March 28, 2024: I've had a number of poems accepted for publication in various journals since I last posted. Personal stuff kept me from keeping this up to date. I'll be posting more in coming months. For now I'm adding Tom's Cove below,which was published in volume 39, No. 1 of the MacGuffin in the summer of 2023.
August 3, 2023: True story: I just found out last week that a poem I wrote was published in the New York Times -- last March. I submitted it to them last February, and got an email back from them saying they were considering it for publication. Then I heard crickets. I inquired recently, and they informed me thusly: "Hello, We already published this poem under the title Stars Over Central Park. https://www.nytimes.com/.../nyregion/metropolitan-diary.html"
It turns out that they tweaked the title from "The Starless Skies of Central Park," to "The Sars of Central Park," so when I had searched for it nothing came up. I'm thrilled of course, but also bemused at how I found out. Also, changing the title without telling me was not cool. And their title is dumb -- the poem refers repeatedly to the fact that Manhattan's ambient night light makes stars almost impossible to see in Central Park. So maybe not as thrilled as I might have been.
June 11, 2023: My chapbook, Locomotive of Mangled Parts, is out! Picture of the proud author below. It contains 30 poems, a number of which were previously unpublished. It is available for sale on Amazon, or through the publisher's website (link further below). All royalty proceeds will got to charities aiding political and war refugees. I'm adding one of. the previously unpublished poems, "Memory of the Child," below. I'll add the others later.
May 23, 2023: My poem "Soldier" is in issue 23 of Mudfish, which has just been released. Here is the link to Mudfish's site: https://mudfish.org/ . The poem is copied below.
Still waiting for my book to come out. The publisher says they are a few weeks behind schedule. The galleys look great. I'll post as soon as it is out.
April 8, 2023: My poem "The Ancestors Take Questions About Your DNA Test Results" was a finalist for the Bedford Prize. Link is here: https://bedfordwritingcompetition.co.uk/BWC/php/homepage.php . I'm holding off on posting it here, but the poem will be included in my upcoming chapbook, Locomotive of Mangled Parts. Speaking of which, thank you to those who preordered the book. It is set to go to publication around May 19, and shipped soon thereafter to those who preordered. If you preordered and haven't received it by mid-June, please email me at blueguitar58@gmail.com. For those who didn't preorder, it will be available for purchase on Amazon, or through the publisher's website at the link further below.
February 1, 2023: Added "The Cicadas Alone May Mourn Us," which was just published in the Global City Review. Link is here: https://globalcitypress.com/do-we-have-a-future-home/
January 2023: Pre-publication sales have started on my chapbook, Locomotive of Mangled Parts. You can find it here: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/locomotive-of-mangled-parts-by-g-r-kramer/ . The actual book will be printed and start shipping in May. The size of the print run will be influenced by the number of pre-pub sales, so if you are inclined to put in an order now it would be much appreciated. I'd be happy to arrange to sign your copy. Send me an email at blueguitar58@gmail.com and we'll figure out the logistics of that together.
I've also had several poems accepted in journals recently, but I'm holding off on posting anything specific on those until the journals come out.
July 2022: Revisions of "Locomotive" and "Google Earth" (now named "The Atlas") are posted. "Traffic Light" was published in Vita Poetica. https://www.vitapoetica.org/poetry/traffic-light
May 2022: "Ukraine Haiku" has been published by the Newverse.News and is posted below, along with "Luck," "Ruins of Gedi" and "while the car door flattens down the tall grass." I also revised "Locomotive," the title poem of my soon-to-be-published chapbook, "Locomotive of Mangled Parts."
April 2022: My chapbook will be available for presale starting in early 2023, and should be out by around May or June 2023. I'll post a link to the publisher's website when the book is available for presale orders.
Three poems have recently been accepted for publication. “Luck” is being published in Whimsical Poet: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry. “while the car door flattens down the tall grass” is being published by Muse Literary Journal. “Ruins of Gedi” is being published by Nzuri Journal. I will post them below once they have been published.
February 2022: Finishing Line Press has offered me a publishing contract for my chapbook, Locomotive of Mangled Parts. It should come out in the spring of 2023. More details to come.
Molecule Magazine is publishing "All I Got Is This Lousy T-Shirt" next month.
December 2021: Superpresent Magazine is publishing "Hamlet's Father" in its January 2022 issue.
October 2021: Harbinger Asylum is publishing two more poems -- "Bride of Forty Five" and "Preaching in the Temple of Forgotten Gods."
September 2021: Sixfold Magazine selected four more poems -- "The Last Aspen Stand," "The Hole in the Poem," "Honeysuckle and Flaming Creeper, and "Different Kinds of Mud." "The Last Aspen Stand" also received honorable mention in the New Millenium 51st award for nonfiction.
June 2021: "Nature's God" was published in Tipton Poetry Review. "Roadkill" was a finalist in the Winter Anthology poetry contest and was published in Volume 11, its 2021 annual issue.
January 2021: "Schrödinger's Cat" is being published in the Winter 2021 issue of Thimble Magazine.
November 2020 update: "Good Witch of the West Side," "Three Thirty Nine," and "Shadows on the Border" added. "Shadows," Like "Young Odysseus," is based on an incident from my father's difficult early life.
August 2020 update: Five poems accepted for publication by two journals. Sixfold Magazine selected three of my poems in a contest. They are “At Your Birth These Hopes Ate My Heart", a variation on the sestina form that you might call a pentina, "Young Odysseus", which grew out of lore from my father's tumultuous youth, and "Easter/Passover 2020", another reflection on the age of Covid. “The Crooked Lines of the Cartographers”, which relates to human dominion over/ rape of the natural world, has been accepted for publication under an earlier title of “Google Earth,” by Wrath-Bearing Tree in its October 2020 issue. W-BT is also publishing in that issue “Three Snapshots of Superman’s Mother”, sort of a counterpart to "Young Odysseus" in that it grew out of my mother's complicated and tortured girlhood.
April 2020 update: Three more published poems are posted. Let Us Take This is a reflection on my friend, Allan Wiley, who left this good earth a few years ago and far too soon. In the Beginning Was The Word is, as the title suggests, about the mystical and tangible power of language.
An Old Woman Reflects is one of a few COVID-influenced poems that I've written recently.
