the City, Issue 21: BEAUTIFUL JUNK
- Current issue: www.thecitypoetry.com/issue21/index.htm
- Interview: Gary & Laura Dumm
- Poetry, Art & Photography
Photo by Peter Dell
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some sample issue snips, juicy bits:
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from BEFORE THE MATCH
by Bree
I want to get cursed
And not care
I want to be chosen
And refuse
~~
from WHAT KIND OF BIRTHDAY
BASEBALL SHIP IS THIS?
by Andrew Boerum
This is a great birthday ship
you told me to sail around in
But you didn’t mention anything
about baseball
Will there be baseball there
on the birthday ship? Or where
the ship will eventually dock…
will there be baseball there
too?
Also, even though this is a
great birthday ship you’re
telling me about I need to know
several things before I agree
to accept it
~~
from EARTH IS HORIZON, HEAVEN
IS HEIGHT
by George Wallace
i am a cutout pilgrim boy. you
are a cutout pilgrim girl. i am
holding a cardboard blunderbuss
and wearing a stovepipe hat and
a shiny buckle is on it. you are
wearing a white apron and have a
white bonnet and one loose
string is falling from it.
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EVENT
City Contributor Yuyutsu RD Sharma,
a Nepalese poet, is reading at Mac’s
Backs in Cleveland March 27, 7 p.m.
www.thecitypoetry.com/issue21/index.htm
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the City poetry zine is edited by Kathy Ireland Smith.
Mar 27 2008 03:52 am |
Art and
Poland and
Publications |
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boy moon fly - weathered child’s collage in indigenous village
We just came back from two days in the mountains picking coffee with an indigenous family. I’d never seen a coffee tree and suddenly I found myself in their midst. And vanilla vines, which grow on coffee trees. And many other wundruss food plants and trees. Horses and burros. People dressed in traditional clothes and the smell of wood and cobblestone streets or mud streets loaded with piles of transportation animal dung. Hawks that congregate on a tall dead tree at twilight, stark black hulks against blue mountain and fading sky. At night, all the stars. When I got up in the middle of the night to take a shit, I saw the big dipper from the toilet window. From my compromised animal position I could contemplate the cosmos.
The roosters crow at 4:30. At dawn I stared out the bathroom window to banana trees, more coffee trees growing down the side of the mountain. A red dirt path, and two workers hiking up it already and this is dawn, an hour after the roosters.
stone and surface for grinding corn and other kitchen ware
Our hosts hold their bodies to rake the coffee cherries off the branch and hit the jackpot basket hanging from their chests ching ching ching efficient not a bounce from brow to ground.
Later in the day Elvira and I work together, further from Smith and Tomas. She’s a head shorter than I am, but she bends strong trees down so I can grab them and pick them. I pick them, she picks others, and she picks my brain, too.
“How are you and Smith together? Are you happy?”
“Very happy.”
“How long do you want to live here?”
“At least a year. Smith says longer.”
“Do you have a house in Ohio?”
“No. We don’t have a home.”
cat at the traditional oven
“Did you stay with your mama?”
“No. I had an apartment, and then I moved in with Smith.”
“Did you study poetry?”
“No. I worked with computers. I studied engineering.”
“Did Smith study poetry?”
“No. English and philosophy.”
“Oh, he’s a philosopher?”
“Yes.”
“Do you share the same philosophy?”
“Yes. We believe life is most important. That we need to make happiness now.”
“Do you work now?”
“Sort of. We hope we’ll make money later with the book we’re writing. And we do art too.”
pack-smith
Walking back home, Elvira asks me, “Is this your art?”
“Being here?”
“Si.”
“Sure. Smith says all of life can be art.”
We watch Smith disappear up the road. He carries a bag on his back, secured to his head with a strap.
Elvira asks, “How many pesos kilos do you have free?”
“What?” I have no idea what she’s asking. Maybe she wants to know how much money I have.
“You see this?” She points to my purse. “How many kilos is this?”
“Probably two.”
“How many pesos do you have free?” and she gestures at my body.
“I’m guessing less than 75.”
“75! Wow.”
“Well, I don’t know. I usually use another method of measurement, not kilos. We use pounds. There are two pounds to a kilo.”
I think about how little I eat compared to Tomas and Elvira. They eat probably twice as much, but they also work three times as much. They’re small people.
modern art - child’s drawing in indigenous village, subjected to weather on outside wall
I got bug bit. Wrote our friend Mad Max, “Fun work, but twenty of the little fvckers got me.”
He wrote back: “Mosquito bites are not good. Tell me more about this village. Is it up in the mountains or down in the more jungley part? If it’s where I think it is, up in the mountains, it’s O.K. but if you go down into the the more humid and jungle like parts you need to see a Doctor and get some prophylactic malaria shots before you hang out in that climate.”
