.Cheer Up! and Keep on Never Minding by Edward Farmer

 .Cheer Up! and Keep on Never Minding.

Let sages rave, with visage grave,
To prove this world's beyond all bearing,
But ne'er forget, some warm hearts yet
Are left, which make it worth the wearing.
If clouds should lour, and friends look sour,
'Tis only neighbour's fare your finding;
One maxim still cures every ill,
Cheer up! and keep on never minding!

One thing's quite clear, no mortal here,
Hath happiness without some sorrow;
And tho' to-day joy flies away,
It may come back again to-morrow.
No hour so drear, but in its rear,
Some warmer, brighter tint is winding;
Then come what may, play out the play—
Cheer up! and keep on never minding!

In Italy by Arthur Clark Kennedy

 .In Italy

Give us the sun and give us love,
A western breeze on a sapphire sea,
Heaven below and heaven above,
Heaven for thee and me.

A western breeze to fan our sails
Lazily flapping against the mast,
Facing the ocean with rippling scales
Drawing to port at last,

As we hail our casa's whited walls,
Where olive-trees gemm'd with the fireflies' light
Stand fringing the groves whence Philomel calls
To the liquid soul of night.

​And scents lie heavy upon the air,
From orange blossoms cloying the breath,
And a soothing hum that numbs the ear
Comes from the town beneath.

Till a mist creeps over the hill, shuts down
On our home's white walls and o'erhanging eaves,
And the nightingales hush as the distant town
Puts out her lights and leaves

The rest of the night to darkness and love
Consecrated to thee and me,
Whilst my world spins on about and above,
Centred in thee

The Dinosaur at Old Faithful by: Albert Whipple Hadley

 

The Dinosaur at Old Faithful

  by: Albert Whipple Hadley

A Dinosaur reared to his uttermost height
and stiffened his ninety-foot spine;
His tail struck an angle of fifty degrees
and he leaned on a neighboring pine.
"In the name of the dead, what can this be,"
he said, examining what he had found,
Then sniffed at a column of steam as it rose
from a curious place in the ground.
"By Golly, I've traveled this region for years,"
said he as he noticed the heat,
"But here's a sensation, surprisingly new,
and a wonderful place for a seat."
"The rank competition for food," he exclaimed,
"at the Tropics is fierce to behold;
This winter I'll tarry where feeding is good
and hang around here when it's cold."

 

Now a Dinosaur's length--say a medium length--
was a matter of ninety-odd feet,
Yet he drew his great carcass of eight or ten tons
and centered it over the heat.
Our scientists tell us this stretchy old beast
was blessed with a triplicate brain,
For relaying thoughts to his far-away skull
where "Brain Number One" did obtain.
"Number Two" was ensconsed near the base of his neck
to function, should "Number One" fail,
While "Brain Number Three" was far down the line
near the roots of his 40-foot tail.
The art of transmission of thought at that time,
was quite elemental and rough;
The system was built on the single-track plan;
one thought at a time was enough.

 

The Dinosaur soon was asleep at the switch
or rather asleep on the whole,
Dreaming only regarding the heavenly heat
that tickled the depths of his soul.
Far down in the primitive crust of the earth,
too far to express it in feet,
Was a spring of hot water, dependent we know
on a source of interior heat.
In fact it was a sort of a safety-valve vent
of the devil's invention 'twould seem,
And the janitor finding a weight on the lid,
turned on the full pressure of steam.
The Dinosaur's hide, though roughly immune
to feelings that humans acquire,
Picked up an impression through "Brain Number Three"
that part of him must be afire.

 

So out o'er the single-track system they hurried
a warning that something was wrong!
"We're sitting on something that's damnably hot;
please forward this message along!"
The warning then slowly meandered its way
down the slope of the Dinosaur's spine,
But the Grand Central Bureau at "Brain Number One"
was lost in a slumber divine.
Tradition maintains that an hour elapsed
while the devil's steam pressure increased.
When suddenly "Brain Number One" got the word
and ordered the "sitting" released.
The safety valve weighted with eight or ten tons,
was a circumstance much to be feared;
But nevertheless an explosion occured
and the Dinosaur--disappeared!

 

In spite of the bulk of the weighty old cuss
and the fact he was triplicate brained,
Except a few bones which are still to be found,
there scarcely a relic remained.
This happened some thousands of years in the past,
still since that miraculous hour,
"Old Faithful" has lifted its flood to the skies
with awful and infinite power.
The causes explaining the hourly event
no longer are locally sought--
'Twas only the Dinosaur trying that hour
to line up his system of thought.
The story, however, is hopelessly mixed,
so all that you need to retain,
Is the funny old Dinosaur plugging the vent,
and the tale of his triplicate brain.

