Category: Poetry

RWB Workshop Poem of the Week—Dec 11

Mark Fogarty

WUTHERING

The best word I’ve come up with to explain myself
Is “wuthering.” And I don’t know what it means.
Out on the wildass moors, the spectral hound,
The ghost of passion, the sweet-natured vets.
Othello, ready for the hard-won Desdemona
To be swiped away by the prodding Iago.
Clueless. Except I wouldn’t kill her.
I’d check the train schedule for her.

Heathcliffe, it’s me, Cathy
I’m coming home now
So co-o-old, let me in your window.

Wasn’t it Heathcliffe out on the moors
And Cathy waiting at the window?
I guess it doesn’t matter. What’s the difference
Between men and women anyway?
An ounce or two of estrogen, testosterone.
A few inches out, a few inches in.

Kate was too dramatically beautiful even for me.
They model-posed her with her legs wide open on the cover.
I figured, if they want me to check out her snatch
Then her voice can’t be any good.

I can sit by the fire, drinking coffee
With no use for the empty moors.
For all my wuthering,
I can’t sit in an empty theater.

Kate’s voice was, though, good. A little mad, maybe.

The Irish came to the Caribbean, too,
Indentured servants, and stayed
For the green water and the lack of fog.
My brother told me about one of them with our name,
A captain in the Royal Navy,
Went down with his ship fighting the Nazis.
Well done, cousin, on those wuthering waves.

—Lyrics from “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush, from The Kick Inside (1978).

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RWB Workshop Poem of the Week—Dec 4

Mark Fogarty

HOMAGE TO KOLA BOOF

Kola Boof tried to kill herself.
Her boys didn’t want to come for Thanksgiving,
And that was the last straw.

She has been strong enough to survive anything.
Kola Boof was infibulated, as many girls were
In her native Sudan. The butchering knife cutting the labia,
The remaining skin sutured up, I never
Wanted to see it. I had a horror of it.

Kola had her first periods through a straw.
But she said her cut pussy
Was the only way she was like her mother,
Murdered in her earshot when she was a girl.

She spent the night with her mother’s and father’s dead bodies.
She didn’t die then, somehow.

Kola has been nothing if not determined.
She’s had miles of sex jammed in her,
And it hurt every time, she told me.

I was too timid of the blood berry.
But now I want to kiss Kola’s cut pussy,
Not as an act of sex, but of homage.

Mary Ma

I’m Probably Ruining It

(or Why I Never Assert My Pronouns)

Comobordity is another way of saying

salt on the wound.
All I am is a salt wound.
All I taste is the salt
from the blood
from the biting
of my tongue.
I can’t always say the thing.
Can’t we have one night, one dinner, one moment without —
me, throwing up the main course,
running the faucet so no one can hear
or
me, drawing blood from my skin
or
me, making a scene?
All of those nights are a million years old
and by a million years I mean
at least ten. 
A decade is long enough to forget.

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RWB Workshop Poem Of The Week—Nov 27

Mary Ma

Human

Myles, I plan on dying first.
Not soon, just in the scheme of things.

Soon is in the time
I’ll spend coming home to you.
I call out “Human!”
and hear you answer, “Yes?”
when I open our door.
We joke that if we ever get a dog
we’ll name them Animal
so that at the end of our day
we can always come home and say,
“Human?”
“Animal?”

Have I ever worn you out?
We talk about how
you grow in the same shape but I
change shapes faster
than I grow.
Okay, I added the judgment there.
You never seem to bring any.

What does it say that my first non-abusive partner
is the partner I married?

I think it says nothing. Maybe it’s just a numbers game—
no shortage of hurt in the world.
But for us, it means nothing.

I wish I could show my child self my now self,
my happy self. Maybe I would’ve had
an easier time surviving, but then again,
fuck it. I’ve already survived.
Maybe we should save these moments for our
future selves– we have so much surviving
left to do.

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GV-Don Zirilli book launch—Nov 30

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New book by Don Zirilli

Don Zirilli launches his book, Heaven’s Not For You, published by Karen Kelsey Davies at Kelsey Books, at the Gainville Cafe on Friday night, 11/30, at 7PM.

Musical guest: Afro-Peruvian jazz singer Corina Bartra.

Please join us!

The Red Wheelbarrow Poets Bring-Your-A-Game open mic with generous reading times follows. $9 includes coffee/tea and dessert.

17 Ames Ave. Rutherford, New Jersey tel. 201-507-1800.

Buy the book on Amazon.

RWB Workshop Poem of the Week—Nov 20

Arthur Russell

We Won’t Come This Way Again

We won’t come again to this grimace,
to this wax-covered place
where we fought ourselves and each other to a cold draw.
We won’t return to the bed we prayed to bring us together
or the workshop where I made shoes and you left food.
We won’t be married.
We’ll be deflated lawn Santas.

We won’t come this way again.
We bit our lips to cover our teeth;
we stared each other down,
yet the sap rose to the same signal
hidden in the February air. I scraped my knuckles
on the side of the well. You drove the scooter
to Newark in search of a ravine.
Our love was tuned
to a gray hair’s curl on a black sweater,
to a fear with a field so magnetic
it made tree rings
on the papers that you handed me.
We won’t come this way again.

Half of half of half of half of half,
the chain saw does its work.
How sad the roots will be when they find the trunk
is gone. Oh, the water that we drank!
And we thought only love could nurture duty.

Shoulder to shoulder, we saw the world
like a television show, but not each other.
One for the pain, another for the waste,
a third for the lockout, a fourth for the forgotten bliss.
Like stammering Egyptians spilling wine
in the rich silt of the Nile,
we won’t come this way again.

RWB Workshop Poem of the Week—Nov 13

Claudia Serea

Windy nights are like alcohol

They both bring back the past
in sips and blows,
both make me dizzy,
drifting.

