Crg Hill's poetry scorecard

Jennifer K Dick looking into The Last Vispo Anthology

 

http://jenniferkdick.blogspot.fr/2014/03/looking-into-last-vispo-anthology.html

 

3 of Spades

 

and you know, Dad, I can see that some women do indeed look a little like guitars 

 

leaves in the gutter. he saw and smelled these things and his

head felt light, and he thought, I hear nothing, it is as quiet

 

Would you mind jumping up and down on the man’s back

making friends all over the world? The Coyote has to

take us across on foot, cold spells drawn like magnets

 

the parade of fools faced tough questions

a trigger mechanism gotten off point

madness is of serious intent

that little touch of diamonds

 

cookies are always coming out of the oven

and everybody has those NO PROBLEM

looks on their faces,

the worst that could happen,

the cat might tip over the water dish

 

But the public knew him

better as an amiable underdog,

stumbling amid the feet of the

giants of sports and other pro-

fessions. Much of his career

served as a send-up of

 

The burning bush smolders. More yellow, less volume,

each day, to the neighbor’s birch. We’re all one season

older, one more or less reason to be bold. You can

feel the morning nip, the evening begin to gnaw. I refuse.

I deny the passage. Instead I exist in the mid-afternoon

warmth, very much summer-like, shrugging off the

new shadows growing from the south

2 of Spades

 

At night, it is a relief to fall asleep to the hum of an air-conditioning unit instead of the crackle of                                small arms fire

 

If a big mouth fits, wear it.

But it wears thin, especially across a globe

 

northern eye war oven my plaque this often moon

after work-up my roam listing some mosaic

tinting some sturdy team in when off came on

 

could give a flying fuck about the boundaries, the barbed

walls flung up by far too many schools of poetry from San

Francisco to Iowa City to New York. I, too, love to read

poetry – it saved my life – I don’t want to take up arms

 

The stronger case for optimism lies

elsewhere. Corporate retrenchments may

be slowing, and other sources of job loss –

weak overall demand, an expanding trade

deficit – may be ebbing. As companies see

 

her eyes are misaligned, her mouth is sus-

piciously pursed, her stockings are bunched at

the knees, even the bobby pins on her white

headband have slipped below her eyes. Wearing

identical frocks, the girls are standing so close

that they seem to be joined in one body

 

He doesn’t know where or how to begin. His lines, some

straight, some arced, arched, twisted and turned

around another, abrupt, rude or opaque white, don’t

signal the start he desired. But that’s something,

finally, desire, which perhaps leads to birth,

to a helpless life crawling, a bubbling, toddling,

skipping, shuffling. Isn’t this beginning really an end

 

 

 

 

phall.U.S.

10 of Spades

 

 

Suddenly there was “Mighty Bright,” a hiccough and a burp. Then the world settled down

 

the great power network

mutual deterrence

 

where Oedipus kills

an intellectual quest

the solution and combat high in taste

 

the pitch of the sound waves equivalent to a B-flat –

57 octaves lower than a middle-C and at a frequency

far deeper than the limits of human hearing – is the

deepest note ever detected from an object in the universe

 

He did something stupid. His right foot on the brake (he wasn’t

in park), he pushed the accelerator with his left.

The car lurched, stopping just short of the man

as stupid as he. When the accelerator slowed, his mind

raced: he could have flattened his friend

 

Old man’s breath, short, shallow, a walk to the car

winding him for half an hour. Old man’s breasts.

Old man’s aching calves. Call him before 1 p.m.

his minds’s sharp as it ever was. Then he’s exhausted.

His father’s soul, he said, is trapped in a dying animal.

It won’t make it to Thanksgiving

 

the trunk, my fingers stroking the bark, seeking a Braille code,

a clue, a message on how to come back to life after my long

undersnow dormancy. I have survived. I am here. Confused,

screwed up, but here. So, how can I find my way? Is there a

chain saw of the soul, an ax I can take to my memories or

fears? I dig my fingers into the dirt and squeeze. A small clean

part of me waits to warm and burst through the surface

 

 

9 of Spades

 

It just is deteriorating so much more rapidly than I expected

 

“You’re the last bard,” Ebbie said phonily, his recitation

corrupting like a creek imploding from a battle after you seek it.

 

was loose, dangling on his shirt, he yanked it off.

He looked up at the advertising placards above

the windows, wanting to turn his thoughts away

 

 

            Things tuck motion, flicker or sound, an

unheroic tradition – it’s all to be to have been.

            In usurpation, advancing by degrees, past and

future create an equality

 

Hell, he was on the edge of panic. The ritual had

been going on for a week now and it would con-

tinue until the cue was heard no more. In the

meantime, the class would suddenly erupt into a

confusion of waving arms and jogging legs

 

not the infirm affirmation

a nation on the mat

knees or shoulder blades

there’s no turning over a new leaf

our resounding conundrum

our aches layer

 

Try as he might, Villa cannot sustain the contempt he customarily

shows gringos. He simply envies even the worst of the Hollywood

nitwits too much: their literacy, their technology, their freedom.

Before the arrival of Thayer and his crew, in fact, Villa has

already taken on an American named Sam Drebben as an inter-

preter and gunner. Drebben (Alan Arkin) is a cynical all-purpose

rebel, the kind of peripatetic fighter who could find an entrée into the proposed revolution

Ace of Spades

 

Past the censor? Past the night hands?

 

We left the esoteric stuff behind and talk about real

things like where roads should be built or shouldn’t be built

 

When it's over it's over

Cloud crossing moon, half-clear sky,

then candle-sputter, shadow-crawl

 

The Patriot Act, passed without a blink, is now

under attack from the left and right, one

thing both agree upon: individualism is the penultimate

act of patriotism. My country ends at my front door

 

'Human beings have no

right to tell other human beings

how long they have to live

unless they have some kind of

firearm in their hands,’ he said

 

majority of that early,

thick carbon dioxide

atmosphere has been

subsequently locked up

in the carbonate rocks,

which are everywhere

 

Until now the lefovers on

this pivotal battlefield have been

small – spent cartridges, the

occasional skull. But as months

of drought have drained the

Danube to its lowest level in a

century, larger relics are coming

A/cross

the street

first time rolling

now

that it's

a blue sky

two 

men jumping

from a bridge

fish

don't bite

the horses stream

slow

nightmare dream

the bird rocks