Untitled

The thieves of children are velvet tongue'd, bright

as tigers, sticky sweet. These doctors with

terrible wings, blacker than a crawlspace, their teeth

white as cherry flowers, lemon-drop sour

stones and string, pocket knives, candy and toys

They say, "come away past the hedge, streetlights are
dropping light", they smile with stained lips curling.

Their eyes are bone and marble white, cave blind.

Their hands softly furred, cracked nails dirt black rind

This one's throat is a well, a car's locked trunk.

They sing, all cancer and milk, copper, lead

and unctuous charm, gravestone teeth in neat rows.

There is no one death, but deaths and deaths and

myriad deaths so thick and numberless

they blot the moon with the shadow of birds.

Each day the doors of the houses open

Something hangs beneath the sidewalk, waiting

Something stands at the red light, in the wood

An armada of boats in black crepe wait.

Their impatient ferrymen play at dice

Let us make a bargain, old bony death.

You may rend me from my bones like paper

Let my cadaver come to its red end.

Pass over these bright and laughing ones that

crowd my house, the ones who do not know.

Written on the occasion of Terry Thompson's suicide, Zanesville OH

 

I am of this place,

and when I release my bestiary

it will be a king of rats that crawls from my gut,

a tangle of tales and black eyes

 a cloud of blowflies,

to sing in the eaves of my final room

a possum hissing wrath, a black bear

save this  sad, mute ape, who will shed my skin

at the last like a salvation army suit

and carry your name into the canopy of the trees

you grieved the nineteen tigers, the lion chasing horses

the wolf, the bear, the storm of animals

and how I love you for that

to love the sharp teeth let loose in the mown lawns

the hungry bear in the pantry

to hate the safety of bullets

the black stain of a beastless road

to love the wolf and hate the keeper's skin

Dauðadag

The night I set the chair on fire, they sent two fire trucks, and three cop cars. The cops came up as I was watching it burn, and they did not even try to take my beer from me, or the gas can, which was probably a good idea. The flame was a two-story high column of orange light and stinking black smoke from the burning foam rubber, and the greasy sixties floral skin of the thing was polyester, at least in part. The gasoline exploded when the flame hit it, and the boom had made my neighbors report an explosion, their weirdly sculpted bushes lit with sunset and hell -light. The chair had a name, was the throne of our underground court, beside the washing machine, the sump pump hole, the empty whiskey bottles, the Black Sabbath and Misfits records, the black indoor/outdoor carpet,the windows used as doors, covered in stolen flags, the chair of office soaked in bong water and gas station wine, in boilermakers and cheap gin. I had been hounded, as I was going away to school, off to seek my fortune in the wide wide world, to "get rid of that ugly piece of trash that you dragged into my house" before I let the door hit me on the ass, by my mother, through a thick slurred fog of sleeping pills. The beers were stolen from the vegetable crisper, old Milwaukee tall boys held by a plastic ring, and the gas was meant for a battered lawn mower that was seldom used.( In our last place, we had let the grass grow till it rippled like wheat,heavy with seeds and when the law came and informed us it would have to be cut, I cut it with a sickle and let it dry in the sun before I bagged it, and then cut it twice, That yard would have burned down the block, but this one was kept passable by contract with HUD.) The iron railings were kept painted, inside and out and the avocado-green stove and oven worked as per the fair housing act, but the fireplace was boarded over (,fire too dangerous in the hands of the poor) and we had no hatchet, so I determined it was to be a viking funeral for my youth, for my chair, and dragged it drunkenly up the stairs, while her stupor held, while my sisters slept, and in the middle of the walk, I placed it, soaked it down with five gallons of gas and led a thin thread of fuel, fuse style, up the walk and set it roaring up to the level of the second floor windows, and sang, until the sirens started.

Hilt's Law

The bones cast in the field like seed corn,
grow nothing, grow briars in the boarded gas stations
brown stalks ready for the fire.
You do not hear our song,
earth thick in our throats, benzene and chromium
cadmium and arsenic
shuttered stores,the hosts of dead in cold-mill towns
the day that does not come though prayed for.

The trains of coal and corpses, the price of power
though wires are stretched like a mandolin on our bones
though the saints bob above us like car-lot balloons
You do not hear our singing.
In electric light the bubble gum machine is full of teeth
the babies' bottles with a slow sweet poison
the air is thick with cancer and the rain with
teeth,without flowers, without cease.

This dream of sleep, in hunter's orange
over oil-black in cups, in the hollows under eyes
the unborn sun in the darkest river, the hollow hills
the unsong of un-place, Bloody Harlan, Centralia
the blessed fly over in air conditioned comfort.

Let the bone-fire of your city burn 'till your shadow stains the bricks
Let the dark come spilling from the mine thick as mollasses
Let the end come if it is coming,
Let the rich hang from their ankles,
washtub full of black blood.
You do not hear.

