Month: June 2017

RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – June 20

Poem of the Week 6/20/2017

Mark Fogarty

Visible Satellites

The New York Times didn’t have comics,
But anything else you wanted to know was there.
As a kid I pored over the “agate” pages (small type)
To see which ocean liners were docking in New York,
Or where they were going, and a little box
Informed you which satellites were visible in the sky,
And when, and on what course through the heavens.
I looked and looked, and saw Echo 1, Echo 2
Crossing space. I wasn’t so far from space!
I could cross the oceans and the oceans of the moon
If I read the New York Times.

The cops and the night owls waited for their copies
Of the Jersey Journal when the presses cranked at dawn,
Loud as Cream with Hendrix sitting in.
The skeins of paper ran along the ceiling,
Black and white birds sailing like kites
Before they would knot together and bang and fall
Onto rollers. I got 50 copies for the newsroom
And the ink would smear if you touched it.
You can read all day long in a newsroom.
My elbows had patches of ink and I knew more stuff
Than Ken from Jeopardy. The press men were deaf
And would curse you loudly if you approached.
I stopped the presses many times with mistakes
But never had the nerve to shout it. The deafies
Had no feel for the romance of the presses
Stacked high as Jimi’s Marshalls in my memory.

I worked for the sheets for forty years
And never ceased to kvell at my name on a page.
I still read the agate pages, which would solemnly report
The results of every rigged wrestling match
(Hogan d. Savage, Madison Square Garden, World Wrestling Federation)
As well as the track reports from St. Benedict’s,
And Pogo’s latest musings and the “woman’s” page
With its legendary (probably mythic) headline
For debutantes this year it’s balls, balls, balls.
I had instructions from five editors
To bring them Royko’s column the minute
It moved on the wires, when I wasn’t trying to puzzle out
The blurry words on the newly-invented fax machine
Or how the purple ink from UPI got carried to my underwear.

There’s a dock somewhere where I can still
Board those solemn liners in the inky night.

I wonder if Echo I and II still loop the world in flight?
My elbows aren’t black anymore and the stink of the pulp plants
Is reduced, I guess that’s a good thing.
The prints are slowly stopping their presses
Except when the newsreaders say, “Breaking news
From the Washington Post! This just in
From the New York Times!”

The red stuff was fake at those wrestling matches,
But the sheets can still bloody the nose of a President.

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Echo 1 was originally loosely estimated to survive until soon after its fourth dip into the atmosphere in July 1963, but it ended up living much longer than these estimates and reentered Earth’s atmosphere, burning up on May 24, 1968. (Wikipedia)

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RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – June 13

Poem of the Week 6/13/2017

Susanna Lee

Camping for One

This year, I’ll be alone with the crickets
under the rising moon of my misery.
I’ll mourn outside my empty tent,
pretending, as I did when I was single,
my silver flute is a steel-stringed guitar.
In my best Joan Baez,
I’ll croon cowboy songs and nursery rhymes
and tunes of sad and happy times.
In evening’s cicadas and midnight’s owls,
I’ll hear echoes of the past.
I’ll fear spiders and snakes.
Raccoons might take to rustling under my tent.
I’ll make peace with a hint of bears,
and enjoy the setting sun.

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RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – June 6

Poem of the Week 6/6/2017

Bill Moreland

Parts

1. The Man

Josef’s haircut was a furry brown burr.
With a red, greasy rag he wiped the plump, shaved, baby porcupine
that is his fat neck.
Muscle memory slapped the levers of the lathe,
adjusted his chuck,
tugged his nuts inside his briefs,
and transformed metal razor shavings into
a spiraling bundle of steel wool
that dropped around his oil soaked
Sears and Roebuck
steel-toe boots.

In the foundry trays there are, bathed
in the thick sickening sweetness of oil,
tiny precision parts, funneling
somewhere to assemble itself into some whole completed something.

The cutting tool’s blue-hot chamfered tip held steady.
Twenty times for every one ‘mississippi’
speeding alloy metal bits turned,
and cut, threaded to tolerances of
one ten-thousandth of an inch.
Twelve rapid-fire machines
punched out eighty-six-thousand-four-hundred screws,
per shift,
for armaments,
or precision surgical instruments.

The machinist serves both ends of the bullet.

In broken English, that Kraut cursed the Filipino kid on the hi-lo,
Pineapple! Haul your ass and put doze castings on der pallet dere, shtoopid.
Through his reach, feeding his machines,
motion and commotion,
Josef conducted a metal on metal
cutting choir
which sang,

Oy yea Oy yea Oy yea,

and from it
arced yellow sparks
trailing blue smoke,
comet flagellum
which either singed pockmarks on his face, stinging,
or they evaporated altogether.

The operator and the operation:
there is magnificence in this ugliness,
and each
has a casual audacity.

2. The Method

Near Newark Sewage, I was parked in Delawanna’s parking lot, they render fat. My windows were down; it was hot. I heard what sounded like a large bee hive; it was not. They were flies. Teed up on a flatbed truck, one dozen 5 gallon drums were on deck; each one open with pig carcasses, haunches and heads stuck out. Foreman flies hovered. Worker maggots scoured. A colony of iridescent wings and blue-green bodies shimmied in the sun; the swirling efficacy licked clean the cavities of the beasts’ hollowed-out eyes. They were the unannounced sub-contractors; their pre-rendering was startling, prepping as they did this primary ingredient for soap.

3. The Machine

Cinder fingers
write in the dust.

Sorrowful singers
cry at the dusk.

Diligent dilettantes
carry the musk.

Maniacal militants
march over rust.

A pattern of pillage
of plunder, of rubble.

Towering baubles,
the dunces will babble

ker-plunking

still lower

into the grave

we’ll grovel,

’till those

saints

do call

us

home.

Oy yea Oy yea Oy yea.

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RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – May 30

Poem of the Week 5/30/2017

Janet Kolstein

Who Are You Wearing?

Click!….Click!……Click!….Click!
….Click!……Click!….Click!
Click!……Click!Click!….Click!….Click!
Can you get more love than this?

Blown-out blond hair in a blunt cut
swings around her golden head
with every pivot.

To the cry of her name,
she twirls
towards and away
from nameless mortals
like me
watching on tv.

Her hand-spangled gown
shimmers
with every swish and sway
of her Cannes camera-ready corps,

and, I wanna
feel le tapis rouge under my feet,
to soak up what was meant to be
mine,
to toast the week-end gross
from a thousand screens
launched in my honor,
my face a shrine,
bankable!
riding high on flash
and flesh,
Valium to calm the riptide.

Kiss-kiss,
(don’t touch my air-brushed lips)
before the bling
goes back
in the box.

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