GAS Featured Artist and Poet: Jeremy Szuder

Jeremy Szuder (he/him) lives in a tiny apartment with his wife, two children and two cats. He works in the evenings in a very busy restaurant, standing behind a stove, a grill, fryers and heating lamps, happily listening to hours of hand selected music and conjuring ideas for new art and poetry in his head. When his working day ends and he enters his home in the wee hours, he likes to sit down with a glass of wine and record all the various words and images that bear fruit within his mind. Jeremy Szuder only sets the cage doors free when the work begins to pile up too high. In this life, Szuder makes no illusions of being a professional artist in any way, shape, or form.

https://jeremyszuder.wordpress.com/

Son Of A Chance

Born from the body of a teenage girl,          

backbone still hardening.

Born swimming quickly

against the riptide of addictive tensions,

through oceans of alcohol,

and punctured veils smoked grey,

through sugar hurricanes spinning inside her

and not much water to speak of.

Instructions for mothering upon birth, yes, 

that would have been great.

Left instead with a whole lot of questions.

But the answer seemed to be that of;

“let him live”,

even if it came with the care tag 

of being passed along to a more

able bodied family, 

      

which was ruled out 

once teenage momma saw

determination and majesty in baby eyes.

Born sleeping wherever rain could not lick us,

sometimes sleeping under the steering wheel

of a Volkswagen, 

sometimes crashing at Grandpas home,

or the house of whoever had 

the good drugs that day.

Born biding time and PUSHING teeth 

through gum to bite the nipple of depression, 

        

no, scratch that, I mean, desperation.

Born wondering why the prophets of our times

would have wanted to do a gig like this 

more than once.

Born spinning clocks and tearing calendars,

waiting for the orchestra pit of my mother's 

body as instrument,

to finish tuning up or down

so as to allow this son of a chance to conduct

the symphony of archaic existence.

Says mother-“Listen to the sounds of my song 

play in the background of everything

you do, everyday of your life……………”

Like you,

dear reader,

I too will be

hammering out 

my visions,

my escaped artistry,

my life plans etched into

my mothers bones,

from out of that

battlefield I called 

the womb.

GAS Featured Poet: Alan Britt

 

Alan Britt’s poems have appeared in Agni Review, American Poetry Review, Bitter Oleander, Christian Science Monitor, Cottonwood, English Journal, Kansas Quarterly, Midwest Review, Missouri Review, New Letters, Osiris, Raw Art Review, Stand (UK), plus countless others. He has been nominated for the 2021 International Janus Pannonius Prize awarded by the Hungarian Centre of PEN International for excellence in poetry from any part of the world. Previous nominated recipients include Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Charles Bernstein and Yves Bonnefoy. Alan was interviewed at The Library of Congress for The Poet and the Poem. He has published 21 books of poetry and served as Art Agent for Andy Warhol Superstar, the late great Ultra Violet, while often reading poetry at her Chelsea, New York studio. A graduate of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University he currently teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University.

SAPPHIRE

(After Stevie Nicks) 

Trombone sapphire.

Emotions like the stream Jesus

dipped his fingers into as a boy

when the holy spirit shot through him.

Trombone sheds celestial scales.

You know what it’s like to be me

as much as I know what it’s like

to be you.

Burning man sapphire.

Upside bats fallen from grace

& all the king’s horses & all the king’s men

scrambling to put us back together

—like so many times before—

like so many times gambling

our present for the future.

Naked souls bathing in the stream

that Jesus dipped his fingers into

as a boy when the holy spirit

shot through him.

SILLY POEM

The remote tumbles to the floor.

Thought of flying monopolizes my mind

this silly moment.

But how does one access silly?

Can we see it as beats fractured 

and tossed like hepa-breaths

onto a rickety framework

of adjectives and nouns

wandering at dusk with Platero and Juan Ramon

through our poet’s diminutive village?

The perfect time for Neruda 

to enter this poem,

this delusionary excuse

for wiling away my time

awaiting Lorca, Aleixandre, Cernuda,

and Jorge Carrera Andrade

to explode from my holiday bag of fireworks.

I’m telling you, the streets are desperate

these days:

no zebra-striped West Nile mosquitos 

wrinkling our white cotton socks,

and no surprises, a la Brando soothing 

his toothache with a kerchief loaded 

with ice chips scooped from the rustic coffin 

of the horse rancher’s decaying ramrod.

I’m telling you,

the end is near,

not only for you but also for me.

