Two Poems by Cassandra Dallett

The City In No Particular Order

In The City once a year it’s hot enough to ride the 5 Fulton to Ocean Beach
Where crashing surf eats sand by the mile
an undertow so hungry it pulls icy toes out from under you
you can only get more than a foot in if you are drunk ,drunk, drunk,
Malt liquor Mickey’s 40-ounce drunk and I got in to my shoulders that way once
a sensation colder than my whole snowy upbringing.

San Francisco is Buckwheat driving a cab through the Castro tourists in the backseat stare
as a man fucks another man against a tree pulls his dick out causing a shitty waterfall.

We were drunken teenagers skipping down Haight Street
Suzanne in the lead always climbing to the top of light poles and teetering on the edges of cliffs
she was carrying a Mylar balloon that night
lost it around Clayton in front of the fruit stand
it flew right up into Muni lines
sparks rained down and store windows fell into darkness
roaring and cheering we ruled the city.

All those times we had to fix the glass front door
all those bodies launched through it drunk and desperate to feel
slamming the gate shaking the flat calling down to Johnsons
and scraping up the money to replace the glass again, like Suzanne kicking and screaming
that she wasn’t scared that she would fight us all.

Once in a flat down on San Jose Ave. we had to pull Danny Lucky off her
his teeth entrenched in her forehead
Once I left them in my room while we went to the radio station
late night for the metal hours we returned deep in Jack Daniels
and found every poster lopsided furniture upside down
Danny and Suzy more into killing each other than fucking.

My City was Bags the Skinhead,
I shaved my head traded squeaky combat boots for Doc Martin’s and braces
circled the block all day long to stay near him
on my knees bent over at parties blacked out in alleys trying to get closer
when we were alone we talked and fucked all night
did speed in the pink palace went back to my place
caused an uproar with my roommates
alone at night I crossed my fingers asked God
to make him love me make me his woman
tall muscled tatted,
drunk enough he played his flute and I followed.

I walked home alone a lot, beer cans hurled from cars through Fillmore
I took dangerous routes on purpose the city was mine.
Three a.m. a guy walked out of the Palladium and punched me dead in the face
And just kept walking probably thought I was a dude standing there
bald headed drunk daze on my way to the pit to drink more.

In San Francisco I sat at Hamilton Recreation watching my boyfriend Dre
play Basketball. My hair grown out blonde still wearing fishnets from the old days
but sucking candy sticks and trying to act all cute and sassy like the black girls.
I was his girl we rode the bus on dates. I wore a letterman jacket and Reeboks.
We drank milkshakes and rocked Stan Smiths. He claimed me.
We beat the fuck out of each other his feet and fists crushing me.
His flesh under my nails, breaking me, holding keys scaring his face,
him chasing me, me chasing him, me filling sunglasses with tears black eyes
Him spending his first night in jail after they led him out, left me unrecognizable pile of purple bruises.

My first night in jail, Cookie was one of my cellies, brown scars covered her limbs
she called it staph she was Greek had a lived a life more than heroin
but you couldn’t tell by looking at her. I was a kid who’d never changed in a locker room never got dressed for gym,
flunked in fact, stood in dirty water naked like everyone else.
They called me Brooke Shields. Hey Brooke what you in here for a B case huh?
Prostitution was always assumed I was white and not strung out what else could it be,

Jail freed me,
from me
so alone.

Ocean Beach Babylon
(For Brad 5/9/1970-4/23/2012)

When I stopped doing drugs
my friends were just getting started.
Fighting in their underwear over needles and dope
in the day light of our front door.
from the top of the stairs
I scream at them to shut the fuck up.
I worked all night on phone sex lines
and I‘m just trying to sleep.

Brad screams back at me calls me a bitch,
says, it’s no wonder that my boyfriend
beat the shit out of me.
“A nigger” that’s what he calls me.
his face is a mask of dope and sickness.
I’m already down my“boyfriend” just stomped me
into the ground while saying he loved me.
I don’t speak to Brad for years.

He goes to jail then prison,
violates parole every eighteen months,
and spends close to a decade behind bars.
I forgive and live, but I never forget.
That early morning scuffle on the stairs
how quickly he turned on me.
Me, trying to keep it all together,
rent paid and the phone on.

Brad was once my best friend,
he was even a boyfriend.
Stood on his tip toes the first time we kissed
at a party, his girlfriend scared of me,
the big skinhead girl.
We were thrown down two flights of stairs
by the bouncers, for drinking straight from the keg,
and stealing the donations.