Let the hills and stones fall on us and cover us
Let those curse us who curse the day, who are skillfull
the smelters of iron, and armaments, the hilltop removers.

Though we are dying, though we breath black dust
and blue powder, spit liquor and blood
the black drink, the earth's secret breath
though we are toothless, though we are blind
we hear this:

Steady trundle of the train under storm clouds
loaded down with malediction,
the radio tower's Babel-bleat to heaven
with the black stone, with the dead for burning
song of electric light, and sleeplessness.

Weariest river at the end of all things
We follow you into the earth.

	FY 2013 Grant Awards: NEA Literature Fellowships: Creative Writing (Poetry) Beduya, Jose Perez Ithaca, NY $25,000 Bird Greenberg, Miriam Berkeley, CA $25,000 Blake, Sarah Havertown, PA $25,000 Brimhall, Traci Kalamazoo, MI $25,000 Browne, Jenny San Antonio, TX $25,000 Buffam, Suzanne Chicago, IL $25,000 Chen, Ken Brooklyn, NY $25,000 Chernoff, Maxine Mill Valley, CA $25,000 Corral, Eduardo C. Rego Park, NY $25,000 Coutley, Lisa Fay Salt Lake City, UT $25,000 Day, Meg Salt Lake City, UT $25,000 Elkins, Ansel Greensboro, NC $25,000 Essbaum, Jill Alexander Austin, TX $25,000 Flood, Reginald L. Quaker Hill, CT $25,000 Gorham, Sarah Prospect, KY $25,000 Hart, Pamela South Salem, NY $25,000 Hoahwah, Sy Benton, AR $25,000 Hughey, Elizabeth Birmingham, AL $25,000 Kryah, Joshua Las Vegas, NV $25,000 Laurentiis, Rickey St Louis, MO $25,000 Mangold, Sarah Edmonds, WA $25,000 McCadden, Kerrin Plainfield, VT $25,000 McCrae, Shane Iowa City, IA $25,000 Metres, Philip University Heigh, OH $25,000 Muench, Simone Chicago, IL $25,000 Murillo, John Brooklyn, NY $25,000 Rakovan, Jacob Rochester, NY $25,000 Reddy, Srikanth Chicago, IL $25,000 Reeves, Roger W. Chicago, IL $25,000 Richardson, James Princeton, NJ $25,000 Richardson, Rachel Greensboro, NC $25,000 Rigsbee, David Raleigh, NC $25,000 Riley, Atsuro San Francisco, CA $25,000 Seay, Allison Midlothian, VA $25,000 Sharif, Solmaz Los Angeles, CA $25,000 Shaw, B. T. Portland, OR $25,000 Teitman, Ryan Berkeley, CA $25,000 Vap, Sarah Santa Monica, CA $25,000 York, Jake Adam Denver, CO $25,000 Zucker, Rachel New York, NY $25,000   « Return to index Privacy Policy          Important Notices          Contact Us          FirstGov National Endowment for the Arts · an independent federal agency 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20506

Reposted from Sarabande Website:

We are pleased to announce the 2012 Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature selection: (Untitled), stories by Arna Bontemps Hemenway. The collection will appear in the summer of 2014. We will definitely have a title before publication date!
Arna grew up in the Mount Vernon neighborhood of Lexington, Kentucky. His fiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Seattle Review, Meridian Literary Review, Bat City Review, and They Magazine. He received a B.A. from the University of Iowa and an M.F.A. in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He’s been the recipient of the Peter Taylor Scholarship for Fiction from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, as well as the Truman Capote Fellowship and John C. Schupes Fellowship for Fiction Writing while at Iowa, where he now teaches.
The finalists chosen (and they were very fine finalists) included:
Light in Darkness, by Jeremy Byars
Poems from a Poet’s Daughter, by Morgan Eklund
Through a Tunnel You Are Leaving, by Jessica Farquhar
Big Bad, by Gary Leising
A Terrifying Brush with Optimism, by Brian Leung
Galaxies that Might be You, by Pamela Johnson Parker
The Devil’s Radio, by Jacob Rakovan
Manglevine: Collected Stories, by Dominic Russ
Gazelle in the House, by Lisa Williams
A Little Luck, by Jeff Worley
Click this link to download a print friendly version of the 2012 Bruckheimer Series press release.

Poetry And Pie July 14th

30 of 30 Elegy for Joyce Mcginnis

It was a funeral year,and a terrible church.
the preacher had an altar call in the middle of the service
as though this was the ideal time, to hammer us
with that threadbare, impoverished faith, worn carpet on the altar
a pair of yard-sale plaster praying hands atop a speaker,
a paint-on-velvet Jesus, and I was young enough to be embarassed

By the Appalachian wailing in the funeral home,
the collapsing and being escorted outside, the coffee can of cigarette butts
the beige shirts and colorful ties, the kentucky drawl of the preacher
I have never felt more northern, more Catholic, more outside
than that room, the women red-faced, collapsing
My own calm in the face of their grief.