And, of course, the wind doesn’t speak to me,
and the leaves don’t gossip
in a foreign language,
but still—

On this windy night, I walked out of the bar
where we went for drinks for my colleague Steve
who’s leaving the office,
and where I found myself telling Sam
the story of my life, over Heineken,
from Romania to the United States
(short version, because he asked,
and you should know that Sam and Steve
are half my age,
and charming).

So I realized I drifted through life
sometimes with eyes closed,
other times, wide open,
and, in rare moments, seeing it from above,
understanding it
with a dizzying clarity.

I left the bar with the distinct feeling
I’m drifting again,
eyes open.

Left and right, people rushed, laughing,
chatting on the phone,
looking,
not seeing,
engrossed in their own screens.

The night was windy
and charged.

A Chinese woman passed by
with a blanket over her head,
pushing a loaded cart
with two big sacks of cans
hanging on its sides,
contorted wings.

And her small eyes met mine.

I’ve seen
what you’ve seen,
they said.

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RWB Workshop Poem of the Week: Nov 6

Arthur Russell

April Was Fatal For Jesus, But Not For Me

The seasons are not my metaphorical daddy.

The wine-dark leaves of cut leaf maples
spread like a king’s robe on the wet lawn
are not a sign the end is near to me.

I give not the slightest shit
that hardened winter buds
on the slender branches
of a sapling oak
are promises to some sad soul
that spring’s rebirth
is ’round a few months’ corner.

I do not believe
in cherry blossoms clustered
in the climate-varied air of April,
or that any kind of thaw
implies any other kind of thaw.

We are not babies.
We are disappointed people
like to die.

I don’t need summer days
on Vineyard beaches
swimming through my lover’s legs
in sunlit surf
to make me see the truth.

The caveats are ample as a bedspread
without the sweetened lemon suffrage
of an August afternoon.

March is wet and cold,
and so’s your mom.

Go ahead, I dare you to correlate
the weather that eleventh
of September with the outcome.

Seasons are the guy who swears
he didn’t fuck the maid.

And whatever I say about the seasons
goes double for the daffy crap
imputed by the lovelorn mass
to morning, noon, and night.

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Blog – http://redwheelbarrowpoets.org (263 followers)
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GV-Jim Klein book launch—Nov. 9

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NEW BOOK BY Jim Klein
The Magic Circle returns to GainVille Cafe Friday, Nov. 9 at 7 PM for the launch of Jim Klein’s new book THE PREEMBROIDERED MOMENT (Errant Pigeon Press). Musical guest will be Joe Jacovino.

The Red Wheelbarrow Poets Bring-Your-A-Game open mic with generous reading times follows. $9 includes coffee/tea and dessert.

17 Ames Ave. Rutherford, New Jersey tel. 201-507-1800.

Read excerpts, details, and advance praise at Errant Pigeon Press: https://www.errantpigeon.com/the-preembroidered-moment

RWB Workshop Poem of the Week—October 30

Zorida Mohammed

PARKING SPIT IN SUNLIGHT 

Her father missed no chance to spit in her face.
She glared at him, speechless.

Her mother fed her money,
lots of it, on the side.

She stole from her parent’s store.
By the time she was 18,
her tiny frame had ballooned to 300lbs.

She slipped into denial.

Everything worthwhile was unreachable.
Self-loathing was the only knock she embraced.

Chaos was where she thrived.
She developed a knack for it.

She ate to tamp down something that she could not put her fingers on.
Sleeping was her 2ndfavorite thing.

She lived in her id.

She visited the Louvre several times
because it was the thing to do.
It was a listless chore
because no man was on her arm.

Forever in debt,
she learned to return the things
of fleeting happiness.

She managed to stay at 126 lbs.
for years after surgery,
but the pounds, all of it,
crept back ever so slowly.

For twenty years, she’s been picking the droplets
off her face and parking them in sunlight.

Cake and candy,
nay, sugar,
is still her daddy.

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RWB Workshop Poem of the Week—October 23

RWB Workshop Poem of the Week—October 23

Frank Rubino

PRETTY GOOD MORNING

And how do I define ‘pretty good morning?’
Picked the wilted cilantro leaves
off the cuttings in the water glass.
A bee kept approaching, hovering.

When I stepped back, it sampled, found no
pollen but then came back again, so I wondered about
the bee’s value system, how it kept getting fooled
into thinking the cilantro was a flower. It flew off.
I picked some yellow arugula leaves from the planter,
the driest ones, but all the rain lately means
the leaves aren’t seared by drought, so why yellow?

And how do I define ‘bad year?’ The year
2012. Gil, Gloria, and Dad died.
Fallen trees, pulling down lines, breaking houses:
Sandy left us without power for weeks. It was cold,
greasy and always twilight in the house.
That was the year, too, when Ryan
suffered their most acute
body dysmorphic disorder.
Oh back in that bad year 2012,
my father looked at my thirsty tomato
plants, and he advised scribing
irrigation ditches in the dirt. They had yellow
leaves like this arugula.

One finch keeps returning, the brave one
with the scruffy head. He learned I would
not hurt him and stayed faithful all week long
while I filled the seed dish, and it incited
various disputes and squabbles amongst established friends.
And some of those bird friends did not return though I poured
Kaytee Wild Finch Blend, and the Mourning Doves
declined, perhaps got tired of winning?
(They are the biggest, and they push the others away.)

Wrote my poetry. This has to be included as a good
activity, but why I value it I have never known,
as why any creature values existing over not.
Is that a cricket chirping to Bose, Satie’s Gnossienne?
Here we are in this house made of popsicle sticks.
I’ll get up. I’ll walk. I don’t know why on earth
I headed for the room I’m entering.

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