April 29: “Ida” by Debrah Morkun

Your name: Lindsay Steuber
Author’s name: Debrah Morkun, debrahmorkun.com
What’s the Philly (love) connection?: Morkun is part of New Philadelphia Poets (http://www.newphiladelphiapoets.com/)
Why’d you nominate this poem?: Debrah is a wonderful poet and I recently had an opportunity to hear some of her new work at a Milano’s Poetry Series reading. (http://milanophiladelphia.blogspot.com/)

IDA

1.

i could tell
the city
from a graveyard,

i couldn’t tell
the city from the tall
ladder in your room:

you climbed it yesterday

you climbed it just once
and you felt girlish

2.

she is sky-blue and so forgets to recollect her leg in the surf

she weeps over the death
of the old man
who held a grey
tiara in his hands
before passing

he held a silver
crown in his hands
and then he closed
his eyes

3.

Tritocosmos. Last year, the geriatric months assembled in beds, sleeping. The days fell from girl to mouth. The years broken like Saint Marie standing in earth pond. I told you, in the decades to come, we’d hold our hands open to feel the moist sweat of the turn-coat landscape as it spoils the way we hear
voices at night, those decades lying,
those centuries lying about stories
of boys who jumped onto trains
to make it to Mexico in time

to make it to Guadalajara in time
to catch the next viewing of the saint child
resting in the amber room of the saint hospital
where they stole his infant clothes last night
and gave them half alive to the farmer
whose rake glistens in the half-cratered sun

4.

Lichen-bearers root themselves
like midnight, vast
orion-body turncoat:

when we first closed
the toilet bowl
to erect a statue

we made a noise
and they heard it on the equator

5.

when i got to the top of the street
i saw the old man
from the motion picture

i saw his old house
with its rickety old shutters
he was in the TV room,
looked through the windows
there were snakes in his eyes

6.

this giant train
we used to push
around the city

barehanded, we
used to push
this train
up her rosy spine

and she coughed
with the ghost
of my mother

7.

he is messiah-wretched,
waiting

these steel airplanes
make airports
disaster and messiah-worthy

we wait for the ocean hue to mark this molten space worthy of our furnaces, to give the most clandestine approach a sorry-shift

i’m sorry
for saying
messiah-wretched

8.

my infant clothes are in the bedroom
they are victory clothes from the last
crusade, you said it happened so quickly
the wars

i spent my last dollar

Victoria found my hairbrush made of conch shells
i was downtrodden and that is why i laid down on the earth

forced myself far off from the hyperbolic trunk

April 28: “Today I Watched Two Children Play” by Jim Daley

Your name: Lovella Calica
Author’s name: Jim Daley
Author’s website address: www.warriorwriters.org
What’s the Philly (love) connection?: Jim is a long-time Philadelphian who works at the VA giving back to veterans.
Why’d you nominate this poem?: I wanted to nominate a poem by a veteran to help shed light on this population and their experiences. This poem is really powerful and shows a lot of different perspectives. 

-

Today I watched two children play

One taunts and the other plays David
Or Daud
The tall, thin, brazen child of 15 years
Displays his wit and bravery
Calls out to the soldiers 20 yards distant
Mocks them and issues insults in his native tongue
He takes off his shoe and waves it at the soldiers
The crowd laughs, the soldiers become very angry
(The gravity of the insult eludes me)

-

He does not elude the sniper
One shot
The tall, thin, child of 15 years spends his last breath
In jest
Gripping in his hand, an instrument of offense

-
The short, thin, quiet child of 12 years
Displays his skill and courage
Places a stone in his sling and twirls it
Defies them and takes aim at the giants
He releases a stone that falls short of their vehicle
A soldier picks up the radio again, and I cry out
(The futility of the act eludes me)

-
He does not elude the sniper
One shot
The short, thin, quiet child of 12 years spends his last breath
In Anger
Lying near his twisted form is an instrument, of defense?

Offense, defense, security – right? wrong.
Two kids…

April 27: “Song” by Ernest Hilbert

Your name: Paul Siegell
Author’s name: Ernest Hilbert
Author’s website address:http://www.everseradio.com/
What’s the Philly (love) connection?: Ernie lives in Philly, loves in Philly, writes poetry in Philly, sells rare books in Philly, and through his E-VerseEquinox Reading Series at Moonstone, brings in world-class poets for all of us in Philly to enjoy.
Why’d you nominate this poem?: Because it’s for us. Because it’s something we need to remember.

