Finches
Porch light nest eggs born.
Waiting to fly away soon;
Feathers flap and rest.
Amnesia
can offer 50 First Dates
or just one question 50 times over
How’d I get here?
Amnesia can strike early, after a workout,
but Before I Go To Sleep, I must know
How’d I get here?
Amnesia can ambush Monday after Easter,
everyone asking Remember Sunday? No,
How’d I get here?
Anterograde amnesia leads to scans, MRI’s, questions
Regarding Henry, the year, the president?
How’d I get here?
Amnesia is interesting
in movies, but I don’t know how I got here:
ambulance, unruptured cerebral aneurysm, coiled, stented.
Today I live.
Memento Moir,
remember you will die.
A Facebook found poem, with thanks
Pop bottles, soda bottles, soft-drink bottles—we just called ‘em empties. At the White House Food Shop, our family deli where Dad sold a little bit of everything but mostly beer, wine and soft drinks. The empties arrived like lemmings swimming in from Fairview Avenue. We’d marshal them from bags, boxes, cartons, and in singles or pairs by the neighborhood kids. Circa. 1948. Take the Radio Flyer and walk US-66 from Wyoming to Four Hills Road and pick the other side heading home. Pickings were good in those years. Who would think of letting their grade school kids do that today? Wonder some of us survived childhood. (Donald George)
My brothers and I handled thousands of these at my dad’s grocery back in the 60s, sorting what folks brought in to redeem. And stealing them back from the behind the store that night to sell again down the road. (Jessy Dean)
Lug ‘em to the back room, a vast space rivaling Xanadu’s storage, where the ranks of Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Seven-Up, Barq’s, Weidemann, Burger, Hudepohl, Stroh’s, and more stretched into infinity. Where’s the Nehi bottle? (Louis R. Chavez) My brother, sister, and I (ages 8, 6, 4) would walk by ourselves down Roundtop Rd., north of Poole, to the pony keg on Colerain Ave. On the way, we’d pick up empties so we could buy penny candy and gum. The muddy ones were reluctantly accepted, unless the bottle was just filled with mud. (Nancy Klosterman Kolis)
Ah—the mud-caked bottles, pilfered, as I imagined, from a shed somewhere in forgotten places of the city—we hated these, since Dad expected us to wash them out. And the bugs, roaches mostly, lurking in among the cardboard beer cartons! We lived in rural Ohio. Lots of folk pitched deposit bottles out their car windows. So as kids, we collected bags full and took them to Kroger’s for 2 cents each. We were kids, we had to take them to the office (no service desk in those days) where a guy would carefully count each bottle and sometimes complain that they were dirty. (John D. Kinne)
Cash ‘em in for candy, baseball cards, a small Coke. Serious adults, with cargo holds unloaded from container ships parked out front would refill their Sunday stash of beer. And the woman down the street would summon us to collect a shopping bag full of quart bottles, to redeem and maintain her habit. (We never questioned how we enabled her addiction.) We would collect them, ride our bikes to the A&P grocery to cash them in and then ride about 2miles to a gas station that had Frostie Root Beer in bottles in a vending machine. So good on a hot Summer day. (Dave Rieman)
This was our spirng, summer, fall and winter.
Even on that dark Saturday, November 12, 1963, there were still empties.
Down, down, down
into the hard,
impossible ground
Cumbersome.
The shovel or
the weight of herself?
Dig, dig, dig
Sweat dripping
As her soul’s ripping
Escaping.
Hasty intent
Where is she going?
Grip, grip, grip
Caked with the earth,
Surrounded by worms
Settling
Becoming one
With where she began
like gondolieri layering lumbering songs
in a limberly, treacly trellising jenga
propped upon lazily listing ribs of a
knotted canal left scowling as proud as a
wallowing tick, evincing in senseless crusts
of an oenomel, mustily rust-colored blood
those plushly redoubling chins of old LA justice
jarred from the sodden scars of a labyrinth, firstly,
mice must thirstily thread through, fretfully
fixed, incensed, the girth of a gormless wonton
gargling cornsilk tongues tinged green with a tepid uranium—
Barcarolle! Barcarolle! dog-toothed carnival
barkers reprising for barnacles scenes from the siege of Troy
or the garish collapse of Atlantis, Ys, the world rolled
over just so some young princely prick might, one
of some million godlings willing, contend to tetchily
oil a dipstick;
Barcarolle, barcarolle, damn and— Dam!
!
what prow cracked over an idle hand,
what shrapnel shucked from the whistling sage brush
elbowed an ailing fit of introspection, debriding
bones from the bubblegum gusseted throne
of a blaring and harrying oubliette—
they parody Fourth Time Around or something,
protest songs beat bluer than sagging night fruit,
stripped and fit in a lamb’s skin thong, wan throngs of
contentious kibbutzers kicking up ordnance forged
from bulimic beer cans clacked like clumsed and
clabbering scree cast, wincing, caul-caulked even,
rattling the black-eyed glass of abandoned mansions,
rickety dachas dithering deer condemned, their
gums run ruddy and white with the spotty agaric
clipped from the cowl of Father Christmas,
chained and satcheled skaters ordained, by
Dylan or Zimmerman, thorns of the advent,
horsemen sworn upon swigs from the Styx
or Boone’s Farm slugged from a styrofoam rhyton
to carve in the shins of stodgy stocks
(the pleated greaves of teetering titans) just
some symbol stripped from a stain among gym socks, streak
what wheezing birthmark borne on the tongue of impending
Apocalypse preening in time with a staticky cast of taps—
Stravinsky, with but a blissful reed, dragged Paris
back to the ages of mead and malice.
What could the monkeys cobble from crumbling rock
that just might muzzle the doomsday clock?
crocodiles in dreams
tombs burnished with crushed
gold a white alabaster water jug
stands in the museum dreaming of the
sculptor who carved it millennia ago
the man lost himself in
time he observes his masterpiece
here now and
somewhere in between but
nowhere really time lost in
water I awake with words singing
in my dream mind his footprints in the
garden
I love that you can’t buy
anything here.
Everything simple, clean,
home-spun: hand needled
footstools, quilts draped
over chair backs. Wood floors
shine with caretaking.
During the night,
the clanging of radiators
waking up, a shing
of steam heat.
Like being on safari
in the bush, here
we’re returned
to the natural world.
I’m resting on a bench
watching leaves wave
against a blue sky.
Engraved on my skin:
A bold concept I struggle
To hold in my head.
i’m the passenger princess and i make them listen to my favorite singer
they wanna get in my pants so they tell me i sound just like her
choking down a cold brew that tastes like dirt
showing my ass from under my skirt
i read what i write and it doesn’t sound like something i would say
i just don’t really feel like myself these days
now more than ever i have a rough hand
i try to make cookies and the batter is sand
chapped lips peach fuzz
gapped teeth tall boy PBR small buzz
baggy eyes
double chin from all the fries
You were born
between
the Kennedy
assassination
and the Manson
murders,
but first
came the death
of Marilyn
Monroe,
born
the same year
as your mother
(1926)
and before
that, Marilyn’s
birthday
song to JFK.
Marilyn
took diuretics
and laxatives
to fit into
that fabulous
dress;
nevertheless,
she was ab-
solutely
beautiful—
either entirely
in black—
or in white
and barefoot.