They’d all be like, never say never in classes we had, but whatever. I turned to the windows and hallways that always said always say always.
*****
Editor’s comments: From Pino Coluccio you should expect light and dark combined, light but deep, usually short, always well-phrased… and always existential. This, the eponymous piece of his 2017 collection, is tucked away in the middle of the book. The book won a Trillium Award, putting Coluccio in the company of Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Alice Munro. He has given me permission to republish more of his pieces from Class Clown periodically.
No one wants to be the damsel in distress, the one in need of chivalry, chained to a rock in nothing but her skin. No! One wants to be
the one who skirts the trap and steals the key, testing the rope bridge with a shaky grin. Whoever longs for victims he can free
is not a hero, but the villain’s twin. So save yourself. Don’t go expecting me to play the clingy wimp, the might-have-been no one wants to be.
*****
Susan McLean writes: “This poem got its start when I heard that Kirsten Dunst said, about playing Mary Jane in Spider-Man (2002), “I just don’t want to be the damsel in distress. I’ll scream on the balcony, but you’ve got to let me do a little action here.” It struck a chord with me. I was so tired of watching action movies in which the male hero does all of the derring-do and the female lead exists only to be saved, over and over again. Men still write, direct, and produce most films, so I guess it is not surprising that most movies reflect male fantasies. But women have fantasies, too, and screaming while I wait to be saved is not one of mine. “The poem is a roundel, a poetic form invented by Algernon Swinburne. As in a rondeau, the poem has only two rhymes, and the first part of the first line appears twice more. Part of the fun of writing it lies in finding ways to vary the repeating line, and part lies in the challenge of finding five rhyme words for each rhyme. English averages fewer rhymes per word than French, the language in which the rondeau originally appeared. Swinburne chose to make the roundel shorter than the rondeau (which is fifteen lines long) in order to make it easier to write in English. ” ‘No Thanks‘ originally appeared in Mezzo Cammin, an online journal that features female formalist poets. It was also included in my second poetry book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.”
Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa. https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean
Painting: ‘Andromeda Chained to the Rocks‘ by Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, ca. 1630
Get up, get out, and get away–I went as early as I could to leave one vile exposure for another. School. It meant escape from home at least a little while, not long enough, and trading family guile for reading sullen peers and teacher spin, except for you, beside me on the aisle– I was the girl with the scary home-life and bad skin.
I was first to homeroom every day. And how did Mr Romo ever know that half a sausage sandwich was the way a skinny girl survived. He’d always go “Good morning,” handing me a half as though that half were mine and we were somehow kin; I’d nod my thanks and sit in the back row– I was the girl with the scary home-life, and bad skin.
And you, who sat beside me, always kind to me, and always kind of sassy tough to other kids who other years combined to make me almost miserable enough to stay at home, from you I learned to bluff my inner fear, to fake a cocky grin, and start to walk as if it wasn’t rough to be the girl with the scary home-life, and bad skin.
L’envoi Yeah, it was you and Mr Romo, in the end, who gave me things that I could not begin to pay you back for, so even I’d befriend the girl with the scary home-life, and bad skin.
*****
Marcus Bales writes: “I have a modest file of poems that have got me unfriended, blocked, or banned by people or publications, for one reason or another. Sometimes, as in this case, the reason is unknown to me.
“Back in the old days when I was a working salesman at the sort of retail store where it takes an hour or two to walk around the store with your salesperson and discuss wants and needs and preferences, it is often the case that the customer gets comfortable enough to tell things about themselves or their lives that they might hesitate to repeat without canny encouragement. Here, a vivacious and attractive young couple were moving in together and needed furniture and a bed. They were excited, and money was not an issue. It turned out the young woman had been an officer in the Marines or the Army — I forget which at this distance — in one of the rougher, tougher units, and I admired her for having the stuff to lead in that mise en scene. She recounted that she had felt driven to it by a harrowing early family life, complete with the sort of acne that is every teen’s nightmare. A scary home-life and bad skin was her description of it. After the sale was completed I wrote most of this poem in the break room in the back, after climbing on the table to turn off the Muzak speaker so I could think.
