by Andy Clausen

Back in the early nineties on the way to a poetry gig
            in Humboldt County my car went kaput
And I wound up in a motel bed with my co–featured poet
            who I’d known since she was a kid — 19
That was back in 1975
I was running a very successful feature — open
            Monday night reading series at the corner
            of Dwight & Telegraph in Berkeley
            often 100 people 35 on the list
There she was, 19, skinny, tattoos, callipygian, you know pretty
     little butt
            face cuter than any button, eyes bursting with story
“Mister I’m from Hells Bend Oklahoma, I have poems about growing
            up there.”
I said, “You’re next.”
            a couple years later she fessed up
            she was from Orange County
“I said Hells Bend because I thought it would impress you.”
From the giddy up I dug her style and country girl heart
            her love of Beat Tradition
            and Jack London, Dylan, Kerouac, Hank Williams
            her ecologically committed verse
And she flattered me as her mentor
I couldn’t take my eyes off her, back or front
I wanted to put a large         smile on her face
I wanted to see her bejeweled eyes eat me alive
I wanted to get lost in magic rhythms
            hear the groans, gasps, outcries of ecstatic freedom
I wanted to be welcomed inside her
            to get my whole body in there
            to bathe luxuriously in the goodness
I envisioned as our cradles slowing into re–entry consciousness
            O our amazed spontaneous laughter!
I envisioned an excess of Blakean joy, uncontrollable weepings
            where lovers can’t stop kissing each other all over
I envisioned her by my side, Percy and Mary, Crazy Horse
            and Black Buffalo Woman, Richard and Mimi
            the Rosettis, Saxon & Billy, Dr. Z and Lara
            even more legendary, more glorious
Touring the continent, Europe Asia, poets in love
I put my hand lightly on her thigh and asked she said no
I lay on my back not sleeping; I have another car back home
            it aint legal — old beat Vulva, Eorsi Istvan, had given me
            when he went back to Budapest — I should have kept it
            the jalopy Istvan drove from Boulder to Oakland
            I could get plenty of Forints for it now, I bet, but
            it was illegal and a couple hundred miles away
So I started walking on my back wide awake through the cities
Of my life Oakland Frisco Eugene Chicago Denver Boulder
            New York Nashville Austin San Jose Katmandu
            It was a long night
            Prague Brussels Vancouver Winnipeg Thunder Bay
            Montreal Anchorage Ketchikan, I walked the AM streets
I wandered where ever I could find brick & wood & stone
            staying away from vegetation & warm blooded creatures taking the
            alleyways wending to where the fog
            freezes the lights and the traffic is seldom
I kept walking till dawn, when I’d be happy go lucky
            me again

18 years later the other night she & I were talking
            on the phone and she told me again
What a great friend and influence I’d been
I said, “Yeah, you know what made me sad is that
            you didn’t desire me sexually
You know I tried when I first met you and remember the night
            in the motel?”
“Are you kidding me? I adored you.
I wanted to so much.
But the first time you were married
            and the second time I was just about to get married
            to the man I love who’d be stepfather to my kids
            and I’m with today
Don’t you remember?”

Do you think it’s too obvious if I add
That’s the part I forgot?

by Neeli Cherkovski

I keep wading in the mud
of the Classic poets, they have
a fine morbidity and a clean psychology

trust in the epic that ends
with a lie, trim your bushes
with care and don’t let the age
of discovery land you in a pool
of meaningless verbiage

I trust the overindulgence
of classical antiquity, and, by extension,
the rope Dante hands out,
I’ll hang on it till the world
dies of heart failure

simple words, ring a ding!

simple lines, I keep to the trail
of the donkey, the hoof of the lamb,
the breast of the bull, the balls of the stallion

I celebrate the old woman
who lives on the mountain
with her cows and hogs and two
black dogs
and the simple fare she heaps
onto the plate

she’s the one who fed the German poet
on his Italian journey
and Caesar long before

yeah, we mean to discombobulate
the dreams, we are intent on
demeaning the new and easy verse
that drills into a shallow pit
we see the future
our cold enemy
made out of electrons
and bits of glass and pieces of steel

we like the cruel economy
of our inner selves
capable of one story
yeah, capable of a tale

I walk to the dais
and give Homer a kiss
on his hairy cheeks

and ramble on a ramp
at the villa of Catullus
who wove his love
into a lisp and his hard–on
into a raging sea

simple words easy dictums
follow the liar

by Stephen Petroff

                       At Night, I am
Awakened from dreaming to look through the window —
As water is welling, the moon’s eyes are filling
And at its throat — at its breast — on its belly
There moves a red hand that looks like a star.
The moon, with its shadows, and seas,
Has black nipples
And the star is a planet, a red world
[attached /to the moon     by a voice or a signal.]

Find a boy who can draw, who can put this on paper:
The moon has a white breast, a white face, a woman’s long throat
That is the color of snow.
Stars and ice crystals are one and the same, but Red Planet looks like
The red slap of a hand.
Where have the stories of these pictures been written?
Where have these descriptions been pictured?
Who can read? Who can know?
Who finds the signs? Who will draw the book?

Tonight, as I wake in shock,
Tonight, when I see, in the dreaming,
                        A red world,
                        Too near to our moon,
I look for a boy to make pictures
Of these chapter–dreams we’ve been having.
This boy may be an old woman     a broken man     or a small girl,
                        A deer or a stone,
If only the new boy knows all the new stories,
            All the old dances for all the new dreams.
Moon and Red World will not be in Taurus tomorrow.
I can’t see how such a new one as we need
Will ever be produced or located. I may have to go myself,
To find where he went.

Yearning and yearning, and because I am yearning,
I will find someone with a heart like the heart of the boy
                                   We have lost.

by Stephen Petroff

Moon and moth,
Take us upon the night sky,
All but out of reach
Of philistines and loathsome politicians,
Who hound artists as they hound
All trespassers and drug smugglers.
There are only two of You.
We have no other protectors apart from
You–our–Moon, and moth.
Of our Moon: Recognized by All Other Muses,
                       You move all bodies of water.
And the Moth: Our Creator has hairy eyebrows
                        And glittering wings.
Moon that is the body of my Muse: In your many
Faces, all of them lit by such distant fires,
Love has been fading from your eyes and face
Since the beginning, and it is pale.
Moth that gives an image of the sacred:
Your singed wings, your thin black legs in the wax–pool
At the candle’s base: each morning new proof of a God’s existence.