Once a devious queen lodged just one tiny pea Under twenty soft mattresses, wanting to see Out of many young princesses which was the one Who deserved to be matched with the prince, her fine son.
For she knew a true princess was dainty and fine, And that little legume underneath the frail spine Would prevent her enjoying the tiniest rest, And by this all would know she had passed the queen’s test.
But you see, a true princess is also polite, So when, bleary-eyed after a long, sleepless night, Each was asked how she’d slept by the queen the next day, She replied, “Very well,” and was sent on her way,
Till one morning a girl hollered, “What is this lump? Do you call this a bed? Who can sleep in this dump?” So the queen said okay. The prince married her straight. And the moral is: don’t let your mom choose your mate.
*****
Max Gutmann writes: “It always frustrated me that the fairy tale couldn’t seem to see the flaw in the queen’s thinking.”
Max Gutmann has contributed to New Statesman, Able Muse, Cricket, and other publications. His plays have appeared throughout the U.S. (see maxgutmann.com). His book There Was a Young Girl from Verona sold several copies.
Illustration: ‘The Princess and the Pea’ by Edmund Dulac. Dulac illustrated several of H.C. Andersen’s fairy tales, many of which include sarcastic social commentary on pretentiousness.
Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken In, sprinkled with ashes, Pop switches channels, takes another Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks What to do with me, a green young man Who fails to consider the Flim and flam of the world, since Things have been easy for me; I stare hard at his face, a stare That deflects off his brow; I’m sure he’s unaware of his Dark, watery eyes, that Glance in different directions, And his slow, unwelcome twitches, Fail to pass. I listen, nod, Listen, open, till I cling to his pale, Beige T-shirt, yelling, Yelling in his ears, that hang With heavy lobes, but he’s still telling His joke, so I ask why He’s so unhappy, to which he replies… But I don’t care anymore, cause He took too damn long, and from Under my seat, I pull out the Mirror I’ve been saving; I’m laughing, Laughing loud, the blood rushing from his face To mine, as he grows small, A spot in my brain, something That may be squeezed out, like a Watermelon seed between Two fingers. Pop takes another shot, neat, Points out the same amber Stain on his shorts that I’ve got on mine, and Makes me smell his smell, coming From me; he switches channels, recites an old poem He wrote before his mother died, Stands, shouts, and asks For a hug, as I shrink, my Arms barely reaching around His thick, oily neck, and his broad back; ‘cause I see my face, framed within Pop’s black-framed glasses And know he’s laughing too.
Featuring it in 2007 (alongside another Obama poem, “Underground”), The New Yorker noted that it “appears to be a loving if slightly jaded portrait of Obama’s maternal grandfather, with whom he spent a large part of his childhood.”
One day we’ll all be dead; survival chances: slim. So concentrate instead on aspects you prefer: “I’m winding down,“ he said, “but not as fast as him.” “Losing my looks,” she said, “but not as fast as her.”
*****
Speaking as someone now in the 4th quadrant of my 1st century, what other options are there? Anyway, this was first published in the Asses of Parnassus – thanks, Brooke Clark!
She drinks a bit more she loves a bit less she no longer fits in her wedding dress.
She’s given up trying, accepted her fate, feels herself thinning while she stacks on the hate.
Doesn’t feel like his partner his mate or his wife, all she feels is as hard and as sharp as a knife.
She reels her mind back but can’t seem to recall, what she ever saw in him, why she married at all.
It’s a dead man’s float, face down on the bed, they sleep separate, unsound in their queen sized dread.
So she’ll tread bitter water as she has done for years, not so much married to him as she is to her fears.
*****
Lindsay McLeod writes: “‘She’ was written in my head, wearing ear protection in a factory. It was about my (then) partner who had recently escaped a toxic relationship.” The poem was originally published in Fine Flu.
Lindsay McLeod is an Australian writer who lives quietly on the coast of the great southern penal colony with (yet another ferocious Aussie animal) his cattle dog, Mary. Lindsay still drives a forklift to support his poetry habit.
