~

my fogged-up glasses
November's gentle nudge
"Be thankful."

~

~

Nearly
asleep, you twitch,
fingers squeezing my hip:
"Don't leave." As if you don't hold me,
wholly.

~

~

photos I should burn--
in your blurred face I see
all my mistakes


~

~

the night so fat...
I breathe her wet smoke, roll
in her open arms

~

~

You smell like orange blossoms
even in winter.
When I'm around you
I can't breathe
seasons don't make sense.

~

~

clean, quiet house
the calm before the
playdate


~

~

A subterfuge of crows
sidles up and circles the tree,
nonchalant pecking.
The red-tailed hawk flutters wet feathers,
checks his quadrants, reconsiders.

~

So, the copy of Inked I got was the August issue with Green Day on the cover.

It's a well-engineered magazine: it's easy to hold and to turn the sturdy, matte pages. You think I'm joking? You should see me trying to read Better Homes and Garden—not only can I not turn the tissue-thin pages that I can read through, but I end up ripping out more than half because they're cheap ads.

The ads in Inked are artistically interesting and usually blend well with the content. There's good use of white space, making the feature text easy to read and drawing the reader's focus to the art. I liked that I learned a little bit about a lot of stuff, like things to see if I ever visit Switzerland—the HR Giger museum and Giger-themed pubs!--and about Skulls Unlimited International in Oklahoma and various artists.

But, no offense to the bookstore employees intended, I'm not sure how alternative the lifestyle portrayed in Inked truly is. Most of the people in its pages are young, white, and thin. Women are apt to be "girls" and there's an Inked Girl of the Month. (The website is much worse about using tits n ass to sell the magazine, which is why I don't provide that link.) They run fashion spreads like most magazines, and devote pages to telling readers what products to buy.

There's an odd...I want to say "middle-class wholesomeness" about the magazine's voice, too. The Green Day interviews, for instance, each began with, "What was your first tattoo?" (which I guess makes sense) and soon after "Did anyone in your family have tattoos? How did they react?" Which to me sounds like a breathy suburbanite kid, especially when Mike Dirnt said he was ten when he got his first tat and his mom and sisters, who had tattoos on their knuckles, acted like, "What took you so long?"

I'm not likely to subscribe, but it was a good one-time buy, and I'd probably peruse it in a B&N cafe. And I really liked this quote from the Dirnt interview, which conveys an attitude I think corresponds nicely with the mindset of craft-oriented genre writers:

"I'm no virtuoso. We're a punk band, but we know our way around our instruments pretty good. Yeah, I make mistakes here and there, but at the end of the day I get most of them right. You just get up there and swing for the fences every night—you don't leave anything out there onstage. You pour everything into it every night and when you're done, if there's nothing left on the stage, you know you did your job right and you had a fucking blast doing it." Mike Dirnt, Green Day bassist

~


crows nag from trees
my hat, forgotten at home,
warms a doorknob


~

Today I avoided a man in a chicken suit.

The suit did not present a happy-looking chicken, which may have been for the best, since the man was advertising a local buffet and he carried a sign asking "how many lips can you eat?"

Eeewwww!

On Saturday I met with a friend to discuss a chapter from my novel and our possible book-length poetry collaboration. It was a really good session, with plenty of big-picture thinking.

After lunch, we went to Half-Price Books and I picked up Sunshine by Robin McKinley (finally! I've been burned out on vampires for a long time), Kindred and Fledgling by Octavia Butler, and Troll, A Love Story, by Johanna Sinisalo.

I noted that, in addition to separate sections for science fiction/fantasy and horror (the boundaries between which I find hard enough to delineate), the store seems to be trying out a dark/urban fantasy section, with books by the likes of Patricia Briggs and TA Pratt. Which seems to me a hopeless cause, trying to maintain separate stock for that last section, unless they have multiple copies enough to put some everywhere one might think to look for that kind of novel.

Also, I picked up a back issue of Inked, which was shelved as "Alt. Lifestyle." With a label like that, I was hooked; I just had to see what qualified as "alt lifestyle" in Cedar Rapids, IA. Primarily stuff that didn't seem to belong anywhere else, it turns out. Including a collector's magazine all about Prince Harry's brother--William? I never remember; Harry is much more arresting, imo.

On Sunday I met with my freeform crit group and we discussed someone's chapter and someone else's poetry. The poetry generated excellent discussion: How, Can, Should we attempt to convey a sense of objectivity even when writing confessional poetry? How can we enlist/embrace multiple audiences when our poem's topic threatens to divide along gender lines?

Both evenings, I read a lot. I even started to reread The Love Curse of the Rumbaughs by Jack Gantos, which I've kept on my bedside table both because I love the cover art and because I knew as soon as I finished it the first time that I'd have to read it again more carefully. And The Mystery of Edwin Drood keeps staring at me, so I should finish it soon. Altho the cover art for that IS perfect for a bedside table...

~

apples out of reach
the tree's festering crown
jeweled by bees


~

~


sipping candlelight
from the hollow of your throat
sweeter than wine

~

~

my name in spray paint
a love letter on the overpass
to nowhere

~

~


blue-jean ballad
bleeds in the wash, emerges new:
tumbled-dry ku


~

~


fifty-seven flavors
you sneak up, whisper in my ear
and I can't name one


~


Based on events I witnessed earlier this week, when diatryma and I met for lunch. Enjoy!

~


bouncing off the walls
with mini mad scientists
homemade flubber


~

~

the exact shade
of ambiguity.
November sky


~

~

Like flicking water
from my fingertips
I fling these poems free
faith and dowsing in one gesture
warding off drought and doubt
summoning storms to me.

~

Love how you've thrown women to the wolves in the name of the greater good! And you too, Mr Obama! "A great victory for the American people" indeed! I mean, except for the female people.