You were born again, but I knew your stories,
the woman shot through the barstool
Red's blood clot and the bullet that cured him,
Your prison time the family secret
knew of your bike, your studded belt that spelled your name
your racist dolls, dirty books, knew the cackle of your laugh
your smoking cigarettes with an oxygen mask,
planted lillies in your lawn. Stared at the Mack truck tabletop lighters
the apple-head dolls, turned over  the plaster frogs with human genitals
near your stagnant birdbath, knew the smell of your backyard goat
a picture of a man with elephantisis, carrying his balls in a wheel barrel:
But you did not know me, called me "Chuck", called me "Chad",
Called me "Neva's Baby" when I was fifteen,
though you had embroidered names on my cousin's woolen jackets
always more interested in your own stories.
My mother and her sisters were charmed by you,
like mice by a snake, they needed the your gaze
even if you only saw your own reflection in their eyes
the children that you left, again and again
that gaggle of garrulous sisters at your dying bed
who did not seem to notice that you did not love them.
who dutifully ate the 7-up cake, the ham left warming for them
that you never bothered to wait for their arrival to eat
on the holidays we drove across two states to your home and car dealership
to eat your leftovers, to slip off and read the black books upstairs, to steal whiskey from your bar,to spin until we fell

When you died this was my inheritance, a rack of pipes that no one smoked
a set of books in black covers, with pentagrams on the back. a collection of stories
of a woman that I never knew, a memory of the sting of stolen whiskey.

29 of 30 Elegy for Rich Weiss

We rode the freight trains into town
jumping off when they picked up speed
and sliding down the rock embankments.
A sign on a post, covered in rust, bulletholes
advertised a long-closed window and siding company
"Exteriors of time" Fields of corn and wheat,
a go-kart track, the weird sculptures of Mini Golf
under fluorescent lights,a dingy arcade where metal bands
played in the gravel parking lot, a whirling pit over the gravel.

Rich was older, had better weed,
drank stolen airplane bottles of "cocktail" and "martini"
with us, hopped cemetary fences, showed us how to make a pipe
from tin foil and a pen, from soda cans and apples.
Rich, on Dilaudid, or Codeine, or Valium and Whiskey,
alone, a drunk, stumbling scarecrow
( or asleep on the tracks, depending on who was telling)
was hit by the Burlington Northern,
and his heart stopped.

The paramedics jump-started him,
and Rich came back, Electric Lazarus
with cinematic tales of a white light, of voices
of being spat back into the world,
which he would tell while we huffed gas,
drank Everclear, shook with stolen speed
I do not recall the method of his second death.

28 of 30 Elegy for Milford Russell

I remember only once,
riding behind the stickshift in a rusted Chevy
sticking to vinyl seats
Hank Williams on the radio, and I
eight or nine, you gave me a drink of your beer,
some chewing tobacco.
We rode out and picked up some bales of hay.
I tried to lift, to be a good grandchild,
but my arms were weak, and you laughed
You did not remember my name.

The corn was drowned, the mud cracked and bloated
Merle Haggard was drunk
I went fishing once, with some relation of yours
a son from your second wife, I think
he showed me how put the hook through the minnow's eyes
I caught nothing but a tiny bluegill, too small to keep.
You were not there.

When you were sick, I went with your daughters
to load some cattle onto a truck,
to sell and pay your medical bills.
The cows were spooked, the bull angry, his head down
Your daughters frightened and useless.
The cows uninterested in dent corn and dying
I forced them up the ramp,
sent them to slaughter,
You did not thank me.



At your burial, your steel grey pompadour
rail thin in a black suit and tie, dressed for town
with wood paneling and lillies,  muzak and Jesus.
I did not know you at all.

27 of 30 Elegy for Daniel Toth

There was the day you fell off the wagon
I was nine, and you drove us to the lake
to meet your wife, my mother and sisters
It was you and I, alone
and you set the six pack between us
and when we arrived,everything went wrong

The boat did not have a pump,
the duckweed skinned the water,
grey sand, and bright sun
There is a photo of me,
a piratical handkerchief, binoculars
a boatless captain. There are none of you.

Your son, jumping on the couch,
stabbing the wall with a knife 'like daddy"
Your wife who haunts the edges of photos
How we cleaned your house,  found your works
 a zippered case of syringes, pipes and bellows
an aquarium of neon fish.
set your wife's impractical heels in rows

You, cook and junkie, dry drunk
Your impossible blond children,
your coal black hair, your Zig-Zag tattoo
Your scar, Your bottomless sorrow

that found its end with a final drink
a bullet through the head, politely
in the back yard, so as not to leave a mess.