I fail at them, these scenes where beauty is married to fear. I have failed before with this one. How can I make it clear
when the moment itself was a blur? My son and I, that night, stepped through the warm, wet air that had magicked every light
to a wide, all-hallowing halo. He said–I think he was ten, still with his clear soprano– It’s lovely out here. And then
the edge of every nimbus, pale gold through a fog scrim, shivered, knowing that beauty soon would be bullied out of him.
*****
Maryann Corbett writes: “This poem (first published in Mezzo Cammin) is indeed based on one of those indelible memories, the sort that lodge in a parent’s brain for decades. And I have in fact tried to write about it before without succeeding. I’ve never asked my very adult son whether he remembers this moment at all.”
Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota in 1981 and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry after thirty years away from the craft in 2005 and is now the author of two chapbooks and six full-length collections, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan U. Press, 2023). Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry.
Michael R. Burch’s poems have been published by hundreds of literary journals, taught in high schools and colleges, translated into 23 languages, incorporated into three plays and four operas, and set to music, from swamp blues to classical, 78 times by 35 composers. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of The HyperTexts.
Suddenly the kids, the car, the house, the spouse, the local bar, the work, have made you what you are. What doesn’t chill you makes you fonder.
Should you stay or should you go? The thrill you’re looking for, you know, could be right here at home, although what doesn’t thrill you makes you wander.
If, avoiding common truth, you dye your hair and act uncouth, will you find your misplaced youth – really, will you if you’re blonder?
It doesn’t matter if you’re strong or if you sing a pretty song, something, and it won’t be long, will come to kill you, here or yonder.
You’re human in the human fray, and choose among the shades of grey. No matter if you go or stay what might fulfill you makes you ponder.
*****
Marcus Bales writes: “This is a little more than a decade old, back when I still had a full time job. There is something looming in a life about a full time job that’s hard to escape entirely even when you’re determined to try. Must have been a bad day on the sales floor.
“This is one of those poems where a rhythm enters my mind and won’t go away until I put words to it. Of course it already HAD words to it, but I couldn’t use those. So after one quatrain it became a challenge to see how many of that refrain rhythm it was possible to make sense with. That’s actually sort of freeing, because once that becomes the challenge, it opens the poem, for me anyway, to using the randomness of the rhyme words, as they arise, to drive each stanza’s, and thus the whole poem’s, sensibility. This is a good example of how the aleatory dice of rhyme can be used to open up opportunities to say things I wouldn’t have thought of to say at all without having to work toward the rhyme word. This can be very bad for a poem, of course — one of the main ways to judge poems in meter and rhyme is on how hard it is to tell whether the poet was using the rhyme words that way or not. The goal, of course, in almost all rhyme, is to delicately decorate the poem rather than for it to be clear that the poet was merely chasing a rhyme. And when there’s a rhyming refrain line the danger is extreme.
“I remember being pretty happy with it at the time. I do like the way something seems to loom over the narrator, pressing him onward through his meditation, and providing, I hope, the reason that meditation is needed.”
Not much is known about Marcus Bales, except he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, and his work has not appeared in Poetry or The New Yorker. His latest book is 51 Poems; reviews and information at http://tinyurl.com/jo8ek3r
I feel a kinship with those, never met, who live, uncertain and displaced in the wrong place on planet earth and sea: with different languages at home and school, without a passport from the place they’re raised, their natural faith despoiled by pointless war, their sex uncertain, orphaned from themselves, poets of restlessness, pilots adrift, obscure, uncertain in their rootlessness, chameleons of constant camouflage, and all the little that they know deep down forever hidden from some foreign frown.
*****
My sense of being displaced is largely one of nationality: in every country I’ve lived in, I feel the closest connection to other expats; and there is no country in which I don’t feel like an expat myself. But that also gives me a sense of commonality with all others in all forms of insecurity and displacement. And maybe it is a natural part of being human… after all, all adults have been displaced from the very different world of childhood.
“Auden thought the triolet was too trivial a form to bother with…” –James Fenton
Practally dactally W. H. Auden Mastered his verse forms with Scarcely a miss.
Some he found slight. There’s no Abecedarius, No triolet, and he Didn’t write this.