August, 2018 update: Two more published poems are posted. Cavity tries to explore the idea of a higher power in daily life without falling back onto purely religious constructs. Written By Window Light is an ekphrastic poem (fancy Greek name for a poem about a painting or sculpture). The picture that inspired it is below.
July 2018: Below are some recently published poems. A quick note about them -- A Sense of Balance is a reflection on love and mortality based on a small moment of epiphany that I had doing some routine household tasks. I began American November in the weeks after the 2016 presidential election, then set it aside and finished it a year later, when the sense of foreboding in the first draft appeared sadly prescient instead of misplaced. The idea for Sibling Rivalry (retitled from Dark Orb in its initial publication) started with the solar eclipse in the summer of 2017, then morphed into a meditation anthropomorphizing the earth and the moon as a dysfunctional, sibling-like pair. Benediction for a Graduate was written for my oldest child's graduation from grad school, but inspired by Lucille Clifton's Blessing the Boats. By the Tap Root tries to capture what it is like being a kid moving away from his friends and his comforts to a new unknown. Hospice Policy: (the fussy punctuation helps set up the first line) is based on my memory of the last day that I spent with my mother before her passing. You can read Pegasus Broken without knowing anything about the Greco-Roman myth of Medusa and Pegasus, but you might get a little more out of it if you google it (never any shame in that).
Publication acknowledgements are noted at the end of each poem. I hold copyright on all of the works listed here. If you are interested in republishing or reproducing any of these, or learning about other poems not listed here, contact me at blueguitar58@gmail.com
-- George R. Kramer
A Sense of Balance
Feeling the brisk November breeze,
I checked the faucets before the freeze.
Bundle your parka and stand on the patio.
Wait. Breathe.
Thinking about the years slipping,
you may not notice the nozzle dripping,
but on the cement a damp stain spreads,
a petri dish disease.
I lay my tools on the bench --
washers, mallet, monkey wrench,
Soft-jawed pliers, ratchet, c clamps.
Hold them. I feel you tense.
Thinking about what the job requires,
does that leave room for your desires?
Brown recluse spiders are somewhere near.
Unkillable, entrenched.
In the cellar’s luminescence
the valve turned to stop the cadence
to the point past which it seemed it might break.
A sense of balance.
The Radio Head song on my headphones ends,
and I’m flooded with a feeling that portends
the lupine eyes of pain, peering
at us in absence.
As I toil so poorly prepped,
that oily water is adept
at playing plumbing’s weakest points.
Around me something creeps.
Under pipes cold as aged adders,
I almost tip my teetering ladder,
into the dream where we fell together
into blooms of timeless sleep.
(Harbinger Asylum, Summer 2018 issue).
All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt
the world
was large
then time-washed,
shrunken
small
inside and out.
i remember
flavor,
dimensions,
window light,
feeling,
so
there is
contentment
in the end.
(Molecule Literary Magazine, Issue No. 6, March 2022)
An Old Woman Reflects
The empty street sings
a cold song under
a silent spring sky
that coils my soul
in the same pale sadness
that I felt after
my husband’s death.
Grape hyacinth and narcissus
call to my eyes
with colors that racket in my head.
Yet a part of me is numb.
No poem has ever witnessed more
than what I see
out the kitchen window.
Yet some part of me is numb.
My son sent me a video
of Italians serenading
their neighbors
in locked-down cities.
From apartment balconies
music draped
the streets in garlands.
Later I dreamt
of a ringing Milanese street
where I reached
to touch boughs
of dry flowers.
Wrapped in the oleanders
and asters I wished
to set my soul aflame
and sleep in ashes.
(West Trade Review, spring 2020 issue)
American November
“The Decembrist uprising of 1825 was the first attempt in modern Russian history to overthrow the absolute power of the Tsars, to bring about a constitutional monarchy, and to abolish serfdom.”
Christine Sutherland, the Princess of Siberia (2001, Quartet Books).
One.
Uncounted ballots
for a different future,
a few thin crisp leaves
cling to their sutures
on that one tall maple
across the back fence
as others pile up
in sublime decadence.
Across our dead lawns
our shadows’ vague outline
meet in unsettled union,
yours, our children’s and mine.
Under the tea brown sky
I rake the deep dusk
while cold winds scatter
piles of empty husks.
Once the leaves sat high,
holy green celestials
fused in the sky with
littered clouds and kestrels.
Chlorophylls, carotene,
netted fabric of veins
gave weight to our days
and welcomed the rains.
Those verdant trees felt
solemn and cromulent,
in green painted sky of
Springfield so somnolent,
as the squares shook their heads at
Homer’s flatulent manner
and young Bart’s obscene
homecoming banner.
Two.
Then fall.
Our yard has a man,
a gourd for a head,
made from straw and old clothes,
of the Day of the Dead.
He sits now embellished
with red and gold leaf,
The King of the Fall,
our Commander in Chief.
Does this amuse you?
Well, Marx had it wrong.
Farce is tragedy, part
of the same tangled song.
A duet sung off-key
by an old chanteuse
and an undertaker.
The lyrics – é Portugues?
Onde é translator?
So fling open your door
to face autumn’s cold flame,
and see snakes in dead leaves
stirring, ready to maim.
Many careless feet tread
into venomous bites
while the rest now grow blind
to what lies in the light.
Three.
I dreamt of Decembrists,
scattered by the Kremlin,
the dust of their names fell
on Tolstoy, on Lenin,
till the great Siberian
cosmos, and each dark star
quivered the triumphal
gates of the quaking Tsar.
In the end their blood swept
to the Arctic Ocean,
saw the fall of serfdom,
and fed Pushkin’s notions.
Are they now lost fossils
deep beneath Lake Baikal?
Were they the close of dreams,
or their starting cycle?
Decembrists fall like leaves,
but ideas barely decay.
Petrifactions grow roots
that in an eon will blaze
new leaves rupturing out
of the land’s bile and blood
then nurturing thickets
of holly oak and red bud.
Four.
We live in a country
invented, not made, by
thinkers and tinkerers
and owners of slaves.
They half held the truth that
derives from the people,
like green buds of spring
and a flower’s sepal.
Their ingenuous old machine
grinds out its grating sounds,
the colorful screeching of
its carload posse of clowns.
Under evening arbor
of laughing leaves tightly hemmed,
the contraption accordions
to a craptacular end.