26 of 30 Elegy for Nolda Risener

You owl-white ghost, rheumy and yellow-eyed
your voice a death-beetle tick, a moth wing
and you deaf as headstones.
Laboring to move, slow and deliberate
a tortoise, ancient as god and death
your hands like stained paper,
nails ivory and cruel.
You terrified. Great grandchildren dared each other
to tell you a joke, and you'd lean in, slow and terrible
toothless, clouded, not quite blind.

Old Regular Baptist,
at your graveside no devil's instruments
but a palsied, liver-spotted choir,
in lined- out hymnody sang
Amazing Grace, ten thousand years.

They demanded to open your casket
at the graveside, the grandchildren
that you mothered, and we, their
toy children, too young to be discarded
watched,in polyester suits
squinting in Kentucky sun
as they clawed at you.

In your baby-blue casket,
Your dress white as christening.
Your mouth open to sing.

25 of 30 Elegy for Mary Rita Rakovan

Your bird-brittle bones weighed less
than the casket of my sister's child.
You, dry as down, as cottonwood seeds
the long years cloud the glass.

Your well scrubbed floor under a sheen of motor oil now
they grind dirt into your carpets
Your clothes, and his hang in the closet
side by side in the room of your death.

There are deer in your garden,
come from along the power lines
to eat the spring shoots.
The Japanese beetles devour your Zinnias.

In the grave, all your forgotten Slovak returns
the language of a mother country you have never seen.
You whisper back and forth, with Andy
through the entangling roots. Cleveland dissolves.

The war is far away, and you are together
The Wonder Wheel spins above the boardwalk.
The gypsy again, in roller-skates.
You see only this, the soldiers in their uniforms
the girls with stocking seams painted up their legs.

Not your son, his dirty nails, his swallowed mouthful of truths.
Not the host passed over by your family, dutiful in borrowed suits .
Not the blue plastic madonna with broken hands,
the sardine cans in the sink.

24 of 30 Elegy for Ben Sztuba

Your house, the horror house
the doberman vicious,one eyed, blind and tumorous
clawing inside the door.
shouting, and barking

The phones torn from the walls,
kept locked in the trunk of your car
your heavy hands, blurry tattoos on the knuckles
"love" and "wine", motor oil in the cracked skin

Another woman's name on your forearm
your belt worn sideways,
a motorhead, a mechanic
drinker of cheap Polish brandy

Your family learned to live around your edges
and I learned to move
in that undercurrent of fear
to leave when you came home

Your youngest son a policeman now,
he answers the calls
for men like you, impotent and angry
full of stupid spite

what misery it must have taken have taken
to make our house a refuge
our house of hoarded metal, of shuttered windows
our dirt and danger seem safer than home

His brother always your greasy mirror,
a thief of bicycles, a bully
a sadist with a clothespin
your wife, bending spoons
and reading tarot, a captive gypsy witch
with no plan of escape
 
When I learned of your death
of the loss of my father's only friend
I let out the breath I did not know I held
I let my footsteps fall louder on the stairs

23 of 30 Elegy for Steve Gurney

My first grief, 1981
Our yards divided by a concord grapes
on rusting fencing, a strawberry patch
you, 71 then, teller of lies
gifting me with arrowheads
chipped from broken coffee mugs
pulled from the burning trash
"ancient artifacts" you said
with the mug handle still attached

Your pond, stocked with catfish
with overgrown goldfish,
bullfrogs and water walkers
your boys hunting squirrels on our acre
the smell of the squirrel brains frying with eggs
hominy grits and black coffee

Your house, all meager screen
and cookpots catching the rain
and you, all hillbilly gristle
a scarecrow, a possum, your wife a white ghost,
telling lies about angels with books
at the foot of your bed, about
your heart stopping on an operating table
the light that pulled you out of yourself
and spat you back like a fish bone
a dip of snuff spat in a radiator

You tranplants, on the wild road
where they scratched the addresses
on the mailbox with pocket knives
where they burned crosses
on front lawns,
gravel line between two counties

Your old hound chasing turtles
howling at the moon
the white scar over your heart
you showed me, solemn

When you died, I wept
your sons filled the pond
with rusting wachine machines
and scrap, mosquitos in the stagnant water
the grass grown tall
the birds had all the grapes

22 OF 30 Elegy for Angela Lynn Williams

The river lies flat and glittering
between the hills, coal barges
and trains drag the black rock
north to burn, in fall of a rainless summer
fires eat the underbrush

The storefronts are boarded,
the last note of your song
ringing through the brick streets
empty attics and discarded treasures
old records, Ma Rainey , Bessie Smith, Maybelle Carter

