There’ll Be Heartache He pulled onto the shoulder, air breaks huffing, stopped and rolled the window down—outside the air was dry but cold, early-autumn evening closing in, and I was eighty miles outside El Paso with a pack across my back heading west, because a friend had died and nothing seemed to fit, the days and nights too long, or short, or just too damned complete— and as the trucker sniffed the wind as if the smell were new to him, and flicked a Camel to the ground and waved me in, I thought I saw a flicker of a smile beneath the shadow of his cap, and so I climbed into the cab, slung the pack into the sleeper in the back then settled in while on the radio a tune by Johnny Cash was blasting, “just around the corner there’ll be heartache.” And as he pulled the rig [...]

I remember listening on a green transistor radio to the Frazier/Ali fight back in the late winter of 1971. I was 12, and at the height of my interest in sports. My Yankees had done badly that summer (they’d finished fifth in their division). This is not the dynasty Yankees: this is the Yankees of Horace Clark and a third baseman (Jerry Kinney) who hit under 200 without power. This is a Yankee team whose best and most consistent player was Roy White, and who had two starting pitchers who swapped wives and houses (Kekich and Pederson). I loved them without hope–the way it should be. Ali had been out of the loop for over two years. He was cocky. I’d heard an old man say something I didn’t understand: “Say what you want about that mother fucker…he ain’t no fuckin field nigger.” Ali’s tune up fight had not looked [...]

BEND TO IT BY KEVIN SIMMONDS SALMON POETRY 2014 ISBN 978-1908836793 When the young Miyamoto Usagi (from the pages of the Stan Sakai comic Usagi Yojimbo) won his first tournament, his reward was a pair of swords. The katana was named “Yagi no Eda” (or ‘Willow Branch’); and the short sword was name Aoyagi, or Young Willow. His future lord and master Mifune explained that the willow bends so as not to break, and that strength isn’t just power but, perhaps more importantly, adaptation. This comic book was essentially my main role, from days at Alta Vista elementary to my present as a semi-professional thirty-something. Pliability over strength and sacrifice are things I learned from Usagi, and thought about way too much as a teenager. I still ponder them almost daily, and clearly so does Kevin Simmonds, as evidenced by his new book Bend to It. The cover depicts a [...]

DEATH CENTOS BY DIANA ARTERIAN UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE 2014 Diana Arterian’s chapbook Death Centos is currently available in a limited edition set ($125) that includes two additional works of art. The first of these is a broadside, designed as a version of the Goose Game, with an inward-spiraling design that depicts a life cycle. The second is a game piece, accoutrement for the board: a small sculpture made of white brass, replica of a 2-franc piece (no longer in circulation), evocative of funerary customs in which the deceased are given money to help aid them in their respective journeys to the afterlife. The center of the letter-pressed broadside holds a statement from Arterian regarding her aesthetic intentions for Death Centos, in which she writes, “I have placed [my subjects, whose words comprise [these centos] on even ground . . . I have bastardized history in order to provide a poetic [...]

Innocence In the middle of summer, when it’s too hot for cargo shorts and the air is heavy to breathe, I let my mouth slide open into a slippery smirk, as I watch Michael Ritter, the boy you loved in 5th grade, on the local news. “Dear Michael, I really, really like you…” your 5th grade love letter began. Against my warnings, you stuffed the tightly folded letter, a rainbow scrawl, colored pencil on notebook paper, into his cubby. He fell to his knees laughing. His friends snickered at you: Dear Michael, I really, really like you… They whispered when you walked by. You cried yourself to sleep at night, a salty puddle of pre-adolescent pain staining your Barbie doll pillow case. It’s not until I see him on the news, until I want to tell you how much you didn’t miss out on, how lucky you are that he [...]

THE BROTHERS PERDENDO AND PERDENDOSI BY BRIAN TRIMBOLI RELEASED BY NO, DEAR MAGAZINE AND SMALL ANCHOR PRESS This is how terrible of a reader I can be: didn’t even think to look up “perdendo” or “perdendosi” until after I’d read this chapbook at least four times, the first two in quick succession immediately after it arrived. Not that it’s necessary to define every little thing in a book or poem, or so I feel; but the title is that much more fitting knowing that these brothers are named after, if not actually, a manifestation of loss, or at least the musical term for a fade out. The Brothers of Loss, things fading away. This might have been more accurately titled The Brothers Perdendo and Perdendosi and their Father, as far as the literal ongoings within as the dichotomous distinction between the two halves set them up next to the father [...]

Leatherbar in Louisville (owed) The city hums traffic through lights, blinking eyes right before sleep, a flatline pattern, automated efficiency designed to pull cars through midnight into dawn. I fall inside, privy to dulled movement, beer foaming to a quiet stasis, smoke veiling the bartender and patrons. Smells of gin, sweat, amyl, tool and product of lifestyle manufacture, the market for primacy, the dank and dark of cave signifying spaces where men belong to men, belie the confidence of pose, migraine smiles suggesting satisfaction. Don, the shirtless bartender, jovial and smirking at me, dangerously out of place, nudges me with jokes and beer into talking, a thaw that draws other moths to the light of the HD big screen porno flashing raw tension behind my stool. Maladroit, I can’t navigate a way between communion and commodity, a simple new guy that laughs politely, declines shots, thank you, declines dance, thank [...]