“I discovered she had friended me on Facebook and had written some nice things about me at the store, which was very nice of her. Of course even back then I was posting my poems on Facebook, and posted this one, without her name, but with her initials. All the details are entirely fictional. I made them all up, except for that one line. She blocked me right away.”
Editor’s note: a ballade is a very suitable form for this poem, with iambics for thoughtful mood, claustrophobically restricted rhyme scheme, steady refrain, and final summation addressed to a superior person. From the Wikipedia entry ‘Ballade (forme fixe)‘: “The ballade as a verse form typically consists of three eight-line stanzas, each with a consistent metre and a particular rhyme scheme. The last line in the stanza is a refrain. The stanzas are often followed by a four-line concluding stanza (an envoi) usually addressed to a prince. The rhyme scheme is therefore usually ababbcbC ababbcbC ababbcbC bcbC, where the capital C is a refrain.”
Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ’51 Poems’ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).
This photo, black-and-white, where Mapplethorpe portrays his dark-mopped ex in profile, seated nude on wooden floorboards, knees drawn up against her breasts to hide her nipples, heated by the sideways radiator pipes on which she rests her palms, her bulging ribs a set of parallel oblique gray stripes rippling her bare white skin, unsmiling lips a short flat line– these were my first parameters, my inspirations, when I learned to write. On Patti’s ribs, the wooden flooring’s planks, the stacked pale pipes, I modeled my pentameters. The aim: amid such sharp lines, to be frank and raw, yet still control what sees the light.
*****
Jenna Le writes: “I first became intrigued by the friendship and creative partnership of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe some years ago. I confess the personas of these two artists and the touted relationship between them interests me even more than either artists’ actual creative output. Based on what I have read in biographies and so forth, their friendship seems to me to represent an ideal: a dyadic connection characterized by remarkable intensity, an intimacy transcending sex and conventional relationship definitions, facilitating both parties’ creative flourishing. As one gets older and it becomes ever harder to form new meaningful adult friendships, such bonds seem to me ever more mythic and miraculous. I think this awe, this wistfulness, is the principal emotion that makes me keep returning to the photograph this ekphrastic poem is about.”
Jenna Le (jennalewriting.com) is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), and Manatee Lagoon (Acre Books, 2022). She won Poetry By The Sea’s inaugural sonnet competition. Her poems appear in AGNI, Pleiades, Verse Daily, West Branch, and elsewhere. She works as a physician in New York City.
I’m wakened, drawn towards the ice-thin window, to witness scenes as faint and still as death. How bleak the moon; how bare the trees and meadows; sky’s pale maw overhangs Earth bleached beneath star fangs. Night’s curled lip sneers on shadows of mountains set like teeth.
Two bow waves shear the median of the valley, iced hayfield yields as feral muscles glide– hoarfrost disturbed by wakes of live torpedoes. Grey shoulders breach and lope, implode and telescope, impelled by ruthless credos of chilled and vicious pride.
The wolves tear savage furrows down the nightscape; their eyes are shined with blood, their mission clear. Grass springs back shocked to green behind their passage– twin tracks traverse the vales, cold comets trailing tails leave scarred in frost their message: the wolves, the wolves passed here.
*****
John Beaton writes: “This describes a real incident on our acreage when I woke in the middle of a frosty night for no apparent reason and looked out the window. I was struck by the grace, power, and sense of danger the wolves evoked. “The first three lines are pentameter and the endings alternate—feminine, masculine, feminine. The next four lines contract to trimeter to give a sense of speed and acceleration. Lines two and seven have a masculine rhyme that closes the stanza and ties its parts together. The overall rhyme-scheme is xabccba. My intent was to convey the power and motion of the wolves running and I built in alliteration and internal rhyme to help with this.”
John Beaton’s metrical poetry has been widely published and has won numerous awards. He recites from memory as a spoken word performer and is author of Leaving Camustianavaig published by Word Galaxy Press. Raised in the Scottish Highlands, John lives in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island. https://www.john-beaton.com/
I like to visit Earth sometimes; I find the too-brief lives and simple cares a change from the infinities in which we range, we who now live unbodied in vast Mind.
