Jack Delacruz

Ode to Malevolence

 

Today our heroes sing their songs,
For the masses, whom they sway.
Come here, come all;
Hear our glasses spill with beer.

          From the masses, whom they sway,
          Gifts arrive to gloss their gaze.
          Here our glasses spill with beer;
          The shaman's fire heard a noise.

                    Gifts arrive to gloss their gaze,
                    Men of mayhem, fight our ways.
                    The shaman's fire heard a voice;
                    Hear it hail, "Cage our days".

                              Men of mayhem, fight our ways,
                              Beat our bellies 'til they bleed.
                              Hear us hail, "Cage our days";
                              Feel the heat of our heart's lament.

                                        Beat our bellies 'til we bleed,
                                        Burn our homes with hellfire's suite.
                                        Feel the heat of our heart's lament;
                                        Are these the songs our heroes sung?

 

Johanna Miklós

Horrid Mary

 

The new baby arrived and Mary got her own room and

A doll.

When the baby cried, the parents

Cuddled and kissed, fretted and fussed. 

When Mary cried, she got put in

A corner.

When the baby pooped, the parents

Cooed and clucked, fondled and hugged

Each other.

When Mary wet her knickers, she got

                                                                        A hiding.

When the baby threw-up, the parents

Cuddled and kissed, fretted and fussed.

 

When Mary spat out vile spinach, she got locked in

A closet.

 

The parents told Mary to mind the baby and went out on a date.

First, it cried and Mary spanked it.

Then it stank-up the house and Mary threw it in the garbage.

 

 

 

Benjamin Blake

I Know What I Saw

 

Silhouettes slow dancing to the rattle of brushes on a snare

Curtains glow like a flashlight pressed against a sanguine palm

The edges of this reality blur

 

Arguing with a fortune-telling machine

That old witch better watch her painted plaster mouth

She has but one hand

But it's seen its fair share of action

 

Distilled shadows writhe upon the bathroom floor

As a good vintage pours from the twisted faucet

This night has your name written in Braille across the stars

Let's get death over and done with

I'm sick of waking up to misplaced limbs 

 

 

Childbearing Hips

 

Lift up that dress

In a room lit only by a hanging naked bulb

See how the light casts shadows that cloak the claw marks?

 

 

The City Skyline

 

The sky just changed color

Streaks etched across sullen eyes

Always illuminated in starlit courts

Worn stone pillars stretch out of sigh

Clandestine, candescent 

An inverted heart placed on the altar 

Stained glass shards refracting stuttered sighs

Half-sunken mausoleums 

Awaiting sacrificial tenants 

 

 

Benjamin Blake is the author of A Prayer for Late October (Hammer & Anvil Books, 2013). He writes from New Zealand.

 

 

 

Steven Gulvezan

Waiting for the Costa Concordia

 

“I don’t feel hate or rancor. I just want to find my wife’s body, to bury her in Sicily and to know what happened in those last minutes.”

            Elio Vincenzi, Christian Science Monitor 2013-09-16

 

Today is Papa’s birthday

We all walk out onto the veranda

To wait for the Costa Concordia

To pass by

 

“Look to the sea!” Papa says,

“And listen well—

The captain and I are good friends

And soon you will hear

A mighty salute

From the horns of the great ship

And then you will realize

What an important man I am!”

 

The air is sweet and warm

The roses in the garden—perfume

 

I look to the sea

Then at Papa’s face

So brave and strong

And listen well and long…

But all I hear is a big crash

Then silence

Except for the gulls and the waves

And the screaming

 

 

In Praise of Anthony Comstock

 

“The world is the devil’s hunting-ground, and children are his choicest game.”

--Anthony Comstock, the postal inspector who successfully influenced the United States Congress to pass the Comstock Law, which made illegal the delivery or transportation of "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" material as well as any methods of, or information pertaining to, birth control and venereal disease.

 

My hat’s off to you, sir

You recognized a dirty picture

Or word

When you saw it—

Pornography!

 

You understood

The overwhelming need

To throttle the pathetic miscreants

Who peddle smut

To our innocent children

And virginal women

Before these deviants 

Could get their dirty feet in the door

Of our blessed America

And befoul us

With their cursed product

 

You knew full well

That once unleashed

These unscrupulous entrepreneurs

Would lead unknowing lads and lasses

Down the garden path

Into the fiery pit of Satan himself

 

Now look at what we’ve got—

A big pile of naked bodies writhing

In whatever sort of unholy union

They are able to attain

 

They are undoubtedly

Consumed by lust and perversion

 

Sweet Jesus

Postal inspector Comstock

Even though your law was passed

Why didn’t America

Continue to heed your message

And forever clamp shut the door

Lock and bolt the door

Put iron bars on the door

Cement up the door

Entomb forever the god-forsaken door

That once opened a crack

Allowed all this disgusting stuff

Deep inside

To pollute and desecrate and slowly 

Through the lazy

Get-something-for-nothing

Mentality it breeds

Destroy the moral fiber

Of a once mighty nation

And transform our beloved America

Into a cesspool of depravity

 

Look about you

Once proud Americans

And observe the trickle

Of the fornicator’s foul seed

Running along the abandoned

Factory floor

Where once an honest workingman’s

Poor but decent

Life’s blood did flow

 

 

Born in Detroit, Steven Gulvezan has worked as a journalist and a library director.  He tries to work a story or poem the way a good butcher works a nice piece of meat:  cut out most of the fat and gristle, leave something juicy on the bone.  Some of his poems are collected in The Dogs of Paris (March Street Press).

 

 

 

Mercedes Webb-Pullman
Lorca’s Duende for five

 

i. his silhouette at dusk

 

tree-tangle, bird-flit and tendrils
ripe plums, a squeaky gate, cool fingers
shadows moving stone

 

(moonlight on waves like a ladder)

 

 

ii. qasida of the ocean

 

through kelp and bladderwrack

two silver fish –

one is shadow

the other just echo.

 

fellow travellers

show me my home!

 

in the ocean, flows the shadow

echoes in my throat

beached

between breaths – out, then in.

 

two black gulls

and a cloaked time-keeper

change places

and wait.

 

fellow pilots

show me my home!

 

in the ocean flows the shadow

echoes in my throat.

through seaweed

two black fish

change places

and wait.

 

 

iii. his lover

 

in infinite darkness

coal, mould and swamp

he collects creeds,

 

the smell of black. he hides

under rackety canopies

secreting lizards and lichen.

 

all ears and heels

he adapts to reality

as his flesh sets.

 

in limitless Erebus

how defiled and tiny a light

his existence brings.

 

coal, mould and swamp. always

in infinite darkness.

 

 

iv. his bones

 

as darkness falls

in the courtyard

he comes back to life

out of the rocks

that hold him.

 

he comes

throwing stones -

life lifts him

into the wind.

 

he enters

aiming at giants -

at the final wall

something begins.

 

from these pages

we build him.

 

 

v. lost between him and Spicer

   (after Bacchus by Jack Spicer)

 

filigreen stencils, the grapevine

shoots out to twine me,

 

its outline scribbled script

against the sky.

 

clouds disagree with sunlight. waves

lose count and start again.

 

long ago, soon, laughing and dying

a random disc crack skip chip.

 

how will you know who to visit

after decent surgery?

 

--but the grapevine whimpers and retreats

seductive and distended.

 

 

 

The eighteenth calypso

Shall I compare thee to a sinook so?
Thou art more wrang- wrang and more wampetate:
rough winds do shake the dear Zah-mah-ki-bo
and granfalloon hath all too short a date:
sometime too hot the foma heaven shines,
and oft is his Bokonon kan-kan dimm'd;
and every vin-dit fair sometime declines,
by chance or pool-pah changing course untrimm'd;
but thy eternal karass shall not fade
nor lose possession of duprass thou owest;
nor shall Death brag thou saroon in his shade,
when in stupa duffel time thou growest:
so long as men can boko-maru be,
so long lives Bokon giving life to thee.

 

(Bokonon, from Kurt Vonnegut Cat’s Cradle

via Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18)

 

 

Heathcliff’s final night   

 

you haunt the hallway shadows

your laughter blows with wind

through open windows

 

I trapped your soul in limbo

where no love exists

 

here, tonight

my curtains blow wide;

through swirling snow

I see us play again

 

Princess of Yorkshire, Prince of China

 

I am still your servant, Cathy

 

come back to me, or wait

and I will join you -                                                                                  

this time we’ll do it right

 

 

Mercedes Webb-Pullman is Chef de Partie of DM du Jour as well as author of Ono and Looking for Kerouac (Hammer & Anvil Books, 2013).

 

 

 

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