You sang rough, barrelhouse belter
and hillbilly choir, old time,
sang the bridge into the river
the birds from the sky

sang spurge and sorrell through the pavement cracks
sun on a broken bottle
dandelions in the brownfield reclamation site
crumbling factories,catfish in oilslick,
hawks above the highway
bones of the horses showing,
ice melting off the highway cuts

dry years blew trash through the streets,
the boneyards filling,
sparked the hills to flames
the city dying, you still singing

in the burning ship of your hometown
the bone of your poverty in your throat
a bittersweet hillbilly twang
in the final resonant spring of your last song
the shuttered shops fall to dust, the trees ablaze
and everything burns in quiet

21 of 30 Elegy for Christal Luevano

There are shots on the bar today
amber votives,  offerings
your bike  slowly rusting,
a jukebox coughing up
London Calling, Hank Williams

The cranes are fishing in the ditch
Life seethes on in its dumb animal bliss
The cancer in your father's  hollow bones
does not retreat though it plants a flag in you

Say instead: your hair has grown back
a long black pennant, behind you
Your bike is built of light, and Gary
has saved you a seat, with a fresh glass

Say instead; the clouds are hill country
the thirsty ghosts line the bars there
the road winds on and on, copless
an unspooling of mondayless days

Kiki, go smiling, go with no hooks in this world
to hold you, your own wheels beneath you
a black highway, a long and raucous night
an endless sunday
 

20 of 30 Elegy for Natural Death

By water, by automotive collision
asleep, and surrounded, encircled by offspring
by disease slow and steady, by virtue of the bodies failure
the clockwork ground to halting, in white rooms
enlivened by florists, by rouge and wax
by the concealed stitch in the lip
the cheap shoes, the rings removed
and shared amongst the family
by slow degree, by pact, by violence
by the blossoming of strange flesh
in the corridors of the body, by the failure of the heart
by slow and ponderous breath, by paralysis
each slow and honeyed day past savor
and the mouth drying to dust, to husk and shell
by one's own hand, by the million stratagems
of a microscopic bestiary, that devours us even
as we live, we are consumed, burning, dissolved in solution
unstitched in starlight, in the noonday sun,
in privacy and in the public square
we are discovered, cleaned like a tagged buck
stuffed with cotton and wax, or left to dry
forgotten in front of a television tube
fallen down the bottle, the plate of powder
this menagerie i have collected
my clot of ghosts are , one and all
natural as milk

19 of 30 Elegy for Jay Ferguson

You are quiet now,
you brandisher of baseball bats
you psycho-billy dancer
crooner of the barlight

The city is burning, crumbling to wreckage
and you were the crowing rooster
atop the ruin, the song of the fire
frankenstein

The nights all run together,
until, blinking, in the closing time light
we are herded into the street
with tall boys in bags
with sugar-spun eyeballs
swallowing starlight

to wreck cars, to fight
to drink until the sun rises in rented houses
to pass platefuls of our own death 
And you, Jaybird
crown prince of wasted time
king of portugal, of cockaigne
of the orchestra of donkeys

You don't have to go home
but you can't stay here

18 of 30 Elegy for Anson Edwards

They wrote your name
on the end of the bar
and did coke off it.

Like a plywood tombstone,
to kick, to pour beer over.
 You hold court  in the red lights
The bartender pounds on the bar
with a baseball bat

My sister carries a picture of you
in a football uniform, improbably young
and uninked, you squint into the sun

they put your body in the ground
and went to the bar and did rails
on the toilet tanks
wrote you a sharpied epitaph
in beer soaked plywood

Hail the conquering hero

17 0f 30 Elegy for Dick Clark

It is New Years Eve in the city of the dead
and they are playing all your favorite records
the 45's your sisters broke, Your grandfather's box
of 78's that burned with the house.
The tape that got unspooled in your first car.

When the ball drops, it is the sun itself
going down into the wintry dark
and the dead stand crowded in the street
and the cold blows ticker tape through them

He is the oldest teenager,
His teeth reflect the borrowed light
like the moon's sliver
and the kids twist

He plays the unsaid apologies,
plays all the thrown away declarations of love
the burned letters, the swallowed words
He is officiate of this rite,
and without him, the world has lost a priest
for the living, the years have stopped
rock and roll, contrary to expectation, has died.
in the city of the dead, they stay up late
Dick Clark is on Johnny Carson
Buddy Holly's new song
is rising up the charts
The twist king says
Let's twist again, like we did last summer

and you taste the summer in your mouth
cicadas and lemon, wild irish rose
a stolen kiss in the tall grass
crackle of the radio


"I played records, the kids danced, and America watched"  Dick Clark

16 of 30 Elegy for the Dying

You slack-rope walkers, jugglers of flaming torches
performing for circles of kin,
for the indifferent eye of god
in white rooms, and home in bed

the world is going, and you hold on to the scraps of it
the curled ash of testaments, of fever
you are halfway gone already
haunting your skin,
the body a failing machine,
black smoke of burning oil

your eyes are drinking in the world,
that is left, taking a small allotment of light
into the dark, It is too late.