Our Quarantine Story Michelle Whittaker

 

Our Quarantine Story Michelle Whittaker after Dorothea Grossman During the pandemic, after he was laid off, it was his idea to forage for edible weeds around Queens when our food grew scarce. From the stoop, I would watch him crouched on one knee, his bare hands between telephone poles, pulling up green stars from the control joints under our mailbox full of clover mites & commercial flyers. I almost forgot how sprawl could be so quiet. When he returned inside, he rinsed off the stalks, placed a rolled lot on his tongue and then on mine. He mentioned how “sticky” foods could be a delicacy in other cultures, as I turned my back and coughed them out. And later in the evening, he read to me about how indigenous women prevented pregnancy by drinking cleaver tea, as he handed me a tall cup of it swirling with honey.

👄👄The River Merchant's Wife by Li Po

 👄The River Merchant's Wife by Li Po

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead 
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers. 
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse, 
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums. 
And we went on living in the village of Chokan: 
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion. 
At fourteen I married My Lord you. 
I never laughed, being bashful. 
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall. 
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back. 
At fifteen I stopped scowling, 
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours 
Forever and forever and forever. 
Why should I climb the look out? 
At sixteen you departed, 
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies, 
And you have been gone five months. 
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead. 
You dragged your feet when you went out. 
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses, 
Too deep to clear them away! 
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind. 
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August 
Over the grass in the West garden; 
They hurt me. I grow older. 
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang, 
Please let me know beforehand, 
And I will come out to meet you 
  As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

The Inflammation by Nikky Finney

 

The Inflammation

Nikky Finney

The air in the high school is swollen. My heart balloons as I smooth my name tag down. The woman checking me in at Austin East Magnet High School has a warning, “They might not have much to say.” I have not come to measure their verbs or their vowels. My vested interest is their red blood cells. East Knoxville, where six students in one year, from one high school, are dead by gun violence. As I walk to Ms. Hall’s young writers class, 16-year-olds with the mud-red beauty of the Maasai fly past me in the hall late for class. There are no visible signs of bruising. A blood test could reveal the damage done these last 400 years. A blood test is a fine modern measurement of the homocysteine levels moving through precious growing creative bodies. There are no blood tests in my bag and I only have one hour to measure what I have traveled here to know. East Knoxville, fifty years before, every grocery store, bakery, doctor’s office, barbershop, pharmacy, juke joint, Miss Lucille Reader of Palms, closed down and laid to rest on the new Civic Center pyre. Blood sugar levels bought season tickets to the Moon. Families on the East side came to know American architecture intimately, how the right side of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard arced into the halls of the high school, and the left side dangled at the front door of Jarnigan & Son Mortuary, oldest Black business in town. A swelling is how the body begins to heal. A blood test can be historical marker for the inflammation of disparity. My ballooning heart enters the door of their A, B, and O world. I am met by 14 framed faces of curious encyclopedic sunlight. Their Wolof and Benin mouths follow me around the room like awakened cicadas. I ask them to read. They stop buzzing, mid-air, hold their patterns, wondering if I have come to take something else from them. The one in perfect white sneakers with BEATS dangling off his ears keeps his head under his hoodie. The two by the window use the glass as dream portal, watching, then aiming, their father’s eyes farther out into the rising Blue Ridge Mountain light settling the pitched roof of Jarnigan & Son. The room is a clover field of hide, luck, and chance, but the burning tenderness of their inflammation wants out. Inflammation is a fight response from the body when the immune system leaps into action even when there is no visible injury. Angelina extends her grey tablet out to me. Her dark Motown eyes begin their return to Earth. I read her poem as if it belongs in my mouth. Their words reach and ricochet. My immune system kicks in just as Jamartray decides I might be worthy, handing me his fragile worry-filled word rope, his mother’s Lindy Hop, in and out of the Double-Dutch rope of illness. Shiasia’s spunky Afro-Latin is read with Black girl attitude kept under my tongue for moments when the fear in their eyes is molten and strawberry. She cheers. Leonard begins with a piercing refusal to never be a statistic and ends with his mother’s double helix—HeLa—never-ending cells of extraordinary love alighting every face in the room. It is 9:00 am on a Friday morning in East Knoxville. I have lost my tally and count. The young poets have broken my fever.

Fracture Ellen Bass

 

Fracture

Ellen Bass

When the grizzly cubs were caught, collared, and taken away— relocated they call it— their mother ran back and forth on the road screaming. Brutal sound. Torn from her lungs. Her heart, twisted knot, hot blood rivering to the twenty-six pounding bones of her feet. Just weeks before I watched a bear and her cubs run down a mountain in the twilight. So buoyant, they seemed to be tumbling to the meadow, to the yarrow root they dug, rocking to wrest it from the hard ground, fattening for winter. They were breathing what looked like gladness. But that other mother . . . Her massive head raised, desperate to catch their scent. Each footfall a fracture in the earth’s crust.

