have won— late beneath the moon with songs and dance carousing in a craze.

Not all the poems are rooted in a timeless land of enchantment. "To Solitude" mentions traffic and smog, and “Two Cities” mentions neon lights. The fine sonnet “On Seeing Manchester at Dawn” features traffic, pavements “tired and littered,” and piled bins. Another sonnet is entitled “On the UK Leaving the EU.” In fact, the sonnets are my favorite poems in the book. I count 16 of them.

“To Beauty,” the opening poem in the book, is distinctly Keatsian. “Last Night” features a vision of a beloved other “still young, turning your head / so gracefully, and laughing—robed in white.” “The Pillar of Tears” gives voice to the nameless slaves who helped build empires. “Drink Not Too Deep” echoes Shelley’s warning of ephemerality in “Ozymandias.” In “On Waking in a Valley in Aveyron,” the poet’s heart is “rekindled like a dormant ember.” Indeed, readers of this book who are aligned with Laverty’s aesthetic will have the same experience. _____

114

Pollack, Frederick. Landscape with Mutant. Smokestack Books, 182 pp.

I had a vision: future readers reading and weeping over my crass, sardonic oeuvre, even resurrecting print and paper for its sake, seeing only sighs and love and fleeting beauty.

Thus ends Frederick Pollack’s “Opus Posthumous,” one of many superb poems in his excellent collection Landscape with Mutant. I think Pollack is his own best critic. Many of the poems in this book are sardonic (I’m not so sure they’re “crass”), but they are also intelligent, ironic, allusive, and keen to apprehend beauty, even though the worldview in them is dystopian. Reading this book, I was reminded of Kafka (mentioned in a couple of the poems), Vonnegut, and Philip K. Dick—and also of Leonard Cohen, especially his album The Future, the title song of which features variations on the refrain “I have seen the future, brother / It is murder.”

Indeed, Pollack is a critic—of the banality and brutality of contemporary society—but is smart and humane enough to make himself or his first-person speaker (a leftist artist-intellectual, I gather from the evidence of the poems) complicit in the horror. Take, as proof, these final lines from “Sad Café”: I took out my notebook and wrote the future. ...............................

Outside a homeless man, a member of the new International, knocked and sank to the ground beside the window, uttering those obscure remarks which, if listened to, would not have to be made.

Or these, from “Day Eight of Trump”: Rush-hour begins, ever earlier; the cars 115

along Macarthur hopefully alert for children, speed traps, and the forecast rain.

You can be certain you’re an enemy.

It’s your choice whether also to be a threat.

Or these, from “Recognition,” in which the speaker imagines himself as an amateur clown at a children’s party (a telling metaphor in itself): I can already hear them crying at my gig—from ambivalence, frustration? Perhaps the new horror is not being dressed as a clown, only a grownup.

However, this book (which, I should mention, includes more than 100 poems) also offers “sighs and love and fleeting beauty.” The surprisingly tender “For P., ill” closes with Feeling hurt myself, I find myself wondering how one could hurt everyone. it seems unfair that only the top .001 % can do that.

I’d kill them all if it would make you better.

In “The Print,” Pollack lets an old man (a version of himself, perhaps?) do most of the talking, as he ruminates on the “something, someone beautiful” portrayed in a dim sketch within a dusty frame. And there are the paired “hotel” poems that I would like to think are autobiographical: “Elitist, Motel 6,” which gives us a current portrait of the artist, who has “been so busy lately. . . And / successful, in my way”; and “The Colours of the Roofs,” a portrait of the artist as a “sensitive young man / roaming alone and fateless with no aim / but experience through a foreign city, . . . / . . . a negligible figure.” Also moving (and if not autobiographical at least metaphorical) are two science fiction-tinged pieces in which the monster is the protagonist. In the book’s title poem, the speaker surmises, 116

Under the grey still sky, I’d collate my notes. The mutation doesn’t know it carries the future in its genes; it only feels like a freak, like one of the failures littering the range. ................................

I have plans for universal empathy and forgiveness if I am allowed to breed.

Then, in “Godzilla,” the iconic city-wrecking reptile assumes almost tragic status: properly understood, [he] might connect with his audience, the screamers, the soldiers—their great secret theme, too, is Innocence. And sometimes he voices the cry of any outsider talent: Look for what’s in my work instead of what isn’t!

Again, this poet is his own best critic. There is so much in Frederick Pollack’s Landscape with Mutant that the reader needn’t grieve over what isn’t.

_____

Sweet, John. landscape w/ solitude / modigliani’s gun. Holy&intoxicated Publications, 2019. Broadside.

—. approximate wilderness. Flutter Press, 2016. Paperback, 41 pp.

—. a nation of assholes w/ guns. Scars Publications, 2015. Paperback, 32 pp.

In the author’s note on the back cover of his gritty and powerful collection approximate wilderness, John Sweet speaks of the book’s poems as “not defeatist but cathartic.” I think this description fits all three of the works under 117

consideration in this review. Sweet’s poems are edgy, violent, and chaotic. To oversimplify, I would say they are in the Bukowski mode: with the form being short, jagged lines, with little capitalization or punctuation; and with the content being sex, booze, depravity, and squalor, with a sprinkling of high-art and popculture references. However, Sweet’s world is his own: many of the poems feature war (whether literal or metaphorical) as a backdrop, and frequently they are set in a chilly, post-industrial North. Other characteristic motifs include missing persons (often female and pregnant), guns, adultery, lonely children, and fragmented Christian imagery. In some respects, this mayhem is Sweet’s critique of America.

He makes this clear in the final lines of his poem “rise” (from approximate wilderness): in the end it’s some 19 year old asshole w/ a knife cutting open the animal’s belly just to watch it bleed its life out just to feel the crystal meth rush of mindless annihilation just to be so goddamn american Nevertheless, the poems are cathartic, and—I like to believe—art beats death every time. Take the final lines of Sweet’s “litany of concentric circles” (from approximate wilderness): static poured out of the hole in his heart and he said the poem was the important thing said the gun was just a metaphor but he wouldn’t stop bleeding laughed when i showed him what i’d written and told me i’d better try again _____ 118

zetataurus press | ann arbor mi usa | tzman2012@gmail.com