a lifetime of action and inaction is resolved
already, and you are as forgiven as you will be

We cannot choose to go, or stay
and this antechamber is a burning house,
a remembered light. this wire, these numbers
these attendants in utilitarian blue are only smoke
we gather with you, to watch a world burn away

15 OF 30 Elegy for Andrew Rakovan

In the dark,  Jack Daniels on the rocks,
sleepless, the war still in your head
you walked the house, prefabricated
and alien to you all your life
the rooms never used

You built a house with your hands,
broke the windows from larger panes
and trimmed the lumber yourself
they ran a highway through it
and once, when i was young
we walked to the place it had stood
and watched the traffic puncture its ghost

You believed. In Edgar Cayce and Padre Pio
in spark plugs embedded in stone
in a library of copper plates under the Sphinx
in saucers cutting through the sky,
the beast in the bottom of the loch

Insulin injections and boiled sweets
In Italy, you drove through the mountains
for three days, with the blood and brains
of a friend on your shirt,
delivering medical supplies

You traded spring water for Cognac in Paris,
walked a Coney Island Boardwalk in black and white
with a black haired girl with my grandmother's face

did we know each other?
I kept my secrets, even with you.
Your insomniac vigils were yours alone
I carried your casket to the grave,
and did not return until I was carrying another body
to lie beside you.

14 of 30 Elegy for Tom King

Your junkie girlfriend in tow,
you came to my place, asking for a future
for a spread of cards that said something other than they said
other than the slaves chained at the foot of the devil,
other than death's pale rose

You were a drummer, and a good one
and I have played sloppy drunken slayer riffs with you
farther into the night than we should have,
the double bass steady as a doomsday clock
shared coke reeking of ether on a bar toilet tank
and I told you, even then
in the midst of my own dying
to stop

you could not stop
when you were climbing, building cell phone and radio towers
dangling on safety lines above the birds
did not stop in Africa,
shooting still with dirty needles,
the company refusing to fly you home
the poison spreading through your blood and your fever

and home, they amputated your hands,
leaving you two tattooed drumsticks
to hold, and fingerless, you could not tie off
could not press the plunger, and stopped

until you begged your friends, and they
tied off your severed arms, shot you full
of stopping, of white flowers, of the end of the story

13 of 30 Elegy for Ike Whitt

Above the trainyards, in a dying town's wildness
spray-painted over a bible verse, your epitaph
"Ike Whitt lives". You do not.
The painted rock juts above the trees,
the lizards sun themselves.
beer cans and dope bags, dead lighters.
a single, stunted tree climbs from the rocks

We have never met, you and I
but i recall your death, how
when they pumped your stomach
they found dilaudid and aspirin,
birth control pills and vitamins
how you wandered through your party
with your zip lock bag, a pillowcase of pills
you became an adolescent legend,
our own keith moon, dead of rock star excess

there is no novelty in this. the kids who crush
pills on the stone that bears your name
have never heard of you
and the hills have healed over our footprints
yours and mine, the trainyards rust
rats on the river bottom.

the bar stars dim in the daylight,
single file, to graves, a procession
too many to spray their names on the rocks
too many to remember

12 of 30 Elegy For Sam Patch

"Some things can be done as well as others". Sam Patch

The gulls cry at the base of the falls,
a ravenous and expectant mob
they are clean and white
like cotton in the mill,
the child's hand spanning it
a host of angels

You, drunk, with a trained bear,
a fox on a chain, jumping from the mill, from the masts
of moored ships, from a rickety platform
on goat island. You strike-instigator. You spectacle.
You stone against god's window. fever-tinged
How the proper ladies gathered,
the gentle folks tittilated to see you
romance your death, dance with it

How you fell, headlong the last time
they believing you were hidden in the cave
watching and laughing, finishing your bottle
the preachers railed against their sheep,
for their need for a wonder

they could not accept their own muddy hands
all those clean white gulls, their open mouthed awe
and hunger, and you, wingless, uplifted in the spray
dead beneath the ice, buried with a wooden placard

11 of 30 Elegy for Eric Deer

Red-faced, unfinished, hand curved to hold the hammer
illegible poems scrawled on notebook-paper
I remember you, clean
reading and building
in a store filled with old paperbacks
not comatose on that lawyer's floor,
veins full of Fentanyl, as they lied over you
your time already finished
Your father, sharer of needles,
fled the scene.

There was a wave behind you,
of dead boys and shrinking funerals
the festival gone out of it, after a while
only the family shows up

but death was still novel then.
and hung over in a five dollar suit
the soles of my shoes cracking
I went in,and spoke to you

You held your daughter's picture in your hand
and the flowers and doilies
of that room were suffocating
as your mother gawked at your exotic friends
and after, We drank and did not sing

We asked your family for your notebooks
the illegible poems and stories,
but they did not understand
how we wanted to hold some piece of you
as you spilled into the ground, and the quiet fell
so they gave us nothing

I found some loose pages, after
in a borrowed book, unfinished drafts
unreadable now, a crooked scrawl against the lines.

