GAS Featured Poet: JB Mulligan

JB Mulligan has published more than 1100 poems 

and stories in various magazines, and has published 

two chapbooks: The Stations of the Cross and 

THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS, as well as 2 e-books: 

The City of Now and Then, and A Book of Psalms 

(a loose translation), plus appearances in more than 

a dozen anthologies.

 wasp’s nest

petite chinese lantern   wasp’s nest
in the bus kiosk
                            the bottom tapered
completed since yesterday

my father mixed french furnishings
with oriental vases   black lacquer cabinets
all sorts of crap
when my friend   on honeymoon
in Paris   visited the Louvre
saw one vastly overcrowded room
he told his bride
I didn’t know that JB’s dad
had an apartment here

(family joke   all jokes
are family   some just have
a larger family for them)

webs of strands
words   feelings   memories
an image like a fierce kiss
bind the world together
for us   to us
everything always new
strange and familiar
ours

what binds the world to the world
we don’t know   just offer equations
as if measurement were answer

wasp’s nest   lit with life
a wasp lands   enters   ignorant
no   innocent
of history and love
busy with body matters
the world building the world
delicate and angry

somewhere   everywhere
a Chinese lantern
glows in the gathering light





late in the Empire

("The winning made no sense.
No one admitted defeat."
Kirmen Uribe, translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin
https://poems.com/poem/it-came-late/)

They fell like bombs from the sky,
birds wounded by flight,
doomed to ravenous earth.

The flags were more important
than bandages or shrouds,
than diapers hanging from lines

while flocks of captured mothers
trembled in body bags,
their eyes like mice in rubble,

furtive, starving, stone
beneath the wings of owls
like shadows of shadows in night.

The child of many fathers,
an orphan in defeat,
screamed at the side of the road,

its hunger buried beneath
the rumble of trucks, the anthems
of empty promises,

the high howling of jets,
the eyes and somber voices
of men in tailored suits.




maybe a soul

Deadyellow gems
and rustrubies
clutched in the fists
of September trees
across the hills
in commingled rivers,
touching one breeze
brushing all years.




Iz
(for Sean)

Billions of years of creatures dying
from small and struggling bags of gunk
to swim and slither, to meat and wings,
to here (and therefore precious) us,
and something close to a dying knows
sharp love and pain, the cut of a cry
things utter in the fist of death.

Ages of coming, hesitant, in
from dark to warmth, to food, to hunt
the quick (but rarely quick enough),
long-tailed spoilers of the crops,
to live within walls, or close outside,
have led, through streams of births and deaths,
to one among so many cats.

He walked his crooked broke-cat walk
(he did from birth, as did his brother,
both of them brought in from out on the deck
beneath which so many pets are buried)
until he yowled and dropped into empty,
through countless brawls and purrs and nipping
scattered behind him and in our hearts

and this, perhaps, is what we get
from all of them we hold and scold:
warmth to take into the world
against the chill of circumstance,
the cold of those with heat within
we'll never touch, who bear their own
undying embers beyond each death.

 

---

GAS Featured Poet: JB Mulligan

 

JB Mulligan has published more than 1100 poems and stories in various magazines over the past 45 years, and has had two chapbooks: The Stations of the Cross and THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS, as well as 2 e-books: The City of Now and Then, and A Book of Psalms (a loose translation). He has appeared in more than a dozen anthologies, and was recently nominated for the Pushcart Prize anthology.

traces

Tire tracks left on the highway weeks ago,
that swerve toward the shoulder, onto it,
holding, holding, then sharply back onto asphalt
just before the pillar of the overpass, out
to the outside lane then back all the way onto
the asphalt of the exit before the tracks
fade like a long exhalation after breath
was held in the clench of the lungs too long,
and drivers note it, almost as a duty
that one who clings to the rope of breath
owes to another clutching at rigging
in the wind and dark spray of the sea,
knowing that the water can hide its reefs
and there are only so many ports till you drown.

riverboat

The boat is leaking, but it keeps chesting down the river toward an unseen ocean.
The wood is rotted in places, and repair crews curse and sweat, saw and hammer,
pause to tear at a sandwich, drink a beer, then continue,
while others repaint the gilded globes and railings and the blind wooden figurehead,
a once-lovely woman with a sword pointed toward the future.

People walk the decks and halls of this floating city like urban streets or dusty roads,
going from this life to this life to this life, links in a chain of days and events,
and some of those walkers are chained by the ghosts of chains tight on their necks
or loose in their thin, alert fists, and by the real chains forged in the past
that shackle the future as it sails into now, chains as real as the echoes
of a voice crying out for air, for water, for life, for the end of the oppressor's
fists and clubs and knees and dogs and guns, the brute constellations of pain
spinning in the dying sky of a child's vision as it vanishes.

Bodies slide in sheets off the boat, or are tossed overboard, or leap into the current
to float away, free and dead, chained and dead, alive and dead and dead and dead.
Hands like withering roots cling to the rails, to ropes that extend like vines
from the dead, flowering wood of the ship.  Hands throw deck chairs to the swimmers
to help them or to hurt them.  Hands lift cocktail glasses and salute the sunset,
the wisdom of the Captain, the sturdiness of the creaking, leaking ship, and themselves.
Deckhands scurry here and there on tasks, sweating and cursing, hungry, thirsty,
too busy to hate the bloated ship's officers, the pale, larded first class passengers
like plucked chickens in pastel suits and glittery gowns, among whom servers wander
bearing trays loaded with choice pieces of anonymous lives on wedges of buttered toast,
smiling as they look at the swollen throats like over-ripened fruit awaiting the knife.

The boat surges on, cutting through water that bleeds sludge and poison and plastic bottles.
Its engine vomits smoke, clatters and screeches and labors to lift pistons and pull and push
bars of oil-crusted metal, tended by oil-sticky men and women who feed it coal and gasoline
and lives that will end with oil-crusted lungs vomiting smoke, gasping and laboring to breathe.

Flags and pennants festoon the boat, rattle in the sky at dawn and sunset.
Trumpets announce its passing to turtles in the reeds and deer nibbling the bushes.
Covered wagons and trains and Greyhound buses move along the riverbanks
in lives long gone and here and to come.  The boat moves on, relentless,
as if it thought it believed it would never end, but felt the Sword of Time
itching the back of its neck, and the end of all possibilities.

The blissful and ignorant river carries the boat like a small child on its back
in the slow restless rush to the inevitable sea, unbounded to the eye,
as open as the sky to the soul.  This hunger for largeness, for a time
endless as sea and sky, of chances without horizons or chains, is in the hold
of the boat, and flitters in the rooms and down the corridors, and dances with the music
in the ballroom at night, where people spin like constellations or the wheel
in the casino, where lights flicker like flames.  This hunger is what the people consume,
and what the ship consumes, and what emits from the smokestack as clouds of black gas
that break into bird-shapes and shatter, while the gulls and hawks wheel
forever above the boat, crying like the lost, silent like the hunter.

A man and a woman stand at the railing, looking through all of the sky for hope.
Among the clouds, the waving leaves of trees on shores , the birds, the smoke,
the visions that spring up inside like roots and tendrils, they'll find what's there.

The voice of the far-away sea reaches the boat, and fills it like breath for the living.