The end of silliness as I’ve known it

for millennia,

or fossils left behind at preschool,

and beneath the musty pew

of my first taste of Christian magic.

I was hooked, or so I thought,

if one can be hooked

by a hundred-pound monofilament line 

haunting the Intracoastal 

between West Palm and Lake Worth.

Lake Worth with its mackerel infested pier

and rum-colored sands gulping infatuation

as quickly as lovers could manufacture it.

Actually, Palm Beach was super silly watching 

David Beasley mugging Groucho for hours 

inside the Breakers Hotel then circling 

with both Tommys the Lake Worth Pier’s 

midnight parking lot as our thoughts inhaled  

pale blue lamplight before trolling our Friday 

night haunt, The Hut, along Flagler Drive.

 

Ah, most of life’s silliness escapes me now, so far 

as I can breathe (which, hopefully, will be later than 

expected), but I’ll never forget attempting to convince 

Everett, Stuart, and Keith how committed I was to

discovering a way to make backyard dog turds taste 

foul to my beloved Bouvier des Flandres,

Chanelle Vida Britt.

 

I could continue, but this is becoming too damn silly.

 

GAS Featured Poet: Jim Murdoch

 

Jim Murdoch has been writing poetry for fifty years and has graced the pages of many now-defunct literary magazines and websites and a few, like Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Lake and Eclectica, that are still hanging on in there. For ten years he ran the literary blog The Truth About Lies but now lives in relative obscurity in Scotland with his wife and (occasionally) next door’s cat. He has published two books of poetry, a short story collection and four novels.

I Have No Words

In Memoriam Birdy

Most pains find their way into words readily

and there are so many to choose from.

Words and pain go way back.

That said words cannot always be relied upon.

Nature made pain, humans, words;

there were bound to be issues,

to wit, I know of no word or combination of words

that comes close to containing all I feel right now.

They’re all too refined, too evolved, too damn fiddly.

A scream likely would do the trick.

It's a kind of word: primal, natural,

language at its rawest.

The Rule of Three

My bird has died.

I feel very clingy

and follow my wife

like a little stray pup.

Please don't die.

Things die all the time

but mostly in threes.

If my wife dies I’ll be alone

and I don't want to die alone.

I should buy a plant in case.

I wouldn't mind if a plant died.

The Natural Order

My bird has died and

I can't stop writing poems.

I'm so conflicted.

I like writing poems but

I miss my bird too.

I tell myself I'm keeping

him alive in the

poems (some small part of him)

but that's not it, no.

I couldn't stop him dying

any more than I

can deny these words their right

to life.

           What does the

world need, another bird or

another bloody poem?

GAS Featured Poet: Lana Hechtman Ayers

Lana Hechtman Ayers makes her home in an Oregon coastal town of more cows than people. As managing editor at three small presses, she has shepherded over eighty poetry collections into print. She holds MFAs in Poetry and in Writing Popular Fiction, as well as degrees in Mathematics and Psychology. Her work appears in numerous print and online literary journals such as Rattle, The MacGuffin, and Peregrine, as well as in her nine poetry collections and a romantic time travel novel. Visit her online at LanaAyers.com.



Things You Will Learn About Me After It’s Too Late

after Brian Trimboli



As soon as I could hold a crayon I wrote

poems, one about a bunny who had no tail.

I wanted to grow up to be an astronaut

so I could escape the gravity of childhood.

My first crush was on the winter night sky.

In a crowd of people, mosquitoes swarm me.

Sleep was never a friend.

Barbie, a sworn enemy with her wasp waist

and long, straight blonde locks.

I could never grow my natural afro hair

much below my ears.

Hula hoops and I reached a truce.

I have failed at everything,

some things more than once,

some things a thousand times.

This hasn’t stopped me.

The forest canopy is my adopted family.

Coffee is a verb.

Poetry is breakfast.

My heartbeat’s aligned with

the Atlantic Ocean’s pulse.

Klutz, I have spent my entire life falling.

First, in love with darkness, then shadow.

Once, I rolled down a hill and would have

kept rolling forever except for my head

colliding with a cedar tree—

thankfully the tree was unharmed.

I trip over words, especially goodbye.

I fell into Mathematics as a major

in college and am still solving for x.

Stumbled into the oblivion of

Earl Grey ice cream.

I teeter on the see-saw of self-loathing

but a fulcrum of constant panic

balances things out nicely.

My life story is the autobiography of rain.

GAS Featured Poet: Tohm Bakelas

 

Tohm Bakelas is a social worker in a psychiatric hospital. He was born in New Jersey, resides there, and will die there. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, zines, and online publications. He is the author of 19 chapbooks and several collections of poetry, including No Destination (Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2021) and The Ants Crawl In Circles (Whiskey City Press, 2022). He runs Between Shadows Press. 

 

getting paid for poetry

i use an uncashed check
as a bookmark
in all these
poetry books
i read.

the check states: “1 poem,
Five dollars + zero cents”

how’s that for irony?

i finally got paid for poetry
but never cashed the check—

it’s too late now,
the publisher folded

maybe the $5 was
too much to swing. 

 

black wheezing thing 

 

i stood there 

at the end of my driveway, 

staring at the  

black wheezing thing  

flailing inside the 

fox’s mouth,  

wondering what it could be— 

bird, cat, opossum, pig, child, 

something un- 

holy  

 

i couldn’t tell because  

the thing, the black wheezing  

thing, didn’t have a head 

 

the word soul kept  

flashing through my mind 

and i thought about religion 

and sorrow and life and death 

 

and the fox smiled  

as if it could read my mind 

 

and that’s when the rain started 

and i turned away 

Su Zi's Review of "As Meaningful As Any Other " by Donna Snyder

   In our terrifying times of overt misogyny now, a view of women’s history can serve us well. There are artifacts aplenty, and each is a symbol of a way of life and a world view. Beyond batik and blarney are rituals that are tied to self-sustenance and self-agency. Every culture that has women has women’s ways, sometimes hidden in hairdo, but nonetheless a ritual of feminine celebration.

   Poetry has a well-established place in women’s history, and the ongoing efforts to suppress and marginalize women’s voices is endless evidence. Thus, offered to us as a new release is Donna Snyder’s As Meaningful As Any Other (Gutter Snob 2022), a perfect bound volume in trade size; an illustrated volume, with a number of images by Tezozomoc. The book is structured in sections, and each section has an image as a frontispiece, with one being repeated on the cover. The images themselves are digital art, saturated and warm toned, that employ a collage of a human woman and symbols such as antlers, roots, and our planet. The sections of the work are also titled symbolically, using roots, auguries, flight, awakening and crossroads. Snyder has taken fragments from other of her work and uses these as an introduction to each section, such as a fragment entitled “woman smiles” that opens the second section “auguries”:

   Woman smiles, her face starred, exotic birds tattooed around her mouth, beneath her eyes, around her nose […] (11) that squares off the reader with this vision of the Divine Feminine.

   The poems here are perhaps also prayers, with both overt and subtle symbolism.  The last section of this text, “Crossroads”, includes the poem “ Her blood, a faded ribbon” that whispers of the moment when menstruation ceases, “ Her blood faded/ only a ribbon covered with dust”(46), a moment notable in women’s lives but rarely overtly celebrated. If the poems here are rituals, then the rituals themselves often involve visiting art museums and reading other poets as well. However, there’s also mention of acts of intimacy, such as “this little rhyme that filled my head upon awakening” with the lovely line “my lips awash in the taste of your unbathed back” (32). This is writing that is as much an account of a life as a collection of correspondence, there’s a tone of a woman telling her confident of the desert and the desert city’s denizens.

   Written in a hybrid of free verse and prose, these pieces seem to echo from the lineage from which they draw. The book’s last piece, “Fool’s Moon” opens with the line “The Fool’s Moon leads ineluctably to darkness” (53) which goes on the include a dancing ritual of:

   Moon paints snakes on her face. Copper bells ring. She dances, peculiarly festooned, as if time really exists […]

While the Fool’s Moon is now a minimally celebrated event, occurring every 28 years, ritualized dancing is still very much entrenched in both women’s and the wider, western culture. And while some readers may be mystified at the symbolism employed by Snyder, the symbols are common to certain types of tarot cards. There’s a sense of a tarot reading in this work, the sections and the admonitions, prayers and reminders that prompt each piece. The draw that would encompass the evidence given here speaks to the full moon and meteor shower that read this work since its arrival as a book. While this may amuse, it would be wise for booksellers of tarot too to include this volume in their inventory. And while a tarot draw, or a tarot-style poem draw might maybe remind us of our celestial seasons, there are those who are comforted by history, by this quiet and ancient wisdom.

GAS Interview with Donna Snyder

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.