10 of 30 Elegy for Second Uncles

My first funeral required a black suit.
a clip-on tie. The saints watched,
blandly pleased, as I genuflected,
knelt, stood and sat.
I did not know the man,
like a rubber plant,
rouged with wax-fruit cheeks.
They drank coffee, and after, whiskey
but they did not weep
stained light,fake grass at the graveside.

My first death was a mouse on a trap
dry and stiff, forgotten under the chair
bloody and grinning, black eyed
in the  dark.

The did not lower you
into the earth, the women wore red
There was no rain.

9 of 30 Elegy for 1368 Norfolk

You will not die, though the ash of the burnt piano
grow briars, though the pipes clot with dirt
the well fills with toads
and your cement blocks rot like teeth.
You are my shame, my embarassment
holes in the bathroom walls,
the wet black mud beneath the floors
a king of rats, indissolvable knot I drag you behind me.
Still they post mail at your address.
You habitation of devils, you vulture's cage,
sunken city and carrion
Your grass still grows green as a graveyard.

Today i clawed a phone from the wall,
screamed when your name was conjured with.
You foulness, you black tar lung
you are the soft black spot at my core,
you worm in the wood
you frost-blighted plum tree.
I am a broken house, my siding falling off
my sodden carpet and rotten couch
my rats, my wasps, my tongue is a hangman's knot
and my father hangs at the end of it
the clapper for my hollow bell
you have your way inside me
and i see you crawl beneath the skin,
you sink full of maggot
you attic of fucking raccoons
my guts rattle with your grease
your stink comes through my skin,
black socks and zest soap
coke ovens and anger

I am burned down and rotten
past wrath and sorrow
I am dead wood and foxfire,
the collapsing septic tank, this rusting shed
and you, specter of all my specters
you eat your canned sardines and live
though the innocent die,
you sit alone at the funeral
you buyer of caskets
you polyester suit
what will my children say of me
in twenty years?
My heavy hand, the table,?
my shouting, my wrath.my accidents and my apologies?
what black thing did you bargain with,
what squats on your bloodline, what spider, what owl

you fixer of broken machinery,
you yellow toothed smiler
how i hate this face of yours i wear
your awkward dance, your thin tongue of a belt
they seat you at their table, they pour you milk
you trashman picking at bad dreams,
you weedy lot and burnt foundation
you motherfucker, you nightmare

i would burn this house to the ground again
to drive you from me,
I would burn , just to be rid of you

8 of 30 Elegy for Charles Broughton

The town swallowed your death
in a gas station bathroom.
In the 4.am stillness, there is a light
and the coffee pots are filled,
endless vigil of insomniacs,
cigarettes for the sorrowful,
the passing through.

Your road still winds down to the river
the muddy cornstalks, the train trestle
young boys still drink there, in the shadow
of the bridge, the catfish jumping.
still crush pills on the toilet tank

your house, a rotten tooth in a broken mouth
the bottles piled up in the trash
life continues without ceremony
the dead stare through a filmy mirror,
the flickering fluorescent sun.

7 of 30 Elegy for My Sisters' Easter Ducklings

You motherless things,
you had no home to hold you.
Your cardboard box open to the sky
behind the garage, among the rusting sheet metal.
The willow wept.

The rabbits lived until the snow came,
starved in their crates unfed by we lazy children
but you would not survive the day.

My sisters did not think to pray.
their white dresses and bonnets for show
a masque of piety, my father refusing the host
and bloody Christ staring at the ceiling
through the endless morning

We ate what sweetness we could find.
My dog, loose from the flagpole,
prowling the grass
for another small and unwatched thing

6 of 30 Elegy for George R. Cookingham

You were first, to ride ahead  on the lampless road
the bikes, half-stolen, kicking mailboxes in the pistol-whipped dark
the dodged bullets, climbing barbed wire fences
the night we came across an open grave,
the casket sitting in the middle of the street,
the black tar of the road.

The night you stole a car,
and wrapped it around a tree
and walked a half mile on a broken leg,
your punctured lung flecking your lips with blood
and threw gravel at my window.