Onto Dust We Shall Come By Manuel Ramos Otero

 3

I sing again, leaving death behind,
to take part in the horrible tenderness of love,
that now arrives when life is late,
to be innocent of future wars.
I come again to the eternal night of expectation,
to the sacred prejudice of a unique man,
when I’ve made peace treaties
in the remote sunsets of solitude.
I return to the world as I depart,
having birthed another phantom,
a dweller of nebulous coasts,
a brief enemy of metaphors.
And you are here.
Promising love beyond this century.
Delivering the thirsty rains of summer.
The most accurate painter of human walls.
Animal of another space unbound.
So many clocks devoid of hours are enticing us,
such a great urge, unquenched, is pressing us,
so much hope is only an initiation
into the slow funeral of our perfect joy.
Our time is scant, and so our things:
a stained carpet, two glasses without memories,
a black telephone, a hiding place,
a key to light that locks in sadness
and a recent past that now rejects us.
Walking hand in hand and lost
we’re perplexed again that so much love exists.

4

I don’t love your body but the secret
it dwells in
the cave that covers me at night
only eases darkness.
I love your gaze more than your eyes
always opened when the mouth kisses
with humidity of sea my irregular island
of stormy coasts and jagged rocks.
And more than lies which every love promises
I love reality that gathers us in bed
wearing off our tongues with sea urchins,
growing daggers in the garden of our thighs,
every dead Sunday between our bodies.
When you depart without a flourish,
when I return to a different symphony’s silence,
when you are a man of paper,
a spirit trapped within the poem,
and I can’t define you again in words,
which now defy all nothingness,
we’ll remember things that never happened,
we’ll love each other as we never did,
we’ll search in tombs of sadness
until we find freedom unscathed,
so that time may repair what we have lost.

The Night

Uncommon love, what is night
but that stray body of desire,
but that cruising sweat that in bed
turns the flesh into a sponge of the mouth.
For memory, whatever happened
is now forgotten, only the shadow
is a still tongue, a blushed surprise in the saliva.
How noble is the impotence of the rose,
without a pistil it kisses its own petals,
without hands stripping itself off its own mirrors,
to die at night as it blooms in the word.
Bolts should be placed, that no one may release
the fleeting perfume of the gutters,
at times love must be made on shores
like cats dying in the cold.
I’m in your smile, though you don’t want it,
you’re hidden in my armpits,
dizziness rushes down our wounds.
Already night knows itself nighted.

© Manuel Ramos Otero. Translation © 2022 Cristina Pérez Diaz. All rights reserved.

Dada poem 5

 Edge tut tent herb debt they bye

Debt bath genuine yet the the they be

Debt he they he he he rune they emu

Genuine they rhyme kg brunch thus

Song then get the unsung Bennett

The the they b danger guns and run

Gangs bent bent th dun gd Jenny then 

Why Do You Love the Poem? Charles Bernstein

 

Why Do You Love the Poem?

Charles Bernstein

For the sentiment. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the sentiment. For the message. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the message. For the music. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the music. For the spirit. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the spirit. For the intelligence. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the intelligence.  For the courage. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the courage. For the inspiration. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the inspiration.  For the emotion. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the emotion.  For the vocabulary. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the vocabulary.  For the poet. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the poet. For the meaning. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the meaning. For what it stands for. — Then you don’t love the poem you love what it stands for. For the words. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the words. For the syntax. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the syntax. For the politics. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the politics. For the beauty. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the beauty. For the outrage. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the outrage. For the tenderness. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the tenderness. For the hope. — Then you don’t love the poem you love the hope.  For itself. — Then you love the poem.

stilettos in a rifle range Tyrone Williams

 

stilettos in a rifle range

Tyrone Williams

She and she said switch so swish                                        he did, having misheard,                                            heard, he slid into a pair                                        of, slipped into an, open- back heels and dress, they, following suit, she, his jacket, shirt,                                       she, his pants, wingtips,                                       tearing down the set                                       pieces, flipped the dinner party, a three-ring au pair a trois staging the blank glint                                       mute smirk,                                       wine glasses                                       half raised, lowered to half-staff, flagging something in the airs,                                     chi chi noses                                     wrinkled with                                     the stiff whiff of a flat mistake aquiline for Roman knock-off                                     defanged the gang:                                     “It was all a gag,”                                     they cried, laughed.

Evolution - this I know!

 Evolution - this I know!

Charles Darwin tells me so!

It's the strong against the weak!

Only Jesus loves the meek!

Yes, evolution!

Yes, evolution!

Yes, evolution,

For Darwin tells me so!

Dada poem 3

Fahrenheit that bent the the the th

Rent get that meth they men renting

The the the they net the they net

The they run the by beg uhh and the mum 

Tangent rent run gem they eng gen get eh

Genre the chest neck further km genome

The the the eng fund um bent net eh

The they they runs henchmen gang run