Throw the lights away, take
our vision in the dark,
mingle with the torch lit mob
that gathers in the park.
Snakes writhe within the blind
herd’s somnambulation.
A parade of devils chants
for mental conflagration.
Now up above the supreme
American mammalia
twitter of the greatness
of their royal genitalia.
As the Republic dissolves,
here sits a murder of crows
while the People only vote
clickbait in comments below.
Five.
I turn back to the leaves
and their colorful canker
slowly strangled and strewn
by the autumn air’s rancor.
Falling from hemlock, black
walnut, American beech
into jumbled crenated
corpses and tannin leach.
Cease photosynthesis,
stomata’s dead breath, decay
these withered faces, their
veining rivers parch and flay
till they fall from the empyrean,
effulgent, separated,
borne onto the withered grass
crumbled, dead and dessicated.
Yet give thanks now for this:
the somber trees will again
have regeneration,
and the world will live on
past this desecration.
New things happen, the plot
writes its own absurd retcon,
and life wobbles drunkenly
through ruin and bad sitcom.
But right now, nerves numbing
in hard face and fingers
I rake newly wet leaves
in fierceness that lingers.
In lumps of decay dreams
ferment and randomly meet
in sway to the Decembrists’
crackled new drum beat.
(Sincerely Magazine, Spring 2018 issue).
At Your Birth These Hopes Ate My Heart
At your birth these hopes ate my heart.
Against a fetal monitor’s anxious beat of passion
your red ear emerged yearning to wander,
sprouting like a mollusk from a glassy shell,
arising from a sea floor, alive to the limpid world.
If ever a toddler swaddled the limping world,
it was you, your lips pursed like a heart
kissing then pinched to a hermit crab’s shell,
and your faith that your tidal passion
will wash out grief to find other seas to wander.
Did I think then that you would one day wander
your way as you choose, spinning the wild world
into your dreams, throwing your passion
beyond the farthest territories of your heart,
kicking out of your cavernous shell?
Then we will mend and refill this shell,
your fading parents, and wander,
two shadows cast by one aging heart.
In a whelk beneath the wobbly world
we bathe in your conch blast’s passion.
I lie awake mulling these days of ill passion,
prelude to tattering seas and artillery shells,
or perhaps a broken fever and a patched up world,
where you can remember me while you wander
across maps marked by the travels of your heart.
I wish your heart a moment’s rest from its passion, a morning
to wander the beach for shells, at peace in this implausible world.
(Sixfold Magazine, May 2020 issue)
The Atlas
Somewhere Gerardus Mercator
met on a blank equator
the prehistoric hunter who first drew
from warm pitch and raw whisk
the rugged path she found
to the mastodon grazing grounds.
Their compasses agreed:
on friable parchment
mapmakers must have
their maniacal dragons, their
flawed seas, frolicksome putti, ranges
of rumpling blunders.
An old wall was woken by
a flattened paper globe,
a remnant copy etched
by an ancient calligrapher
with a cliff grip
chiseling a copper plate.
Google Earth, see what you lack:
a map’s crinkle, or its volcanic dimples,
green alpine frock, sweat of ocean.
No chance for glass-headed pins.
Lands not thick nor lean, pliably
lying on a polarized screen.
Swipe past the displaced perspective
warning of the asphalt assault,
sharp canines snapping
at the ribs of gated jungles,
as the electric sky thunders down
data to wander its endless rooms.
In this pale monitor light I read
about the first arrow, its tale
of the bloody hand that held it
and the slaughters that it stopped
on the ancient path that we still walk.
Children of the map, yet ever lost.
Benediction for a Graduate
The May sun warms
on awakened skin.
Proud kites punctuate pathways
onto delft blue porcelain.
This day is good.
May the breeze favor you.
May the sun light on your shoulder,
kindling every step.
May your voracious mind
mark the wisdom scattered in the vortex
like vivid pebbles in dust and shadow.
May your passage
be guided by those stones,
and may your brave thread
unspool far across the horizon,
entangling, entwining
in warp and weft
of line and tail
many unknown, unnamed things.
(Torrid Literary Journal, July 2018 issue).
Bride of Forty Five
USA USA Yew Ess Aiy.
There is no us in america today.
a wall split Them from Them
and the loud land hushed.
They catch smoke from the fire
that reigns in His dry brain forest.
experts say this tumor of fear
is ablated by a country fired
to blue char by Their fear.
here is a kind of fat frankenstein this one beloved by the villagers
for He knows Their trapped hearts out in the red prairie of burnt out lies
built by americancarnage.com by purple hearts and roadside bombs
built by daddy’s ptsd busted for oxy and taking a plea
built by suits with agendas to lie over bypassed towns and farms to fly over
built by burger jobs and lotto scams buying child labor from foreign lands
built by shot-up schools and 8th grade mothers
by one cufflink hand
that washes the other
He sees america singed and knows how to ride Their pain. He hides a lacerated inner face
(this poem grants Him that much grace) and senses each bit that dies
in each self-loathing tweet. the experts ask why follow Him. They say fuck You
and put it all on a throw of loaded dice in His casino. oracular bones drive the protest vote and set ablaze Their suicide note.
the note sings of sweet covfefe.
here is the great tit judge deep into His kobe burger
courting His seventh wife one more than mad king henry He says
who people say had long beautiful fingers He knows how to pattern Their guts
on a red crown with glue then shoot Them dead on fifth avenue
hymn Him a chorale of cronies wed Him with this wounded republic
join hands through the dawn-lit crack in our wall and cry
Coh feh fee.
Covfefe.
Covfefe.
(Harbinger Asylum, Fall 2021 issue)
By The Tap Root
Dawn leaks like a curtain crack.
A depthless gray shadows
the house in the flatland.
My sisters and I keep
out of the way.
Stubs of cold candle wicks
line the kitchen window ledge.
Love stacks in packing crates.
The frosty grass crunches
under boot soles.
The compost pile holds
each frozen weed yanked
by the tap root
from last summer’s soil.
Headed south the car traces the scar
of highway for hours
across the pale prairie snow.
My sisters bicker, then sleep.
I remember dandelions,
watching their feathery teeth
scatter like last spring’s promises
lost in the wicker and the heath.
(Better Than Starbucks, Summer 2018 issue).
Cavity
Your blind dentist, cruel, kind one true dentist,
will see you at ten o’clock.
Let her fingers feel the deep recesses,
sorting good from rot,
let her gracey curette pick inside the lip of your angry gingiva.
Let her help you find where you begin and where you end.
When the shadow of pain falls across,
let a mask seal in your breathing thoughts,
the thin nitrous oxide barrier all that divides
what is and what is not.
The x rays will miss them, but let your blind dentist see
all the forgotten truths about you.
Let your dentist not be dead.
Let her live inside, playing you in her imagination,
as you imagine her hands playing over her ivory work.
If you do not know if she lives in you,
just know that she knows nothing unknown also to you,
but she overwhelms your nothingness,
light mixing in darkness and darkness in light.
Later, let her billing office go unpaid.
The dunning letter will sit before you,
its cancelled forever stamps
and outstanding deductible clamoring, clamoring
for the cunning emptiness of your cavity.
Every moment is a mystery, a tangle of then, now and when,
according to her diploma above the porcelain spittoon
silently watching over you, forever agape and helpless,
mourning your extinct cavity,
amen.
(Red Savina Review, Fall 2018 issue).
The Cicadas Alone Will Mourn Us 17-year cicadas, nature’s longest-lived insects, rise once from underground to mate and die. we gather as one drove then die cycle-stamped brood from dark larvae earthen seeded pupae upswarm mass in choral trees songs burn air copulate ovules silence again we gather in fervid paradise born from the eternal earth womb where life was a buried name of death shrill yammering lust detonates skin piles scattered as sated leaves we gather within the rising juddering tymbal brood racket rise in forests and field edges echo in stone and glass canyons live our full day on tar rivers our army of eyes gather as one we watched you build hollow towers sat by your crowded deadly thoughts mourned your years of plodding and pain the brief mad flash in which you dwelt we gather to remember time before your bone dust darkened the land your cruel unsteady ascendence as you lowered yourselves we fought to arise apart from the same ground we gather together to praise the small greatness of your tiny clutch your earthen dead playing cleft tines of broken genius as the song of our bliss fell unheard to you we gather above your fallen truths your doubts dissolved to dirt and fed us we gather to begin again again we sing all that we know
the time for all doing is now
we gather as one drove then die.
(Global City Review, January 2023).
Cooking, Sex, Life and Death
The machinery of internet pornography
is a blender of whirling blades
gelding the grip, grind
and grunt of it.
Courtship was once,
maybe, a coupling
of growth and hunger,
a chiffon flowering in a garden
in the first fecund dawn,
but the modern mind has moved on
out to the country
where the factory farms
devote a few capons and fryers
for copulation quota,
while the pullets cluck in hutches
over clutches of barren eggs.
In town, lust now piles
in grocery aisles,
until rung up
and later cracked and whipped
like eggs on a hot pan
in the kitchen.
Then upstairs
on the creaking pallet
the fry cook lays
with the butcher,
their clefts and cracks
mending in a moment
of simple human need.
Basted in cooling sweat,
a fertile red joy
floats just beyond
joined bodies
waiting for its birth,
poaching inside
God’s fevered ovarium.
(I-70 Review, September 2021 issue).
Eclipse
What is the shadow of the restless Earth
if not a whisper to the deaf moon,
speaking of urges
and erasures over eons
on continental canvasses, half-forgotten
memories of volcanic torments
that could tease syzygy to lunacy?
Sunlight illumined off
the beaten lunar face
silhouettes an infant palimpsest,
nursed on obliviating
rain and wind, swaddled
in tectonic blankets.
A warm-hearted amnesiac,
innocent enabler,
the artful Earth shines over
airless ageless craters and pocks.
The tired Moon, worn by abuse,
counts up every tedious meteor blow.
Dead, cold and without too much hate
for the earth, that sibling
with one agate blue brown eye
and its selfish unrequited love,
that too intimate orbital embrace.
After receiving a billion spring tides
gifting a few Apollo footprints.
The moodless Moon is forever
the Earth’s mark.
The Earth turns over fresh soil,
each new day begetting extinction
and birth of a new sun.
Every moment
a new river runs into a new sea.
Scales flash in water.
On coastal cliffs
what tiny shadows
exalt
the sister Moon?
(First published as “Dark Orb” by Harbinger Asylum, Summer 2018 issue).
The Good Witch of the West Side
Into the rattling subway silence
came her familiar moonlit pitch,
her worn smile always
on like an occult crown,
her thoughts radiated
outward, saturated inward
the crevices of her mind.
The songs that rang out from her
nonsensical and deeply true, echoed
off the walls of headlines
to be long remembered by some,
like certain moments
with small children.
When she ended her chirping and
hopped away to the next car,
she left unspoken
words, caught like flies
in flypaper, in a swaying breeze
of silent straphanging passengers.
Some days she reached
into her rumpled bag for
the clay bowl
from her lost daughter.
She told a gray man in a gray hat
on the Number 3 train
how she swept the cars with her invisible broom,
he asked if that meant she was
the Good Witch of the West Side,
and they laughed together.
She saw him often on the train after that
and traded smiles.
Once she showed him the holy letters
from her children,
telling of their lives in foster care.
She wanted to fly to them
but her wings were trapped in glue.
Instead
she asked him
if he could,
he said
he was sorry
but,
her glance wandered
from his face
like a ghost of a bird
and somehow
she flew to the next car
on stumps of broken wings.
He never saw her again after that.
Mornings later he was dozing in his seat.
he opened his eyes at his stop.
Next to him he found
a small bowl of dead flies.
(Oddville Press, Winter 2021 issue).
Hamlet’s Father
Daily I think of my father:
shroud of broken threads –
venom-tainted veins –
scalpel blunted on
his double-woven heart.
I did not expect last night
he would speak of it:
his memory gullied out –
asking in the dark
that I seek its sediments –
stand with him
in ravine, forest –
me, his echo,
raving for us
to weary hills
against this slow ravelling.
(Superpresent Magazine, January 2022 issue).
The Hole in the Poem
It was termites, I think,
that bored out the heart
of this poem. Yet
the poem still asks: why
is the hole in the poem
its heart? Less is more
for a poem, but imagine
if a magician’s sleeve eclipsed the center of
the moon: a lacuna cratering out the lunar
heart, a coreless moon would now climb
the black leaves of trees –
only a peephole to
Cygnus,
Cat’s Eye
Nebula, Lyra
and Vega
C.
No memory, no feeling, no minding
its leave, just our sadness watching the heart
of the moon fall in the wordless sea. Less is less
for the moon. More or less.
Or let me put it like this:
When the hole fell
from this poem
I stuffed it lumpy
with words for grief and love
until, luminous
with lovely grief,
it sank in that sea
like a moonstone.
Pull it
up by the stuffing
and the hole returns.
In the center
waves the argentine flaglet
of something new.
(Sixfold Magazine, Summer 2021 issue).
Honeysuckle and Flaming Creeper
On reading Terrance Hayes
As you said, there never was a black male hysteria.
It is a wonder to ponder the spent lifetimes
Stacked under a lineage of kingly goons
In Money Mississippi. Or lying scattered
Like bone bits in other not much better places
And still not mirror the madness in the faces.
Imagine instead planting your good feet in dirt
And letting the sprouts spread out for miles.
Many may be pulled up, or frisked down,
But still they tendril, lancing hearts,
Doubling back on themselves, entwining,
Alive but speaking for the weary dead.
You should see them, all these strong green ropes,
Wrapping a restless house in fiery hopes.
(Sixfold Magazine, Summer 2021).
Hospice Policy:
“No Jokes After 8 PM.”
After I cracked wise your laughter
floated above us like a blessing.
The tears came later,
finally and zealously
As I nuzzled your dying head.
How lovely when
the glacier within thaws
drip by dear drop,
leaving newly carved landscape
and us only this day
to explore it all.
(Torrid Literary Journal, April 2019 issue).
The Last Aspen Stand
Aspen share a common root system, resulting in stands that are genetically a single tree. One such aspen stand in Utah is 80,000 years old – the largest and oldest living organism.
The best of us
is at the root,
away from light,
probing for good
in dark. We are
a single tree,
divided
above and below,
every part devotion
to a whole.
In each breath
live a hundred generations
of mastadons,
elk and nuthatch.
Out of what heart wood
do we worship the wind
with leaves like shimmering hands?
How many winters
have strengthened our fiber?
How many fires do we bear,
or saplings strangle in our shadow?
We feel our killers’ footsteps
fall among us,
and we weep:
for our alikeness;
our mutual need;
our sense of selves;
our awe
of the other’s strangeness;
your weak grasp on what you saw;
your blind visions and divisions
both within and without.
Even
as we die, you forget
that the core of all of us
is a heart woven of two fibers:
- one to heal,
- and one to harm.
(Sixfold Magazine, Summer 2021 issue).
Let Us Take This
In memory of Allan Wiley.
Let us take this.
If not the tendrils of the garden vine.
If not this park’s great oak tree.
If not our rambles roped like planets
into ellipses of that tree.
Or the moon winching
up the coarse twine of oak limbs,
a spidery lattice under ivory lunar light.
Let us take this.
If not the tippling wind plucking the woods.
If not the rustling laundry of winter leaves.
If not the sole blue balloon
lofting unbound on your children’s laughter,
Or the liquid guitar chords that you loved
trickling through magnetic pickups,
dreaming us gods pretending we are not.
Let us take more than the slack casings of regret:
that your light cut just a bit into the disenchanting dusk,
that the trail washes out at water’s edge,
that you left your name on bottles of bitter pills
churning in the swell of your nightstand’s tides.
Let us take knowing that others may be cured
of the comfort of hiding inside the longing to be known.
Let them take what they need to rebuild
their battered lighthouse
where the doubtful think that only they can clearly see.
Let us take grief as a planting, a seed of faith,
even if we only spin like mayflies
round a light we saw go out.
Then take with you the things not left behind.
Strap them to the great heart
that you carry lightly from this world.
We are stronger
laden with absent weight.
(Map Literary, Spring 2020 issue)
Locomotive
“It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description." Alan Watts
“Words are impoverishments, splendid poverties.” Charles Simic
In the beginning was heard
the brilliant word,
babbling of its birth.
Then the sentence clattered an entrance,
drunk metronome,
locomotive of mangled parts,
clacking on untrusty tracks,
snake straight
but shifted in their rusty bolts,
molting rolling thoughts.
It is the thing that gets lost
trying to explain itself.
This sentence,
conceived in the mind to die in meaning,
lumbering locution,
a listing headlamp and a whistle
bridges darkness to darkness
blind to much.
It leaves us still blind
in the bright night.
Every sentence seems a failure born
on a dying tongue, yet sparking
up rails of light, a convolution
rolling to its distant point.
It does not see how the noun
decays in its womb or the verb
conjugates toward flowers,
riding this line to the next station.
There it may change to westbound
but never
slip off the page,
skedaddling for a newspaper and coffee.
I remember a sentence like a hooded head,
lucent and lost,
lurching down the unlit path.
Where went the beveled edge
of the blade of language?
What is this word.
Why is this glory.
(First published as "In the Beginning" by Map Literary, Spring 2020 issue).
Luck
Years ago. Ringing phone.
Emergency room.
Half way to Omaha.
High speed rollover.
Jaws of life.
Helicopter
medevac. Emergency
surgery, morphine drip delerium,
antibiotics, waiting room TV prattling.
My sister heroically arriving, driving 500 miles
with my neonatal niece in tow. (Two years later,
it was like it never happened.
Blessings of traumatic amnesia,
plastic surgery, physical therapy,
Miracles of Modern Medicine.
The recovered now tell jokes
involving crash test dummies,
or agape button eyes watching out for them
on a scarecrow in some Nebraska field.)
Taking a break from the ICU
I went out to I-80, the very spot
according to the police report.
Across the dead asphalt,
a partly crushed caterpillar
writhed across skid marks,
feeling for the safe green leaves
of high grass, wild strawberries, goldenrod.
The early spring crickets
kept up a constant cackle,
resilient, as if the pavement
and the blurring cars never were.
Between the road edge, the flattened weeds
and the crushed hackberry
that saved their lives
ambled that happy idiot, luck,
that scarecrow or lighning rod
blocking a dark door,
or some other metaphor
too big, dumb and lovely
to fit in an ambulance
or a hearse.
(Whimsical Poet: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry, spring 2022 issue)
Memory of the Child
As the old roan mare lopes
on pushing the confusion
of cows rounded by the collies
across the mud flats,
the boy thinks ahead
and because his taut gaze
is never adrift of the bovine
ocean bob of haunches
to lose his track of each
from each and because
he wonders how time’s
slack lariat snaps tight
to cinch dewlap flesh
even as his hondo
knots the herd
to memory,
the horse stumbles
light, the day behind,
cattle gone to night pens
then slaughter, and below
the TV’s blare
the frayed old man,
bathed in dim light
in the chair of his mind
scatterings, a worn
peace warming him
with thoughts that still
measure a mile’s trail
of time, recalls pieces
of that child’s lost face,
the calm forms of beasts
returned to stable,
and how finally
none of it was wasted.
(Locomotive of Mangled Parts, chapbook by G.R. Kramer, Finishing Line Press, 2023).
Mud Chameleon
More mud than man,
I was made from spit
and dirt, descended
from a bog
now dried and cracked.
When the rain departed
I shone for an hour
under a high sun.
My minds remain many
heaps of fallen rose petals
in different shades of brown.
My one heart,
disguised
coal black,
still pumps mud-thick blood
that squeaks - as if to ask.
The swamp grass rooted in me
before she came to set her toes,
and sink and stir such chemistries.
Out of dry grass and pebbles
we shape this together
and in the morning lie
with creation. Again the hawk
drifts overhead
and passes.
The child is now strong
but pain always steals again
for the wild God above.
Now I’ve become old mud,
these boots caked like blood
until mud and boots are one.
I wash my shadow in mud.
Has time changed you mud?
Do you still squeal your young question?
(First published as "Different Kinds of Mud" in Sixfold Magazine, Summer 2021 issue).
Nature’s God
A reflection on Thomas Jefferson
Hold this truth
and cast your words
over the water like Jesus.
Your hooks seek minds to snare
in a power illuminating
and hot as a new sun.
Later your form stands
at the door of Sally Hemings’s shack,
casting a shadow
between enlightenment and terror.
Only the two of you know in full
your honed guilt,
your bone-built lies,
your deadly failings
before Nature’s God’s
steady eyes.
You wake with the ache
of the hollow world
in your head. Like Moses,
you want to lead your people to Canaan,
standing on a false bottom,
conscience cut at the joint.
You seek to be kind,
you stroke
her shoulder,
like a wolf
petting a dog.
You mull a question
raised by Nature’s God.
Knowing that all are born
equal,
you sense a twisted helix
of cord, running through
every knotted fiber, tying
each to all,
sewn into the kind,
the dull,
and a special breed of mean.
One night you dream that she left you,
fleeing across the plantation fields
with your child in her arms.
Like Solomon, you stand
paralyzed,
as your foreman raises his musket.
The moment before
the shot claps out
you burn with the shock
of your answer
to the question
posed by Nature’s God.
(Tipton Poetry Journal, May 2021 issue)
Passover/ Easter 2020
Since Eden never such a sanguine night.
After the slaughter in Goshen of all the flocks,
their cries abate in the last limb of light.
Against slave hut doors a blood tide knocks.
Moses chafes for the risen sun god’s eye
then the furious flight to silent Sinai.
Contagions and devils stalk this spring
as willets and warblers ring and rage
over this and that malicious king,
over these just deserts, that minor plague,
over those years of Egypt grown tired and fat
and the hungers haunting Judea after that.
Another prophet offers up feeble explanations
for each lost child and blood-let lamb.
Fear lumbers today through divided nations
and down the snaking streets of tired Jerusalem
stumbles the risen son, a savior, an enemy
falling from this weedy Garden of Gethsemane.
(Sixfold Magazine, May 2020 issue)
Pegasus Broken
We check our email for the thing that matters
while waiting for a funeral to begin.
A memory rises of a child’s tale,
a winged stallion, storm cavalry for the gods,
once foaled from wild Medusa
and her hair of snakes,
which turned all who saw her
to stone,
except Perseus her executioner, with his mirror trick.
Aim the bow blindly,
still the dying heart.
A thousand snakes struggle for my head
in the bath room mirror,
as in the water glass a million reflections of Perseus
stand paralyzed
before the thing the matters.
Look Mommy, butterfly horses.
The ugly statue is stapled like a tail
on the rump of Memorial Bridge.
With coltish grace the myth prances,
A circus pony arrowing down millennia,
to ricochet
off my young son’s old soul.
My wife once told me this with glistening eyes.
Her weariness after months of moil,
ground down by the long illness of her mother,
by her death, and by other mournings,
slung like lightning bolts from Zeus,
was for a breath
in the breeze of brisk new butterfly wings.
The thing that matters goes unseen
into the spam folder, between love and fear.
The fluid muses of archaic gods seed
the frozen stone before us.
Only the agile mind of a fool or a kid
would try to tip
the turning mass of this tired rock.
If they would come to us, those butterfly horses,
and guide us to their oasis,
then we could lap the water
before the empty eyes of desiccated gods,
gods at peace sensing how our children hold
the quivering hearts
of the things that matter
(Harbinger Asylum, Summer 2018 issue).
Preaching in the Temple of Forgotten Gods
Every day, life praises the sun.
At night howler monkeys huddle in loneliness and fear.
Our lives mark the cycle of day light.
Such days bracket the darkest times.
In the yellow Yucatan, temple shadows mark the solstice.
Like a monkey, I ruminate on secret regrets.
The Milky Way drapes the jungle top like a bridal veil.
The galaxy of our mistakes is draped in loneliness and fear.
Every dawn is pregnant with ignorant expectations.
Every dusk the air hangs with remorse.
The old days were blessed like river water in cupped hands.
The yellow temples are in ruins. Everyday life raises the sun.
(Harbinger Asylum, Fall 2021 issue)
Roadkill
Under manic sun,
the deer’s heat
leaks
on the berm.
Before terrible stars,
the berm leaks
day heat
into antlered trees.
(finalist in 2021 Winter Anthology poetry contest, published in Volume 11, Winter Anthology)
Ruins of Gedi
Gedi was an Arab town on the Kenyan coast of the Indian Ocean. Settled sometime after 1000 CE, it was suddenly abandoned in the 1600s. The fate of its inhabitants is unknown.
Clear finger moon strums
on ancient stone walls
on the hills above a muffled ocean.
The town within lies empty.
No blood, no bullets, no mass graves.
Pottery and fineries left behind.
Gates unlatched, responsibilities fled.
Fear and sorrow lie muzzled
between the town walls
and the thick forest.
Perhaps only the women,
still and silent, stayed.
Stemmed the despair
that frenzied the night,
unflinching, steadfast. Stanched
the miasma.
Later they called out.
No answer came from the wave-
beaten shoreline
or the enfolding jungle.
By dawn the women had become
ghosts, mourning the unbroken
bread loaves, the cold ashes
of kitchen fires, the shapes
that still filled beds,
the silence of remembered songs.
The men and children
had taken a silver trail out to sea
where none could hear the other’s voice.
(Nzuri Journal, spring 2022 issue).
Schrödinger’s Cat
Critics, if I had them, would say
I should use fewer words
and say more.
Yes.
My greatest critic is my cat.
I don’t have a cat.
But if I did she would approve
when I scratched her belly.
A poem is like Schrödinger’s cat:
Sitting on paper
both dead and alive
until a reader decides which.
Erwin Schrödinger wrote a poem
about his cat. Like all poems,
it was a thought experiment,
meandering a bit like this,
but in the guise of a science paper
dealing with quantum superpositioning.
It was not received quite as he intended,
as with any successful poem.
He wrote in free verse,
but chose not to show off,
resisting German rhymes
for “quantum superpositioning.”
What he meant as an absurdity (a)
folds on itself into something
in some deep sense true (isdst),
leaving a remainder of one stanza line.
The formula reduces to a squared = isdst
which might be the solution to all poetry.
The critics missed that trick
and should be criticized for that.
(Spring 2021 issue of Thimble Magazine).
Shadows on the Border
At dusk on a late winter day 1950 I am a ragged refugee hiding
on the express train to Paris,
roaring past the Maginot Line,
once as grim as the Iron Curtain,
now just a scar of empty bunkers
across the damp Alsatian hills.
A tunnel comes and darkness amplifies
but fails to smother tenacious hope,
as faithful as a tunnel’s end.
A train blasts by like a shot
and I see phantoms of people
in slivers of dim rushing lights
passing like me
from nothing to nothing.
Everyone I have loved is a shadow now,
leaving an intimate illusion in my memory.
Their absence as tangible
as silhouettes in a doctored snapshot,
as real as that shock
of air pressure and speed.
Hiding between carriages
in my patchwork clothes
I am shapeless stolen bits of others,
whose differences from me
don’t feel as far apart as the difference
I find between me and myself
when I let anger work its power over me.
Twenty nights ago I crawled
under barbed wire at the spot
where a villager whispered
there were no mines, only
the earth’s shadow on the guard towers,
and a searchlight punching the night
like an arm hurling dice above me
huddled in mud and tall grass.
Shadows are the ghosts of imagination.
All else leaves you
between hearing the police knock
and crawling out the kitchen window
with only what you wear
and the last gold coins
that your mother put in your hands
as shadow fell across her face.
(Young Ravens Literary Review, Winter 2020 issue).
Soldier
Sometimes a soldier
will start laughing
in the middle of the battle,
at nothing and for no reason.
It is as though he is somewhere else,
helmet strapped on
at his old school desk,
where someone carved his name
with a bayonet.
His laughter ends,
and he thinks of his lover,
the times he was sorry,
the silence of God,
the bomb’s dark orange petals
opening,
and a joke he has yet to tell.
(Mudfish Issue 23, May 2023).
The Starless Skies of Central Park
The dead are the dirt
that heave up green
notes in the hot dusk
to break the glass
of this living islet
riverine sliver
in granite and light -
it splits the Hudson flow
into passings that precede risings
as we divide the divine
between imagined blood rites
and blank sky painted
by starlings - lying
in the lawn that patches
this tumid ball
backs to our cinder star
eyes listen to hear
curtained constellations tell
old tales in the pallid night
but our scrambled senses drown
in echoes of that ancient
cosmic shriek - now
the stale staccato sky
holds mostly light of inbounds
to Newark - yet
science webs thoughts -
they telescope
to the imagined edge
where murmured skies
were once a glittering
coal bed and tin moons
rose and fell on rocks roots
and strange wings -
what if a young Whitman
once lay on this very grass
and cried - my,
how crickets then sung
the milky night
to unseen windows
beyond unseen stars
(New York Times Metropolitan Diary, March 5, 2023)
Three Snapshots of Superman's Mother
In memory of my mother, Felice Kramer.
The Battle of Budapest, December 1944.
This stagnant end squats over its vile start
Faster than a speeding bullet!
from the slag pile, the louse waste
More powerful than a locomotive!
the fecal secretions of war
Leaps tall buildings in a single bound!
the girl’s father was sought for
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, its Superman!
the column of Jews being
Truth, justice and the American Way.
marched to the river.
This is a job for Superman.
It was then that God stole her belief
but left her fraught wonder.
Superman Acting Out. Colorado, November 1963.
The vertical hold hop-skips,
horses drawing hearses
plod inside the droning box, fusing
to the vitreous reflection
of his mother’s tear-streaked face.
Preschool Superman stews.
No president calls Him to Dallas.
He was not consulted
on preempting His TV show for this
dull parade.
His caped powers, though mighty,
are no match for the elegiac bagpipes or
the morose Kennedys on this untuned Magnavox.
After Kryptonite. Virginia, April 2016.
Floating in my feeble galaxy of lost atoms,
I peer at an old picture frame.
Behind glass the girl’s silver halide half smile
issues a cautious greeting across
this light year of longing.
I orbit that smile’s twilight glow --
a planet where love has nowhere to go.
(Wrath-Bearing Tree, October 2020).
Three Thirty Nine
according to the somnolent clock,
a pale green sun over her sleeping form
that I watch on her inward flight
through whichever cityscapes and jungles
her flicking eyelids choose.
I ebb in somnia and
dream that my dreams and hers
intertwine, waves washing down alleyways and
receding, oceans tugging
our difficult shorelines, each whitecap
a marriage of air and water,
a serrated roof over such depths
of lost wrecks, of water swinging
over the aloneness of green and black
krill as whale flukes crack
silver into the night air, swallowing stars
that perched above as she passed through
churches and pastures of her tangled country.
Each night our skin somnambulates
to places our bones cannot follow. I stay up waiting.
(Oddville Press, Winter 2021 issue).
Tom's Cove
Edge lines of water, grass
and sun-singed blue sky
fret their colors, cast nets
past shore birds afloat
in tidal shallows
to the rim of the world.
A fleet of gulls, terns,
ibis and herons
lie anchored and alert,
like their river of forebears
that stood watch
on ten million such radiant days,
ten million more when raindrops
pocked clear gray water.
Such assortments -
the arch of the egret’s neck,
and the bleak oyster catcher
on its reef of shells.
Overhead ospreys crisscross
the bay patrolling
for fish. Flexing wet wings,
skinny chest thrust out,
a cormorant sits atop a buoy.
I tell Cathy that I try to learn not to think much
about the ways we gaze
at the salt marsh flats
though I know
that I could look more deeply.
One of life’s funny conundrums, I start to say,
then there is a shift
and the osprey veer away.
The motley fleet sets sail, flapping
above the water to new respite,
a flock of nervous terns,
the ungainly lope
of a single great blue heron.
We look for the disturbance.
There it is,
high aloft,
a thick black line,
and white dot against the blue.
Bald eagle,
delicate patch
of menace, majestic
dot in the day,
circles awhile then drifts away.
The osprey return.
As things go on
I almost see how
the laughing gulls’ cries
and wheeling ospreys
are to us as we are
to the cattails and salt hay,
as is the marsh grass
to the blue ebb of water and sky.
(The MacGuffin, Vol. 39, No. 1, 2023).
Traffic Light
00:00.00 The car made us free but the traffic enslaves. The altar is empty in front of overcrowded pews of disbelievers, tired of ourselves inside steel and glass sarcophagi, jammed into lanes of unexpressed road rage or despair. In the gray sky, disgruntled unseen stars drudge along in their dark half-dredged trenches. It is hard to know if that is free will shimmering
00:15.00 amidst the carbon monoxide: some may glance in their mirrors, reflecting on the order and chaos in the modern world, on the haze glittering off metallic grays and greens, the clear glass of semi-conscious minds locked in innumerable pasts, driving to a finity of futures. Above us a traffic camera records how the seeds of imagined fragments of this moment
00:30.00 gestate into a half-sense of the mysteries, the quantum mechanics, the algorithmics that drive it all. We came to be here and in seconds we will go into the rest of our lives, flawed and sublime in more ways than we can know or any device limn. You never choose the moment but only whether now to look through the windshield spatters, navigate
00:45.00 the traffic patterns of thought, or join with ourselves here enraptured - as a machine might be, if it could – by what it would be to carry a spirit, to gift oneself each to each - as if we were in part each other’s creation - as others are in part our creation - as if each were another’s rough draft. We ride at our own risk.
01:00.00
(Vita Poetica, Summer 2022 issue).
Ukraine Haiku
all across the road
blood of butchered root in cracks
seed of black spring bloom
weapon
below white flowers
we lie with the fray of bees
nowhere people are
loud
mir meant peace to both
when trees leafed over laughter
now stumps stand their ground
silent
Their portrait stained red
parlor tatters open sky
empty sniper eyes
annihilate
dear scor ched children
let’s play in the gutted car
front seat parents sleep
witness
may the good endure
tanks missiles sunflowers plows
may the lost return
explosive
see how the flies help
keep down the odor of rot
old men in ditches
artillery
war machines rust out
wind blown blood loam covers steppe
lily bulbs open
memory
nations’ lies take life
empires feed death to the dead
human history
for got ten
mothers of soldiers
whose blood drains to the black sea
mothers of soldiers
(NewVerse.News, May 2022).
while the car door flattens down the tall grass
under the rusty light of the low sun,
and the shattered glass, an hour ago scattered stars
strewn across an asphalt sky,
now swept into the mud and weeds,
and darkened in long shadows, lies along
a trail of some dried substance leading
from the place where the door was flung,
back across the tire tracks
of a departed ambulance, and
back further to the devastated car itself,
squatting still on its crushed roof
as if a shed skin of a chrysalis,
or a prehistoric creature
with wheels skyward like stubby limbs, waiting
for the wrecker haul to the salvage yard,
but clinging to something soul-like, until
some minute tug of gravity and jostle of wind
forces the failing latch of the glove box, and
service receipts, parking permits,
a child’s drawing spill onto the ceiling,
somewhere later in another universe
an insurance form will populate
its data, and silent angels pour themselves
more coffee in the break room.
(Muse Literary Journal, spring 2022 issue).
Written by Window Light
On “Woman Writing a Letter”
by Johannes Vermeer, circa 1670.
This momentary world
is washed pure
of timeless savageries.
The slanted beam draws
your pen forward,
as you, bent over verse,
bow to this oracular light
and to words’ random rhythm.
But your maid is her own muse,
moored in the flow of time.
Her radiant gibbous moon
looks to dangers far past
the harbored masts of Rotterdam,
or the glistening fields around Delft.
Her serenity as to crimes
done to her, or to her family,
or as witness to the taint of empire,
or to household scandals concealed
behind that looming tapestry,
or some such secret makes her
powerful, wise and kind.
Her dark form erect and vigilant
is the cloaking lens
for your orb of internal focus.
All depends on her confidence –
her watchfulness,
her placing your poem
into the hands of your lover,
her sealed lips, her prudence.
The picture says you are a servant
To how you feel in this moment
And your maid is time’s patient mistress.
(Finalist in Atlanta Review 2018 International Poetry Competition, Atlanta Review Fall 2018 issue)
Young Odysseus
You sprang from the old story
Boys lined along a gully
Soldiers belting up a gun
Arguing in a strange tongue
Whether to shoot or not
Each boy half in terror half sailing away
Someone was always nosing to know
Where you were from though long
from fresh off the boat your patois
peppered words like wave
cresting crashing long after
Father feel my skin wrap over your old ribs
Drag your battered oars far from sea
Winnowing fan kindled for heat
Tread your shadow across the Canadian steppe
Horizon is border of the sailor’s knowing
But my mind is shallow against relentless ocean
All I think is borne in light breeze
Carrying this thin vessel to the edge of the world
Dividing ourselves in our dreams
We chart many headings
This sail slooping below a bright horizon
That body not dropping in a red ditch
(Sixfold Magazine, May 2020 issue)