*****
When I first started thinking about double dactyls I made a list of words and when I saw that James Fenton quote I knew I had a poem. I no longer recall what word got paired with Kevin E. Federline.
Reese Warner lives in Toronto and does things with computers for money. Reese’s poems have shown up in journals such as Asses of Parnassus, The Malahat Review, The Rotary Dial, The Dalhousie Review among others. For more information see http://pubs.reesewarner.com
Double Dactyl was first published in The Asses of Parnassus.
Clip clop clip clop steady up yon stuntgrass rise, boy, long as low and stony-brown, slow like weeks with nothing in them: saddle-tick, dirt-crump, poker-face.
Clip clop clip clop privy-top and anchor-wires, church-cross, store-spike, steady boy, up yon one-street, just more-trodden dust: saddle-tick, dirt-crump, poker-face.
Clip clop clip clop steady, boy, through sad wood civics, rippled in yon saloon-glass store-side, road-end, horses maybe leaving: saddle-tick, dirt-crump, poker-face.
Clip clop clip clop rise, boy, steady, way ahead, purple-white mountains, nothing in them maybe, like weeks maybe: saddle-tick, dirt-crump, poker-face.
2.
My brother’s name was Crazy Sean. They shot him in the head. He rattled through the summer corn and turned the green shucks red.
I laid him in the willowbrake. I couldn’t stand to pray. I kissed his cheek for pity’s sake, and then I rode away.
The plains are full of buffalo. The woods are red and gold. The mountaintops are white with snow. His memory keeps me cold.
I’ve rode through Hope and Whisky Creek. I’ve rode through Faith and Love. I’ve laid in Hate and Hide-and-Seek, and run from God-Above.
The prairie shines, the buckdeer cry. The hawks hang in the heat. Clipclop clipclop, the world rolls by. They say revenge is sweet.
3.
Somewhere still, stark as an afternoon; Ached in long planks of sunshine; Like a gambler’s card dropped on an empty land; Vauntsquare, the nailed-up main street creaks Against the air. Clipclop – hotel, laundry, saddles, Telegraph, clap-houses, guns. The horse stops. Into this hollow spine of fellowship blows a slow O of wind. Three men clatter at a boardwalk: Nacarat boots, sharktooth mojos – oh my brother.
4.
I shot one on the shithouse board. His head smashed like a squash and sprayed the backboards red. He pissed his boots and died. The stinking hole spit up a fat, black fly, which was his soul. I shot one in the barbershop. The chair caught fire, and ate his o-colonied hair. He fell out like a slice of spitroast meat. The duster wrapped him in its winding-sheet. I shot one in the cornfield. Larks of blood flew off his skull and twittered in the mud. He rattled through the stalks. His mashy head threw up its brain and turned the green shucks red. I took a bath and threw away my gun. I rode away wherever. I was done.
5.
drizzle pops on his hatbrim, cord and wool and steam-sodden, saddleticks like an empty stomach.
windpump wires and tin-dump, like horizon-drowning, horse, then man, hat, gone, clipclop, dusk drips in.
paraffin lamplight pricks the town, glo-worms, night hunched above, coyotes carry their eyes like stars.
6.
reckoning done how will he ever be warm
purpose gone how will he outrun the storm
bearings none how will he find another
riding alone how will he tell his brother
*****
John Gallas writes: “‘Western Man’ is a weird one: I have a quite spooky love of Westerns, jogging as they do some very deep links with Old En Zed, remnants (many remnants!) of which I grew up with and in. Those old wooden towns, the dim General Stores, the slightly grim and mostly silent (mostly) men, the cheek-by-jowlness of town and bush. It means quite a lot to me. I find the end of most Clint Eastwood films, and especially ‘Once Upon A Time in the West’, as the hero says ‘I gotta go now’, and rides away into lonliness after some bloody vengeance or other, inexpressibly moving.”
John Gallas, Aotearoa/NZ poet, published mostly by Carcanet. Saxonship Poet (see http://www.saxonship.org), Fellow of the English Association, St Magnus Festival Orkney Poet, librettist, translator and biker. Presently living in Markfield, Leicestershire. Website is www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk which has a featured Poem of the Month, complete book list, links and news.
Form in Formless Times 