Our science fair project to take a picture of the soul,
and your father dying in the middle of it,
the voltage running through the copper plate, over the film
calling devils in the dark of the wheatfields

That moon grinning down, your dead father
hanging over us,as we smoked his funeral flowers
over the bloody mirror,
huffing gasoline from cans.
Everclear in a gallon jug
My father's stolen .22
every broken window in the church
a tooth to catch your absent god
his relics in your backpack
as you climbed from windows,
escaped asylums
 
When your heart stopped, your truck kept going
through the intersection and into a telephone pole
The camper where I hid you rotted into the ground
my house burned to the foundations
your girl's head filled with ghosts

5 0f 30 Elegy for Gary Lynn Coffey

There is a house for broken men
when they are shaking,
when they are thirsty,
when they have no other house

There is a song for the loveless
for the rusted truck and the shotgun
a song for dry places
a song for the scar

In the long and godless sunday
of waiting to die,
the interminable afternoons
the loneliness of an empty bottle

jukebox hymnal and border-town heaven
honky tonk on the edge of hell
this chapel, these ministers of grace

Come into this cool dark place
steady your hand with a drink.
Play us a song.

4 of 30: Elegy for Ted O'Neil

In the windowless Union Bar and Grill
the painted goat quoted Heidegger
"Existence is in the form of a question"
and we, dumb and young and full of Schlitz
gathered around the burned boat you left behind you
and were starless

The day the haterock died,
I hated God and Texas
hated the way they left you
on the floor,the record deal
the night before, you said to me
"I'm almost thirty years old.
I have to get it together"
The next morning, your brain was dead
and your body followed

Yesterday, on the radio
I heard a song from nineteen years ago
It was not yours.

There is a procession,
with pinhole cameras in their bones,
with men in bottles, a patent medicine tent revival
a smalltown parade of car crash and almost
You go into the dimming light as we forget
forget the body's abandon and roar of blood

The ghosts gather thick around the bar, remembered smoke
moths hurling themselves against the incandescent,
the spirit yellow in glass. The townies sway.
a nineteen year old kid
beats the shit out of a pawnshop drumkit.

3 of 30 : Elegy for Tim Cantrell

He was a horse thief and a drunk
I have found him sleeping in tall grass,
outside the bar, met him when he lived
in the woods, on the run from the law.
With a needle wrapped in string,
a bottle of india ink, I scrawled
a blurry cross on his arm, and the alcohol bled out
In prison, he read Blavatsky.

In prison, he read Blavatsky.
and did his time, and was released
He carried in his head, a murdered father,
a tangle of useless language, Blavatsky
We used to play Pyramid, upside down
with a pinochle deck, and endless blue cases
of beer. Played circle of death, the
bicycle cards face down on a stained carpet

The burned down houses, the bartered cigarettes
Blavatsky and a blurry cross
coke and hotel rooms

Now your sons are fatherless, and you haunt their heads
the table where you died some shrine, the pill-dust
in the cracks of the wood. You died , your secret safe
the head full of Blavatsky, of dead fathers
gone into dark, the blurry cross on your arm

2 OF 30 Elegy For Ingrid Elizabeth Deardoff

Your pretty dress is a hammer
knocking against the eyes of God.
The sky is a stone. The tiny ants
go about their blind business.
We have sown you,  seed
in the black soil of home.

Concrete angels feign weeping,
deathless and mute, they cannot curse
plastic flowers bloom and bleach in the sun
the shining cars swarm on the black road

Your name is stitched into our tongues,
it should not be a synonym for grief,
the ink of it in your parent's skins
should be a bird, a song, not coal or fire

you cannot laugh
we have washed your long-legged body,
the song of the saints goes on
how do they praise him for this?
this broken circle, shattered kin
o grinning death you sonofabitch

in the hills, in summer
tiny lights flit in the tall grass,
small stars under the trees

1 OF 30: Elegy For The City Of Detroit

The city, tumulus and cenotaph,
grows meadow-bright in the char of housefires,
the rank and rotten fabric of a child's dress.

The engines are rusting, silent room after room
the last word rings, the phone, unanswered
petroleum plastic fetish.

A mill willed to the devil and his fire.

The books swell with rain, with silverfish
with a swollen tongue of affluence we do not speak:
let them burn.

Let strange gods return to the stones,
Let the hollow galleries ring with vandals,
flowers grow from the midden.

We will drag our plows through the bones of the dead
We will pepare a ruined house for our caller,
the dwarf with blazing eyes and rotten teeth

A flowering tree in the skull of a car
a circle drawn in the dust.

Jacob Rakovan Reading and Q&A

Jacob Rakovan Reading and Q&A

Date(s): 02/22/2012 - 02/22/2012
Times: 7-9
Location: Writers And Books 40 University Ave
Contact: Writers And Books
Phone: 585232590
Admission: FREE



Jacob Rakovan Reading and Q&A. Jacob Rakovan is an Appalachian author. His work has appeared in numerous print and online journals including The James Dickey Review, Thrush, Matchbook and Anon. He has appeared in anthologies by Ireland's Salmon Poetry press and The Arsenic Lobster. He will be reading from works in progress and will have a limited edition chapbook on hand. Jacob Rakovan is a 2011 Artist Fellowship recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). This presentation is co‐sponsored by Artists & Audiences Exchange, a NYFA public program,funded with leadership support from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA).