GAS Featured Poet: Wayne Russell

 

Wayne Russell is a creative jack of all trades, master of none. Poet, rhythm guitar player, singer, artist, photographer, and author of the poetry books Where Angels Fear via Guerilla Genius Press, and the newly released Splinter of the Moon via Silver Bow Publishing, they are both available for purchase on Amazon.

The Man in the Blue Cadillac 

In hindsight

I could have been a statistic

I could have been a cold case

that rainy day 

walking back from school

to that loveless home

in 1975.

It was just a short walk 

about half a mile

but I was only five

and the distance seemed

much further.

Out of nowhere

came a blue Cadillac

he pulled up alongside me

he rolled down his window 

"Where are you going?"

he asked in an accent that 

sounded vaguely northern.

It started raining a bit harder 

and I just started walking to get away

from this stranger.

We hadn't heard of "stranger danger"

in 75' all that much.

Kids that disappeared often ended up

on the backs of milk cartons

and you read about them

at the school cafeteria while at breakfast

but that wasn't until Etan Patz in 1979.

"The milk carton campaign" was only started by 

the Ragan administration in the early 80's.

The man in the blue Cadillac was so nice

he politely insisted that I get in the front

passenger side 

as the rain grew heavier

I caved and hopped in

I could have been that kid on the evening news

and the poor boy that was the talk of the town

for a while. 

That poor kid from Florida-

I could have been the pre-Ethan Patz and Adam Walsh

but my guardian angel was pulling a double shift

that day.

And the man in the blue Cadillac

just turned out to be a good Samaritan

doing a good deed to a frightened gen-x kid

that was caught up in a rainstorm

on his way home from kindergarten.

GAS Featured Poet/Artist: Eric Brunet

 Eric Brunet is a poet, photographer, graphic artist, and satirist. He lives in the Mission Valley of western Montana and, despite recent mobility challenges due to a hereditary neurological disease, continues to venture into the wilderness. His photography has been featured in various galleries and magazines. His artwork, poetry, and satire has been published in a variety of literary journals and online sites. 

Rise

Catch Yourself

Not being able to stop thinking is an affliction,

entirely normal, and the reason for sleepless nights

in contemplation of glaring algebra teachers

and pink horizons speckled with approaching drones.

Better to be a wailing child stopped instantly

by a perfectly-arced dirt bomb to the head.

I grew up with two boys who once shot each other 

in the ass with a shotgun just to gauge severity. 

They were living in the now, breathless with laughter. 

The greater part of human pain is unnecessary.

You'll need to do some remodeling. Rip up that red shag carpet

and put in a skylight. The steps to meditation should not be fuzzy

or poorly lit. Wear shoes with good traction.

The true nature of space and time is slippery.

As children, we learned the nuances of a canoe

because we didn't want to drown. As adults, we own

canoes that collect dust in the rafters of cluttered garages.

Like drunken archeologists, we prop ladders

at impossible angles to retrieve relics from a reckless past.

Catch yourself says the guru in you. Stop thinking

for a few moments and breathe. No mind. Just breath.

The universe will never say It's not you, it's me. 

Unmarked Snow

Badminton In A Tempest

I should inform you I am armed,

anodynes have not slowed me.

Here’s the thing: it’s dark.

Remedies have been a distraction.

Those things that seemed harmless

are now fully in charge. I bend

backwards to the river, to wash

my face or drown. It started

with wordplay, a dictionary fetish.

After years of obsession, entire cities

have been reduced to confetti. 

Thoughts are birds in a windstorm,

swirls of feather unseen in the gloom,

announcing themselves by touching your face.

Kicking Horse

Sacred Path of the Warrior

Had a case of the Mondays so I caught a fish

with my bare hands, chased a tornado,

and rode on the world’s biggest rollercoaster.

Next day: bungee jumping from a hot air balloon,

Tuesday is spaghetti night and roller disco.

Arrested for stealing a motorcycle on hump day

but posted bail and saw both a solar and lunar eclipse.

Learned Swahili on Thursday, got a tattoo,

and went skinny dipping at the aquarium.

Built a catapult on Friday and shouted “Drinks are on me!”

at a dive bar on the wrong side of the tracks.

Spent most of Saturday creating a cult

and experiencing weightlessness. Milked a cow.

Sunday was a day of rest under the vast silence

of stars, most of them unnamed.  

Last Mile

GAS Featured Poet: Jane Downing

 Australian poet Jane Downing’s work has appeared in journals at home and internationally, including Meanjin, Cordite, Canberra Times, Rabbit, Not Very Quiet, Social Alternatives, Otoliths, Live Encounters, e.ratio, Last Stanza, and Best Australian Poems. Her collection, ‘When Figs Fly’ (Close-Up Books) was published in 2019. She can be found at janedowning.wordpress.com

Dashed Hopes

The blowflies are talking to me

from the window sill

sounding like a radio 

                        badly tuned –

words fuzzed beyond meaning

resorting to a morse code

of short headlong chops

against the glass pane

                       the long dashes

my answering cracks

against the brick wall of the day

A Song That Never Ends

When you are Bambi’s mother

you know your death

is necessary

for the plot

which does not stop

you planning your revenge

             turning your doe eyes

on the audience

for a subliminal second

brimming with remember me

to every little girl

who

growing up to be a mother

may not yet acquiesce

to the tropes of the narrative arc

 

 

Su Zi's Review of DOMESTIC BODIES by Jennifer Ruth Jackson

    The lineage of modern American poetry is now a century of voices, some of which have been levitated into the canon—the voices we find most anthologized, most taught to students. As scholars find perhaps marginalized voices from history and that work is seen anew, out of its time of creation, certain aspects of the canon gain in wider recognition. Our cultural sense of discovering marginalized voices and amplifying that work is familiar enough when the artist is dead; however, the living artist is a conundrum in the tempestuous weather of social expectation. Taboo topics, although the pillars of the American canon at a historically safe remove, challenge the humanity of us all. 

    What is taboo is a culture can vary, but globalization has homogenized differences into what is sometimes cute exploration—a new type of food, public pajamas; yet certain taboos seem entrenched in westernization and often invert previously revered social positions into ones of stigma; from wise elder to covid disposable. We do not discuss the covid disposable, and what history makes of this will not glow up the humanity of our current culture. We do not discuss the covid disposable even at cultural events, which exclude even as they publish photos of the very throngs that are the core of jeopardy. The covid disposable are the disabled and the not-yet-disabled, the most vulnerable among us, and their American voices ought not to be shunned now, as they too sing our canon.

    Among those whom we now teach as our literary giants was Wallace Stevens, who has not been as readily cited as being as influential as other modernist poets; yet this influence is readily perceivable in the recent publication of Jennifer Ruth Jackson’s Domestic Bodies (Querencia 2023).  Stevens himself did not bother with literary throngs and was recognized after years of work. Jackson’s acknowledgments page too shows years of work, with individual poems finding publication some ten years before collected publication. Such career trajectories are common enough in poetry, as in the arts overall; however, Jackson’s work resonates with aspects of Stevens’ work that are distinct. This resonance can be seen in the poems “Absentee Father” and “Those Who Inherit”, which begin, respectively, with  “Pause, cut the applause off mid-cheer/And screams mod-screech like a bird of prey” (46) and “Come, hungry hippos, another of your ranks has died”(52) that has a metrical echo of Steven’s widely anthologized poem “Emperor of Ice Cream”.  Jackson’s meter throughout this work has a musicality, a tendency towards line emphasis of the quadratic familiar in our culture.