We left his girlfriend there
and got stung by bees hiding from the cops in Golden Gate Park.
Fucked on the roof of Chinese Projects
staring drunk and cold over the twelve story edge.
Defying gravity we tried to sleep up there
made it home on the bus where he stayed with me
till he went to Log Cabin.
When he escaped he went with my best friend
but it was cool
he was one of us and he went out with all of us over the years.
At parties me or him always got in a fight
swinging through the crowd to the other’s side
We were 86d from everywhere.
We shared blonde hair, high cheekbones,
and something that ate at us
from the inside out.

Six years after the stairs Brad called me up
“I heard you wanted to talk but I didn’t believe it” He said.
He was an ex-con, tattooed“Dirty White Boy” across his back.
From segregation back to our yellow crew
of half black and Chinese babies.
I always dated black guys had even left him for one.
I never knew where that left us,
except friends,
cause he had to do what he had to do
on the inside and I understood that.
I think.

We got together,went out to the beach.
We sat on the wall, drank,
told stories of the old days
History ate at us like the waves ate the sand.
At nightfall bonfires lit the beach
We were sure we’d find the heads and the parties of our past.

Instead the clumps of bodies
we eased into were dry
fire warmed faces grilling hot dogs, popping sodas.

Church groups, they invited us to join,
Back in the day it would have been Sunset Pods,
Head bangers or skins lighting up the beach,
scattering from cops searchlights.

Our adventures had been stolen and replaced
with the squeaky clean church folk.
It was tragic and scary,
or maybe we were.
Maybe they
invited us to church
cause our asses needed to be saved

Angel at a 25 Degree Angle… by Andrew Gallix (re-printed from Scarecrow Magazine)

Imperious, impervious, Girl on the escalator going up, pulling her case behind her like a lapdog on a lead, going up. Nifty, shifty, eyeing up Girl going up, naughty, haughty, hoity-toity.

Did she condescend to look down upon you as she went up, Angel at a 25 degree angle? Did she acknowledge your existence as she plucked celestial chords on her flyaway hair and breathed honeyed tones down her cellular phone? Did she fuck. No: your eyes did not meet. You looked at me looking at you looking at her looking up, all high and mighty, pulling her case behind her behind like a slave on a lead, soaring up — she mighty high, you mighty sore. Looked at me you did, with your chastised eyes, all hot and bothered, hot, hot under the collar, your face a slapped arse.

Andrew Gallix © 2005.

Four Poems by William Taylor Jr.

To Let Others Walk the World

I was born into the winter months
with a weak heart and frightened eyes

I met the big nothing early on
took it inside and became immune

I never bothered with the future
because the moment in hand
was always burning

abandoning dreams of justice
to sit beneath the sky
and watch things fall apart
in their fashion

to let others walk the world
as if they had some place in it

myself content with dreams
of little rooms with little windows
looking out upon the rain

sad music and wine

afternoons spent
in libraries and bars
with the drunks
and unemployed poets

all of us hungry for some quiet place
to escape the indifferent sun.

Even in This

I write poems for all the little things
that might otherwise be lost,

convincing myself I am somehow doing good
in keeping things alive a bit longer
than their natural span.

But maybe all the sad
and pretty moments
have no desire to live
beyond their tiny flash,

and I craft my words
only to try and make myself
feel somehow less alone,
selfish even in this.

The Dead Horse of Our Love (a poem in two voices)

The beauty of you was unexpected,
an accident, surely meant
for someone else

but for the strangest of moments
it was mine.

It wasn’t much, just a thing that happened.

I’ve never known
how to let go of anything,

I hoard every shard of every
perfect thing I’ve ever broken.

Dude, be a man about it.

The memory of laughter in sad hotels,

a photograph that proves
we shared the same space,

It’s over, bury it, let it go.

how you once imagined me beautiful
and the desperate way you loved,

I was mistaken.

I will carry it all
in the junkbox of my soul
for the rest of my days

Weak as fuhhhk.

and on nights when the joy
and the rage and the sorrow of everything
rises up within me like an impossible wave

I will think of you and sing.

Whatever.

If There Must

If there must be an afterlife let mine
be a little bar in San Francisco
somewhere near the ocean
an endless grey sky stretching
out over everything
dim lights
and a soft rain falling
with grand windows to watch it through
a bartender with an honest smile
leaning to fill my glass
a jukebox with all the right songs
and endless credits
to the left of me sits a blowzy blonde
with enormous laughter
and to the right an old man
with shining eyes of kindness
and stories to tell of days long passed
and we will talk
if we want to talk
or just be quiet and listen to the rain
time is obsolete
and there’s no place anyone ever
has to be and maybe an old dog
the color of gold
asleep in the corner
and people could smoke if they wanted to
I wouldn’t
mind.

As Before by Brent Powers

It is done there. Nothing to be done about it. The funerary burnings have begun, all his awful old stuff, old marked-in books and notes on paper, paper files, lengths of paper tape run over everything, tape smeared with sticky black ink in clumps of his clotted script, the whole of it carrying his stink of cheap smokes, spilled wine, scum of self love … there, so there, ruins of Athens, Rome and Frankland, ravaged by the Goths of restless impermanence. A man not yet dead, no, not yet fully cognizant of a moving on from himself that occurred years before with the disappearance of his wife and friends, the erasure of all that he was in his own memory, leaving only this detritus of paper history. No, no, not yet. He goes on as before, goes on until he can’t any more. Then there is a period of simply waiting. Hoping for something to catch fire. When it does it is the actual fires of loss. Nothing to be done. Nothing to do. But even this is a dream, the dream of an ending.

He wakes before first light on the last day before the Time Change. It is the winter of his first year in formal Exile. He now lives outside a little seaside village in Q, a place of easy retirement. Retirement indeed, for none else are criminal here, merely old, or of middle age early struck down at the futile business of working, by that business, thence put away from society.

He hasn’t yet seen any neighbors, although he does hear occasional earthworks, tractors and cats attacking the bogs which lie among the paradisial trees of what could be taken for a parkland, his loveliest residence ever. He has never even vacationed in such a splendid place.

He had thought to make another accounting of it all. Another falsification of the past, as all accounts must be. Determining to do so one day he discovered that he couldn’t even gin up enough anger to go on for very long. Perhaps he wasn’t even angry any more. Old friends will call and ask him if he’s finally set about the business and he must lie, although he has begun to wonder why he even bothers. It is over with. Over.

It could have been different. With one or two wiser choices he would be someone else entirely. A smug bureaucrat, a shopkeeper. Yes. That little bookshop he’s always wanted. Never really busy yet there is the constant traffic of a regular clientele, people who hang out, bring him coffee or even lunch. It is on the main thoroughfare of a small college town, a place that still holds out false hope. They come and go, come and go. There is talk of books and films, music, politics, the latest religious balloon. Nothing too important happens, although there are rumors. People are always getting something up, even when it’s all taken care of. There can be no peace among humans. Sooner or later someone starts shooting.

One of them comes in and begins simply enough, with a postulate of some kind. From there it follows, marches heavily, like soldiers in the dawn. It would appear to be noble yet it isn’t. One is almost bored. Marching along, as before, marching as to war. What is the war about? Some vague broken promise. An argument at cards. It doesn’t matter, it must be. And so we go on, as before, as always, scratching and biting at each other, blowing each other up. First one dead son, then another dead in retaliation. Then legions, all dead, all burning up with the files and the books and paper, sizzling meat, stench of valor, all of it burning up for no particular reason other than to make way for new conflicts. We don’t like each other very much. Never have. The wise must come down from time to time and remind us to be nice, at least love the neighbor, which is impossible. These are his thoughts, his sometime discourses, admittedly all very comfortable for a bookseller, grand pronouncements made in the safety of a musty indoors, yet all of it somehow necessary. Must keep your hand in, keep at it, generating opinions, for to opine is human, valid as any war.

And yet some time one comes in with a story, even just a small vignette, more rarely a capture of something occurring at the subatomic level which somehow generates a whole mess of sudden springing circumstance, a world born of almost nothing, a Berashith, thus:

Know then that in the year One King Portius rode out grandly with men at arms and claimed Lands to the North, adding these on to his own with the expedition of the flag. Salamander VIII, rightful heir to the North, rose up in contest against Portius and there was war. The plain was flooded. Ships were brought in. There were navel battles. Portius employed Greek Fire. Salamander was defeated. He retreated to Johnswood which is inimical to Portius. “Will we give chase?” asked Bald Walt, hero to Portius. Portius cried Nay. “We must lose our way in the Forest,” he explained, beating his palm with a ruler. “Will we eat then?” Bald Walt inquired further. When the King agreed Bald Walt signaled for his Ensign to blow the trumpet. “Let’s Eat!” Bald Walt cried. Perforce food was put out on long tables. The food was comprised of tacos and pizzas and burgers and fries, all washed down with small beer. For Entertainment there was Suzy, who danced. An argument arose between sergeants and drum majors as to the art of Suzy. One said it was Balanchine inflected belly, the other called it pole sans machinery. Opinions bred out of these like the exaggerations of plague. Let the food fights begin! Hot cheese flying. The stuff of tacos. All the vagaries of burgers. You cannot escape, you cannot escape. Yet the King did nothing but enjoy the show, and it is due to this irresponsibility that History is not kind, for Salamander made insinuation of his troops in the guise of local peasantry albeit surreptitiously armed. After all, one does not throw down with pizza no matter the topping against cold steel. Portius is humiliated. Salamander rides through the Capital with the ensauced chivalry and marchers of Portius under arrest. The gathered citizens are invited to taste of these interesting blends and a fine entertainment was had by all. Again dispute arose, this time among the food journalists. But disputes rarely stay within the boundaries of interest groups, hence this one grew to include the farming community, the tech guys, the recovering alcoholics and drug addicts, our girls in uniform, the baking collective, various lobbies, sundry paid shills, finally the Paris Light Opera entire until there was again dubious warfare …

Once more he finds himself alone. He surveys the historic landscape with an eye for souvenirs. He hopes to establish a business which includes old melted ordnance and the bones of valor beside the usual books, possibly even antique motion picture cameras, music trapped in vinyl grooves, teeth encased in amber, teeth which had broken off whilst they worked at normally soft food which had been stuffed with gravel by the enemy. These are vague hopes but hopes none the less, and he hasn’t entertained such in a long time, no, not since his ambition let him go. But who could be ambitious here? For behold yon northern mulla drawing in his lawn to partake of the customary afternoon siesta, small zs shortly oozing from his little comma mouth to join the flies above as he drifts into guiltless sleep; others following suit short upon, parading various degrees of splendor in their bedding. Even pavilions appear, and suddenly erupting canopies stretched over birch rods cross the sky. All’s well with the world that can be, and much can be well here. In the marina toy ships shift in their slips, wind chimes ring and flicker through leagues of sad air. The boats go creek and the tides reach up and clap and glitter seems to fall from the masts and the breath goes out and out, joining the wind far out to sea, and nothing has changed for him at all except for that loss of breath going out and rejoining the wind and the sea.

Photo by Samantha Seto

Two Poems by Stephen Page

Transition

When the cows have eaten all the grass
And the butcher cannot buy,
What do we do with the clover
That has not yet recovered?

When the bulls leap barbwire
To find the cows in heat,
What do we do with the toothless
Hags tagging behind their calves?

When the sheep return to twenty-one
And the shepherd is on the highway,
What do we do with the fallen twigs
And the uncut park grass?

When the fenceposts lie to rot in ponds
And the Fencer curves his line,
What do we do with the logger truck
The Lumber Jack false-bottomed?

When the Counter cannot count
And the horse herd shrinks while growing,
What do we do with the unlearned leader
That has yet to earn his office?

When the land transforms from marsh to wheat
And the Seeder sprays more herbicide,
What do we do for the migrating ducks,
And the butterflies missed by bankers?

The Old Man (2)

I saw the Walking Man today
close up
I was lying dead on the side of the road

His eyes were shaped Eskimo
His cheekbones Illini
His face and hands tattoed Maori
He height Tehuelche

When he stepped over me
he did not look down

He did not look down

He did not look down

he just stepped over me

his eyes fixed on the horizon

Mayan Sacrifice by Bradley Mason Hamlin

the
cool thing
about
living
in

2012

is that
we
made it

past the rumors
and metaphors
of 1984

over & beyond
the
space age
dream
of Moon Base Alpha
in 1999

or Arthur C. Clarke’s
2001 monolithic
nowhere zone
where apes rage
against
twinkling stars

we’re not flying around
in cars
like the Jetsons

not yet,
but there’s time
and that’s the
good part

it’s not
the end of the world
but just
the dawning
of a new era

me and you
you and me

the sun always rising
never forgetting
to set
and popping up again
with cornflakes
and cartoons

and
all the aggressive aliens
on Earth
or in Heaven
can just fuck off

we don’t have
time
for their bullshit

as long as
human (or inhuman) politicians
still argue

about

women’s rights
gay privileges
and all the goddamned
liberties
that should be
common sense

instead of …

freedom,
and what the hell
are we
going to do
to make the world
a better place
for everyone …

with less government
and without
raising taxes

I think we
still
have

work to do.