A Review of Brian Rihlmann’s NIGHT AT MY THROAT by Heidi Blakeslee

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    I wanted to sit down and read a couple of poems from this collection to get a feel for what I was about to get into, but that was not meant to be.  One became ten, ten became twenty, and before long I had consumed the entire book like a tube of Pringles.  

I then realized that what I had before me was a looking glass into the soul of Bukowski’s son.  If Bukowski had a son who was hardworking, hard-drinking, and a lover of broads, then this is him.  

The poetry has central themes that are relatable: tenacity, inherited mental health problems, complexities of human interaction, wisdom, and broads. This writing drew me in first with a masterful use of atmospheric metaphor.  Rihlmann’s world is at turns bleak and lovely, and always true.

One of the reasons why Bukowski fans are as such is because of the humor interwoven between the pain and chaos of his lines.  “Night at my throat” delivers tough moments in such a way that makes me think that Rihlmann’s eyes are twinkling as he writes.  Of course, the other side of twinkling eyes is insanity.  Despite this, Rihlmann works the line well so that in the end we’re rooting for him.  Even if he is crazy.  Even if we all are.

“Night at my throat,” published by Pony One Dog Press, is a worthy traveling companion for anyone looking for some poetry that will make you think about life, death, and most importantly, the journey.

From “Hoarder”

I used to watch shows

about hoarders

and think my god....

how can you live

like that?

in houses filled

with rats or cats

in houses packed

with the accumulated junk

of a lifetime

in houses with plumbing

that doesn’t work anymore

so you shit in plastic bags

and throw them in the basement

I mean

what the fuck

is wrong

with you people?

but now

two plus years sober

as I daily navigate

the junkyard and sewer

of my own mind

scraping congealed puddles

of who knows what

off the floor 

under white hot spotlights

of teetotaler awareness…

I don’t wonder

about that anymore

Brian Rihlmann comes out of a tradition that seems to be fading in our country, that of the self-taught poet. His experiences in jobs as varied as car washes, horse stables, construction and warehousing to bartending, truck driving, working as a personal trainer and commercial photographer, just to name a few, have shaped his work and provided an inexhaustible source of material.

His broad work experiences and wide travels in the United States have made him an authentic observer of American values and life. He writes with conviction about racism, the glorification of money, the disrespect for the elderly and the poor, and about the American gun culture. He is currently sheltering in place near Reno, Nevada. He is the author of a previous collection of poems called Ordinary Trauma and is widely published online.

GAS Featured Artist: Andrea E. Lodge

    Since Andrea went to a Catholic university and is very much NOT Catholic, she was able to fill her Religion class spots with any Humanities courses she wanted to take, resulting in her getting a minor in Art.  She loves all art forms but is really into decoupage, collage, mixed media, and painting.  She has recently been doing her paintings with gouache and been focusing on portraits, mostly of famous people.  The portraits are meant to look like photos that have been put through filters.  Though she doesn't care for the title of "A Creative," she has been one as far back as she can remember, making tiny books and creating things out of found objects since she could hold a pencil and resist gluing her hands together.

Amy

Tori

Joker

Madonna

Clothesline

 

 Andrea E. Lodge resides in Philadelphia with her husband and two disabled cats; Budgie, with only three legs, no tail, constantly drooling, and Loki, AKA Poki, AKA, Pokapotamus (because he weighs 20 pounds), a Scottish fold with only one folded ear.  She studied English/Secondary Education at Holy Family University and taught middle and high school Writing and Literature after graduating.  She is now a full-time writer and and artist.

Andrea is on Deviant Art and Instagram.

GAS Featured Poet: Arthur Broomfield

 

Dr. Arthur Broomfield is a poet and Beckett scholar from County Laois, Ireland.  His works include The Empty Too : language and philosophy in the works of Samuel Beckett [Cambridge Scholars’ Publishing 2014], three full collections of poetry, Cold Coffee at Emo Court [Revival 2016] The Giants’ Footsteps at the Rock of Dunamaise [Revival 2019] and Ireland Calling [Revival 2020]. Arthur has been a featured poet in Krysia Jopek’s Diaphenous Micro.

Fudge

Today I want to thrash those dandelions,

the colonising buttercups, glaring at me,

the ironic beauty of the milk thistle.

I won’t dig the dun earth

with my heavy-duty mattock

or disturb the sad soil

with the spade bought for the event.

Today I’ll walk in slow time

down the bog lane,

I’ll pick a bunch of prickly furze,

purple foxgloves, meadowsweet,

listen to the double bass coo coos

of the woodquest,

the dirge from the rookery,

and carve your name on the flagstone

where you used to lie on hot days.

I’ll sanctify the spot

with scents from our walks,

sip sparkling water

and wait for the dawn chorus,

the morning star.

GAS Featured Artist: Soheyl Dahi

 

Soheyl Dahi was born in Iran in a small town on the shores of Caspian Sea. After graduating from University of Leeds in England, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1979. He has published several books of poetry and a volume of short stories through Bottle of Smoke Press in New York. He now writes and paints full time. Soheyl has won awards and exhibited his paintings nationally. A new website featuring his paintings is under construction.

1) I've known you as a poet since the late 80s, when did you start painting and what inspired you to do so?

SD: Writing and painting came to me at the same time. At a young age, I realized very quickly that my escape route from my unhappy childhood in Iran was going to be paved through the arts. So a lot of my time was spent in my room drawing or writing. 

As a writer and painter I am largely self-taught -- other than 3-4 art classes at San Francisco Art Institute, I have no formal art training. But I have been studying art history and painting on my own quite seriously for the past 30 years or so. Every day that I paint, I'm confronted with the fact that there is so much more to learn.

2) What is your medium?  Do you only paint on paper you have made? 

SD: I started with oil paint but like many artists I switched to acrylic paint. My work is small in size, about 8x11 inches. I mostly use hand-made paper imported from Kathmandu, Nepal. The paper is uneven and somewhat fragile which to me mirrors real life -- now more than ever. 

3) Which artists are an influence on you?

SD: My interest in art is wide open. I appreciate artists as varied as Emil Nolde to Cy Twombly and everything in between. The work has to speak to me at some deep level. One of the early painters that fascinated me was Francis Bacon. His figures, always situated inside a small room, touched me a great deal. Years later, I finally saw his masterpiece, Painting, 1946 at NY MOMA. I think I stood in front of it like an hour and studied every brush stroke. Nolde has been a great source of inspiration especially nowadays since I am working a lot on land/seascapes. I am also influenced by the painters in the school that became known as the Bay Area Figurative. I think geography had something to do with it since I have lived in the Bay Area (mostly San Francisco) since 1979. Their use of bright colors which must have been shocking at the time (1950s) liberated my palette. Elmer Bischoff, David Park, James Weeks and others were all artists that I have been able to see and study their works often.

4) Do you ever write poems to go with your paintings?  If so, an example...

I don't. I see the two activities as totally separate. But someone like Lawrence Ferlinghetti can pull it off successfully (most of the time) and I'm fine with it when I see it done well by other artists. 

The Day After

California Burning

Evening

A slideshow of Soheyl's work is presented in GAS 10.  Also one of his paintings was used as the thumbnail for the show on YouTube. 

View it here:  Soheyl Dahi's slide show.  The accompanying music is by Emocat (Heidi Blakeslee who interviews poetry books on this blog).~Belinda Subraman

Ekphrasis Prose Poem Collaboration by M.A. Blickley and Zoe Anastassiou

Photos by Zoe Anastassiou

Mother’s Milk

by

M.A. Blickley

    My lips tremble as if I am about to cry.  Please let your mother’s milk steel me against the animal I become when my brain confuses intellectual arousal with physical pleasure.

    Why do I nurse wounds that flow from the expectations of others?  Sometimes it feels like I’m the suckling of a tin woman who warns me she has no heart, yet dopamine builds with each puckered kiss swallowed in humiliation or spit back in defiance. 

    You lactate a complex flow of contradictions that dribbles down my chin with the shame of a stain.  I want to forget the day I found that first red stain on my nine year old’s Wonder Woman panties.  Terrified, I run upstairs to tell Nana.  My gentle grandmother slaps me across my face. 

    I cry, “Why did you hit me?”  Nana says, “Ask your mother when she comes home from work.”  

    The moment I hear your key click in the keyhole I run to the door.  When I speak, you slap my face too.  You, who never laid on a hand on me.  Why?  You shrug. “I don’t know.  It’s what mothers do.  That’s what Nana did to me.” 

    Why doesn’t your mother’s milk offer me the nourishment and immunity from judging myself as being nothing more than my menstrual flow?  From fertility to maternity to menopause, must I believe that I am simply what I bleed?  

    Your milk sours in my mouth whenever you try to convince me your slap was done with love to awaken me from my childhood slumber.  I was nine years old. 

    If I’m ever blessed to one day suckle my own daughter, I will offer up a kiss, not a slap, when she comes to me with her first red stain.  I will celebrate her menstrual flow as sacred, not shameful, as it honors her passage from childhood, and will continue to do so right up to her old age.  

    And should someone ever claim her blood is a curse, I will ask why is it painful to be reminded of your youth each month?

Zoe Anastassiou is half Greek half Australian, born in London and educated in England and now lives in NYC as a working professional Actress. She works in Theatre, Film. TV, and Voiceover, is also a Host, as well as what she likes to call a "365 Blogger". Zoe has a knack for dialects so is often hired as a Dialect Coach in addition to performing as many nationalities. http://www.zoeanastassiou.com/

Mark Blickley is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center.  His videos, Speaking in Bootongue and Widow’s Peek: The Kiss of Death, currently represent the United States in the 2020 year-long international world tour of Time Is Love: Universal Feelings: Myths & Conjunctions, organized by esteemed African curator, Kisito Assangni. It opened last February in Madrid.

GAS Featured Poet: Krysia Jopek

 Krysia Jopek’s novel Maps and Shadows (Aquila Polonica, 2010) won a Silver Benjamin Franklin award in historical fiction. Her chapbook Hourglass Studies (Crisis Chronicles, 2017), a sequence poem in twelve sections, was nominated for a 2018 Pushcart in Poetry. She has published poems in BlazeVox, Columbia Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Redactions, and The Wallace Stevens Journal, among other literary journals. She is the Founding Editor of diaphanous micro, an e-journal of literary and visual art.

SHADOW PUPPETS

We were thin shadow puppets in another country broken by wind.

There were rumors of biological warfare, laboratories of losses.

We didn’t have the right connections to get home on time or publish manifestos.

The quarantine proved to be a drama of the absurd, a sandbox too small.

Unexpected kindnesses decorated small spaces.

The light through the stone walls found ways inside us.

We lacked the confidence of performers, the artist approaching the canvas or text.

A paper-thin ship stuck in an ornate bottle misses the sea.

Our inner horsepower went restless and lazy simultaneously, a paralysis of movement—yet rampant worry.

Icarus was not a fool to want to be near the sun; he just misjudged the distance.

We hungered for food prepared by our mothers who left us.

Our fathers would tell us to be brave until this strange state of affairs was over—

the shipwreck of the singular on the cliffs of shadows.

Until then, an ancient chorus praying in a language we didn’t know

Permeated our parched skin with haunting sounds, and syllables.

 

 

WATERLOGGED BIRDS

The abstract paintings and sculptures untangled lost music.

The maestro’s hands transformed waterlogged birds. He knew.

The book the poet had been writing became too intense to hold.

Pages could be ripped out and folded for paper ships. 

One match could take the whole fleet out.

Nothing is frozen externally, at least.

Too much is broken—the flowerpots, the left panel of the privacy wall, Buddha’s mossy chin, the rusted indoor table on the patio, the cat door, mantras for composure.

The scientist worked long hours researching a pill for heartache, for moving to the top of someone’s list.

The uninitiated will not understand.

One became very tired of being a pronoun.

GAS Featured Poet: Chris Bodor

Chris Bodor is a first generation American. He was born in 1967 in Connecticut to an English mother and a Hungarian father. After working for ten years in film production and audio-visual services in New York City, he moved to Florida in 2003. He was asked to start up a monthly poetry reading in August of 2009, on the last Sunday of every month in St. Augustine, Florida. During the past 25 years, his poems have appeared in many independent, small, and micro-press publications, such as the Lummox Journal, FM Quarterly, and Old City Life. Bodor is the Editor-In-Chief of the international literary journal A.C. PAPA (which stands of Ancient City Poets, Authors, Photographers, and Artists). 

File Cabinet Full of Sins

At the Good Friday service

members of the parish

wrote their sins on paper

and one after another

they nailed their confessions

to the wooden cross

set up near the altar.

After the mass

before I cleaned the carpet

and swept out the narthex

I removed each piece of paper from the cross

and placed them in a small plastic bag.

The anonymous sins of the congregation

are locked in my second floor office

in a file cabinet 

near the paint cans 

next to the dust mop

and the broken vacuum cleaner.

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