To introverts writers are glamorous. I am reading Joan Didion’s Blue Nights and enjoying it, but I hate those who feel they own Joan Didion. I don’t know how many others feel this way, but I often become irate over the ownership of issues and artists. Nothing will make me back off an issue or an artist more than the disciples and gatekeepers of said issue and said artist. I can’t stand when people “collect” their loves and hoard them. Dragons do that. Introverts are dragons. Maybe this is why I feel alienated from other writers. I never got into the glamor of being a writer. To me writers are the most uninteresting of persons. Most of them sit around looking slightly bug like and fearful until the book comes out or the poem and then you see the ferocity of the dragon in their work which is that bug [...]

Transcendent Beauty in Yeats and Keats The works of W. B. Yeats and John Keats are interestingly similar in style and concept. Both rely heavily on imagery. Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” is full of sensory imagery describing the journey to an ideal place, just as Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” is beautifully portraying the significance of an ancient art on an urn. Both use metaphor to deal with the idea of aging, the concept of time, and the permanence of art compared to the fleeting nature of life. The examination of immortality is a common thread in both and is seen as an achievement. Yeats and Keats come to the conclusion that aesthetic permanence is transcendent beauty. Imagery and metaphor in “Ode to a Grecian Urn” and “Sailing to Byzantium” are used to convey the poetic speakers’ beliefs that being an “artifice of eternity” is the ultimate achievement of [...]

This is my favorite Emily Dickinson poem, even though it is not her best. It is the poem for which I have the most affection: 348 I dreaded that first Robin, so, But He is mastered, now, I’m accustomed to Him grown, He hurts a little, though— I thought If I could only live Till that first Shout got by— Not all Pianos in the Woods Had power to mangle me— I dared not meet the Daffodils— For fear their Yellow Gown Would pierce me with a fashion So foreign to my own— I wished the Grass would hurry— So—when ’twas time to see— He’d be too tall, the tallest one Could stretch—to look at me— I could not bear the Bees should come, I wished they’d stay away In those dim countries where they go, What word had they, for me? They’re here, though; not a creature failed— No [...]

Revealing the presence of order in “The Idea of Order at Key West” “The Idea of Order at Key West” was written by Wallace Stevens, a ‘transcendentalist’ in the modernism era. Steven’s poetry reflected works similar to those of Whitman and Wordsworth in that he loved writing on concepts of the natural world to help discover and create personal meaning. Stevens often took vacations to Florida where the serenity of peace and beauty inspired him to write and reflect on deeper philosophical issues such as natural order, chaos, and the deep internal desires of the self (Morse 140). “The Idea of Order at Key West” emphasizes the internal longing to create meaning for order within the natural world, and to discover the role of man’s origin and the self’s purpose. However, in order for such meaning to be made obvious over the chaos, the order at Key West can only [...]

In 1985, two professors of physics published some research about the extent to which a physics class impacted students’ intuitive understanding of motion. Like most of us, the students had a more Aristotelian model–the one that seems to fit with common sense: e.g., heavy objects fall faster rate than lighter ones. The goal was to see how many students internalized the Newtonian model by the end of the semester: e.g., heavy and light objects fall at the same rate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they found that many students retained the Aristotelian model after the course. The professors were surprised, however, that even A-students–those who had demonstrated competence on exams that tested ability to use and apply Newtonian concepts of motion–even these students still retained the Aristotelian model. Shockingly, the students would rationalize their belief in such models even when shown evidence to the contrary. It’s a truism that we education is more [...]

I remember the 90s much better than the 80s because the 90s pissed me off. First, everyone started going grunge, but hell, I had worn flannels and work boots, and funky ski caps back in the friggin 70s and no one gave me credit for it. They told me I was a sloppy dresser. I was surly and moody, too, and took a dim view of humankind, and then along comes Generation X acting as if they had invented flannels and boots and baggy-assed jeans with holes in them, and the Fugs, and did they give me any credit? Well, Do you know Generation X to ever give anyone credit? They just bitch and moan about how greedy the baby boomers are, and then they bitch and moan about the human condition, and then they go gentrify some urban neighborhood, jacking up the rents, and filling it with health food [...]

In many of the pieces I’ve turned in for a Creative Writing class, they’ve been returned with red ink underlining the first line, usually with comments like “This needs to have more impact” or “How does this draw in the reader?” Plus, there’s always one class period dedicated entirely to the crafting of the first line. Even now, as I’m writing this, I’m wondering if these first sentences are really the best ways to open this article. The first lines of our poems can promise us interested audience or convince them our work is worth skipping over. From what I’ve learned from my studies so far, a good opening grabs a reader’s attention. I’ve also seen from my own reading that trying too hard to get their notice can make the lines feel forced and serve as a worse opening than something more generic. This emphasis in my classes and [...]

Ariana Nadia Nash is a poet of the body, like Neruda, like Whitman, but her poems do not move with Neruda’s desire-driven caprice, nor do they swell with Whitman’s electric and expansive equation of body and soul. Rather, they proceed with the structured precision of a surgeon (the title of her prize-winning collection is revealing in this regard: Instructions for Preparing Your Skin). The first poem below, “To Hold the Body in My Hand,” begins with: “I peel back my skin and scoop.” From there it carefully probes down the page in measured lines that one can’t help but read softly and slowly–an effect of the low enjambment and elaborative syntax (Scoop what? “The origins out of my self.” Like what? “Like embryonic papaya seeds.” From where? “From the center of the fruit”). The relationship with the body in this poem is recursive and seemingly paradoxical: one can both be [...]