    Jackson employs the Objects of Americana, a path now traditional in modern poetry, and recognizable as American highways, family dinners, bathtubs. In this use of the prosaic, Jackson often allows the metaphor to become symbolic, the poetic delight of a tightly constructed collage, a moment of being privy to the internal experience of living the poem. Jackson is also overtly disabled in this text, and the juxtaposition of that taboo within the framework of an American life will certainly challenge any conditioned thinking. In the arc of the work, Jackson introduces us to disability both in sensual hints—as in “You On The Palate” begins with “Let me taste you again and discover/ (with this chemo mouth) what flavor” (36)—and the medical nightmare of disability “I’d Rather Be Dead Than In Your Shoes” (26). Furthermore, Jackson’s text centers an identity poem “The Word Is ‘Disabled’”, that begins with “Yes, I am that cripple with calloused/knees and suede-soft soles” (56).  The fifth stanza refines this phrase to ‘I am that wheelchair, no name or gender/when you talk about the space I take.”  While the identity becomes one of other to object, Jackson’s point is made through the subtleties of alliteration, rhyme, and other auditory repetitions.

    This is a densely poetic work, well-constructed and well-worthy of inclusion in any scholarly consideration of Steven’s influence—intentional or not. In our era of challenges both to our curriculum and our personal health, Jackson’s work offers a well-crafted consideration from a point of view that has been held taboo for far too long.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.

GAS Featured Poet: Jim Murdoch

 

Jim Murdoch lives down the road from where they filmed

Gregory’s Girl which, for some odd reason, pleases him no end. 

He’s been writing poetry for fifty years for which he blames Larkin. 

Who probably blamed Hardy. Jim has published two books 

of poetry, a short story collection and four novels.

 

 

The Ship of Theseus

 

 

There are many kinds of memories,

wallows, flickers, triggers and icons,

but the most vital of all are anchors,

tethers, ties that bind us to our past.

 

Some refer to them as proofs which,

is probably a more appropriate term

as proofs require outside verification

and Reason cannot be bought off.

 

The opposite of remembering should

be dismembering I would've thought

since remembering is reassembling.

Now if only it were as simple as that.

 

At what point do you stop being you?

I'm not the child I once was but insist

I'm the same person despite the fact

we don't have one atom in common.

 

What was definite is now indefinite.

I don't remember the bench we sat on

but as one bench is much like another

does it really matter which bench?

 

Memories, like every part of a human,

are short-lived and in a constant state

of flux but there is a limit and in time

even anchors get displaced by beliefs.

 

Beliefs supplant memories with ease.

Like stem cells they become whatever

they're needed to be and who can tell?

I believe we sat on a bench you and I.

 

I believe. I believe.

 

 

 

The Week of Indescribable Things

 

(for Carrie)

 

There are many things people describe as

indescribable that are eminently describable.

 

Vomit, diarrhoea, acrid piss: all are

easily describable. We just don’t want to.

 

What I want to describe,

what should be easy to describe,

 

is the pleasure water provided me at the time,

cold water running over my hands.

 

My hands are not sore but

hands know how to read the pain.

 

Afterthought

 

There were other indescribable things this week,

the way my wife cared for, endured with and simply

endured me. No words. No words. No words.

 

As she sat with me as I cried as I read

the first part of the poem to her in the dark.

No words. No words. No words.

 

 

Bishop, Bukowski and Me

 

 

The reason my poetry disappointed me

for so long

is it wasn’t great.

I thought poetry should be great.

Not necessarily great thoughts

     (not everything’s that profound)

but do great things with words.

 

Took me sixty years to realise

all poetry needs to be is poetry.

 

Occasionally,

like a Philly cheesesteak or a meat sub,

it’ll be great

     (more by fluke than design

          (some happy confluence of events))

and that’s great, really great

but, hey, even a not-so-great Mac and cheese

fills a hole, right?

 

People imagine Bishop was a better poet

than Bukowski and, technically, yeah, maybe.

What does “better” even mean?

 

I should stop beating myself up over this.