I love to watch the children at a zoo, careering up and down, shrieking to see the strange lives in the weird captivity they also share…and as their parents do.
Visiting in – of course – a human guise, I can be young or old, female or male; sex, power, seduction never seem to stale, to give gifts seems fair pay for all my lies.
Sailors and tourists visit and then leave; it’s best their hosts have something to believe.
*****
This sonnet was published in the current Alchemy Spoon, which had ‘Gift’ as its theme. It is one of a series of ‘Voices From The Future’ sonnets which I wrote in an attempt to present more diversity than the bleakness that Maryann Corbett had identified in my writing of what I see coming. Others are ‘Ultimate Control’ (Pulsebeat), ‘Exiled Leader’ (Star*Line) and ‘Dreaming of Flying’ (unpublished). Well, some people may find them all bleak, in the same way that Victorians would have found a description of today to be bleak; but what with travel, the Internet, dentistry… I’d rather be alive now than in the past. Similarly, I look forward to the future, no matter how much change is involved.
In a tiny cottage called the Laurel Tree, my neighbor lived alone. Nobody came to see her and she had no family, so week by week her life was much the same: she went to church and said the rosary, took in the mail for neighbors out of town, adopted cats, watched MSNBC, and at a roll-topdesk she wrote things down– things no one ever saw, although we guessed a novel, memours, poetry, and more– but we saw nothing, though we did our best. And when she died alone, at eighty-four, with no companion but a big gray cat, we pitied her. We were such fools as that.
*****
Gail White writes: “People often pity someone who lives alone for being lonely. But the Solitary Woman isn’t lonely; she’s complete. I’m always pleased when readers like this one, because I know they got the point.”
Gail White is the resident poet and cat lady of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Her books ASPERITY STREET and CATECHISM are available on Amazon. She is a contributing editor to Light Poetry Magazine. “Tourist in India” won the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award for 2013. Her poems have appeared in the Potcake Chapbooks ‘Tourists and Cannibals’, ‘Rogues and Roses’, ‘Families and Other Fiascoes’, ‘Strip Down’ and ‘Lost Love’. https://www.amazon.com/Asperity-Street-Gail-White/dp/1927409543
We aim to sing Boldly as the brave acrobat on his thin string Across the air. But yet, no matter how we juggle words and dare, And think ourselves stupendous, We’re risking nothing… we’re no Flying Wallendas.
The noted scholars of the institute Are tasked with framing issues and debate. Through data and the values they impute By proxy–or assume—they correlate
The wealth of nations and their policies, Distinguishing phenomenon and cause Until equations cut through fallacies, Assuming over time the air of laws.
Accordingly, with every factor weighed, The State will be apprised of how to spend. In high demand, proportionately paid, Those who’ve advanced their field approach day’s end
With puzzles yet to solve, but satisfied, And step around the beggars stretched outside.
*****
J.D. Smith writes: “The poem arises from the daily–and uneasy–contrast between ‘Washington’, the arena of politics and policy that draws players from around the world, and ‘DC’, the place that most residents know, with all the attendant problems of urban life in the United States. (I work in the former, though in a minor capacity, and live in the latter.) A complex society needs experts, so I won’t get on the bandwagon of anti-intellectualism, but I remain deeply troubled by the disconnect between many of those experts’ abstract work, accompanied by ambition, and how they address or refuse to address the actual human beings they encounter.”
J.D. Smith has published six books of poetry, most recently the light verse collection Catalogs for Food Lovers, and he has received a Fellowship in Poetry from the United States National Endowment for the Arts. Smith’s first fiction collection, Transit, will be published in December 2022. His other books include the essay collection Dowsing and Science. Smith works in Washington, DC, where he lives with his wife Paula Van Lare and their rescue animals. Twitter: @Smitroverse
We spiral round the sun, like water spirals round a drain; herded like sheep to the slaughter, it’s an old refrain– what you coulda, what you oughta… so few years remain.
*****
This short poem was recently published in The Asses of Parnassus – thanks, Brooke Clark! Btw sorry if the poem seems morbid – fall/winter has always made me reflective; I’ve been feeling time running out since my teens.
Form in Formless Times 