Tropical diseases could be some kind of haute couture fad. I imagine Angelina Jolie in khaki, limp and alluring in a sweaty tropical fever under gauzy mosquito net. Or we could set up diarrhea clinics for fat celebrities so they could lose all that extra weight - very quickly. Serve them smoothies with an extra special ingredient, bacteria a la mode.
art made by children
When what you read becomes real, that’s adventure. That’s a traveling life. This past couple days experience has fertilized my brain. I was worrying that I don’t think as much, or as deeply as I used to. I worried that it’s because I’m smoking too much grass, or I’m not in the real working world any longer so my brain has slackened, or that it’s because I no longer have solitude because Smith is my constant companion, my constant silver lining. Though I’d always yearned for a companion like Smith, I used to have cathedrals of thought that I’d built in my fortress of solitude. I had ornate recursion, mania, obsession, brainstorms, vistas. Rabid focus on the future.
Now I have the eternal Now, a big eyeball. An entirely different perspective. A me who I’m surprised to be. And I have an articulateness, a maturity. I remember the old cathedrals were really labyrinths of madness. I have a thinning of think, but it’s a refinement.
“Malaria” - my latest art piece
Crime Scene by Lady K, 26″ x 30″ - foto by smithearthquake this morning. things shaking and swaying like a badly driven bus on a rough bumpy road. been in an earthquake before while in a bath in ohio - water ripples played on my surface, otherwise i’d never have known. here, the bath water would have been waves.
lady k finished her large piece - Crime Scene, 26 by 30 inches - here’s 5 faces it metamorphed.
Crime Scene by Lady K, phase 1 - foto by smith
Crime Scene by Lady K, phase 2 - foto by smith
Crime Scene by Lady K, phase 3 - foto by smith
Crime Scene by Lady K, phase 4 - foto by smith
Crime Scene by Lady K, phase 5 - foto by smithno hot water this morning. pilot light went out in the night. opened heater up, figured what was what, re-lit. i feel surprised any time i succeed at doing one of the manly things i’m supposed to know how to do - like swap out an empty propane tank in france and replace it with a full tank that had the wrong fittings. the things i’m good at all seem to be tied more to the feminine side of life. my masculine index is suspect. fortunately i’m large and psychotic looking, so folks tend not to mess with me. this is probably a good thing.
Feb 12 2008 02:05 pm |
Art and
Mexico |
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Haven’t blogged much, but I’ve been active. Here’s what I’m working on lately. Got some art, some photos, and some prose (subject to change) from our project - CRIMINAL…
First, my recent art. I’m showing two alignments - not yet sure which end’s up.
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Here’s something from the 270 page mess of CRIMINAL:
I was in electronics school for radar in Memphis in the Navy. I never used any of it. The only thing I remember was the Navy taught electronics backwards from civilian life. Current flows one way in civilian life, it flows the other way in Navy theory.
At Memphis while waiting to be assigned to class, I was working KP in the kitchen when President Kennedy was assassinated. Every American my age knows what they were doing when Kennedy was killed. I was mixing up 30 gallons of red Jell-O at the time, and I cried in the Jell-O.
Kennedy’s the one who offered hope to the country. Countries always need hope. He had style; he said things like, “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.” Kennedy appealed to the best within us. That’s the only time I’ve known of a politician besides RFK who seemed to care.
I know Kennedy was just a politician and he stole the election with Chicago, but he still offered hope. Plus anyone who did LSD and slept with Marilyn Monroe in the White House can’t be all that bad. I cried when he died and I cried when John Lennon died, and that’s it. I didn’t know anything about politics back then except that he defeated Richard Nixon, and Richard Nixon was bad. For a seventeen year old, that was a decent amount of political knowledge back then.
One odd thing about working in the military kitchen: the scrambled eggs were powdered, but they would sprinkle them with little bits of broken eggshells just to make the men think they were real. No lie is too small for the military mind.
Memphis was serious school. Electronics classes eight hours a day. My brain was occupied. I did well. I always do well in school situations. If there’s a situation that has a set of rules, and I can figure out that set of rules, I can do well if I want to. Life doesn’t have any rule books, though. That’s probably why I’m still not famous. Art and poetry may have rules, but I’ve never learned them. And what ones I’ve been told about in retrospect, I’d already broken. I tend not to do well in games which require herd mentality like life, art, poetry, success and in-crowds. But I sure have come a long way by flouting them.
In one stupid moment in the babble of a class, somebody pointed at me and said, “Zap. You’re sterile.”
The class coincidentally went silent just as I replied, “Ping. You’re pregnant.”
And some recent photos from the neighborhood:
Stairs to Where?
Paint the World
Green
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