- 

Song

A song for those who learn forgotten, slow
Skills, crafts submerged long past by massed commerce,
By hard, dark, oily machines, and the din
Of duplicates shipped by the millions, stowed
In cavernous depots to be dispersed
To each home, used once, and then binned.
This is for those who weave by hand, who brew
Their own suds, and roll their own smokes, hammer
Together shelves, print on presses, plant gardens
In vacant lots, raise beams, fire pots, the few
Who challenge the swift, transient tenor
Of the age, the lonely sincere wardens,
The last, noble pull of old ways restored,
Valued and unwanted, admired and ignored.

April 26: “Trying To Live As If It Were Morning” by Thomas Devaney

Your name: Lauren Hall
Author’s name: Tom Devaney
Author’s website address: http://www.thomasdevaney.net/
What’s the Philly (love) connection?: Tom lives in Philly and teaches creative writing at Haverford and Penn.  (There’s also a Philly shout-out in the poem, itself.)
Why’d you nominate this poem?:  Not only is this poem a master class in craftsmanship, it brilliantly cuts through the bullshit of our daily lives with unapologetic candor — “Philly-Style.”  It’s the kind of poem that, after reading it, you can’t help but say, “Hell yeah.”

-

Trying to live as if it were morning

Every character in Dostoevsky is going to be in the hospital
     after this poem.
The underground man with a baseball bat, clearing house
“Philly-Style,” and from what I’ve seen
    it would be true.

I put the Brothers K and their endless array of calamities
    out with my pinky.

I don’t go in for the ping-pong of rational-irrational,
    possible-impossible —
The sad, lucid, mad, attractive, murky
    and yes, horrible overcoat of Paradox, Pennsylvania.

I don’t need that.

The Bros. K are gone.
The problem of fake hamburger or even real hamburger remains.

The Past at my back,
Back in the past, I agree with John Coltrane
    when he says, “War begets war.”

I drive all around my neighborhood with “the Idiot”
   in the front basket of my bike.
When he falls out we pick him up and keep going.
He’s clever in a way that any other person might be killed for.

Of course, people don’t fuck with us.

It’s the old game of imposing order where there isn’t any
   then calling yourself on it.

The ancients called it gravity; the modernists job security.
The people after lost a lot of weight and went home pissed off
Not believing they were home when they actually were,
—–so they never really slept.

It’s the kind of trouble a fleet of blimps “up in flames”
Might cause flying over an Olympic stadium as seen
   on video cassette —
          but really real anyway, like on fire.

People point out the violence I do to my own words,
How uncareful I can be — I duck under their commentary.
My copy of Crime and Punishment is under the aloe plant
  all buckled and stained from water.

A man I respect said there hasn’t been any “breakthrough work”
    since sometime in the 1930’s.
Sometimes for me it would just be breaking things;
Like my uncle’s a “good guy,” but
The precinct captain pulled his back-up.
He shouldn’t be here. We don’t talk about it.

Take out a piece of paper and write down:
Man the builder, Man the destroyer, Man the eater
   of donuts, butter cake, and pork buns.

The experimenter says he, or a recombinant
He and She “unsettles all things.”
Even though that’s cool, I don’t unsettle “all things.”
I don’t have enough time.
There’s enough nonsense without that nonsense.

I’m not here to settle that.
I’m here to write a poem because I’m a morning person
   and it’s morning.

This is a morning poem.

first published in The American Poetry Review, November 1, 2000.

Interview with CA Conrad at The Rumpus!

mcrouch:

Routine is comfortable because you always know you can do it and the results are what you know they’re going to be.

CA Conrad being amazing as usual.

via mcrouch

April 25: “Neighborhood Watches” by Ryan Eckes

Your name: Jacob Russell http://jacobrussellsbarkingdog.blogspot.com/

Author’s name: Ryan Eckes

Author’s blog: http://ryaneckes.blogspot.com/

What’s the Philly (love) connection?:

Why’d you nominate this poem?: I can answer these last two as one. Ryan nails the sound of blue collar, middlebrow white neighborhood Philly: in snatches of dialog, in the rhythm and cadence of his lines, in the drop dead understated logic & ill logic, perceptions and misconceptions– & never fails to let you know how limited the points of view in expressed in his poems…or of any point of view… a kind of wise humility that’s almost, but not quite, unconscious of what it’s up to.

-

neighborhood watches

another guy brags his mother was a mother
before she had babies, tidy streets broke from
her hands, one man attached to a motor car,
another to a motion picture house.                          what’s showing?
at is-a-bella’s, COUNTER GIRL WANTED.
she rides a bike, gets honked at, gets told
to get off the road. the neighborhood watches.
if tragedy strikes who will pay your mortgage.
oh watches never worked on me, mom says,
i don’t buy them. me neither, i say. but what’s
difficult about watching reruns is the policeman
between my sister’s legs looking out. he’s got
my eyes and winks, nodding to the neighborhood
north—watch out over there, he says, they’re
animals, you know, you gotta treat em like animals …