by John Roche

Reading Alice Notley’s Homer’s Art (Curriculum of the Soul #9), gift of Alan Casline, on examination table in Doc Booth’s office—now an hour later in the hot sun of parking lot to Lori’s Natural Foods, using reverse side of North Shore Grill menu ‘cause I can’t find notebook. Arms look like napalm burns from infected poison ivy (“most impressive case this year,” quips Doctor Laura Jo). “Both of Homer’s public stories—as everybody knows—are generated by a war & are male centered-stories for men about a male world.” Female doctors and Supreme Court Justices and Secretaries of State—so much has changed since Alice wrote of Vietnam and Troy raped by the stupidity and lies of war promoters and poets, but now women, too, calculate the cost-benefit of so many body bags, as Madeleine Albright factored the children dead from Iraq sanctions and Condi Rice authorized the waterboarding and Hillary Clinton pushes the new Afghan strategy. But women, too, die for freedom, as Neda in Tehran the other day, and so many like her females long silenced like Cassandra, enslaved behind not-so-veiled threats of rape and disownment, caned in Sudan for wearing pants in public, gunned down in Kandahar for teaching school, Natalya Estemirova slain in Chechnya-all now choosing to enter the epic with their words, their deeds heroic. And women like Alice wield the pen, no longer in the shadow of Maximus males. Although Emily was a war poet, as Randy Prus reminds me, women warrior bards of today are freed from the home to become the new Homers-processing words rather than foods-absorbing the power of the Word in order to effect change; affect history-the power that kills-the power that once invented a Helen to fight for and now invents a Neda-the power that paves the planet so that there can be faux-natural food stores with dancing fruits on TV commercials and lakeside restaurants with fabulous views and gluttonous portions-the power that seduces with novel roles-learning to fuck like a man-be notorious like Calamity Jane or Mata Hari-look the Sun right in the eye and spit-Poi-son Eye-Eye-a-vie- Out-Bukowski Bukowski (like Susan Deer Cloud does)—-Out-Bakunined Bakunin. “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” says bumper sticker in suburban Pittsford. But what of the female suicide bombers? Aren’t they too entering the realm of heroic history, even behind a burkha loaded with gelignite? Fanon says the Algerian women dropped the veil to shoot Kalashnikovs. No going back to the “womb-like brothel” Alice describes. Entering history-the realm of rights-the realm of contest-the heartless realm-the nightmare from which we don’t awake, except in death and lyric poetry. Go ask Alice about history’s looking glass, feeding the heroic dead with pools of crimson ink. “History’s for those” “Who ask not” “to be forgiven,” wrote Alice, each phrase in quotation marks. Then she voices the anonymous victims: “We ask to be forgiven””& loved” “No we ask” “to be absolved” “And to be elemental” “ask leaves and wind” say the dead of Saigon and Tikrit and Troy.

by John Roche

(Inspired by the Cloudburst Council poets’ retreats at the Gell Center, Naples, NY, 2012-2019)

The sun shining on everything and everybody is seeing as it is at the
same time. —O’odham elder quoted by Tomás Atencio in Resolana: Emerging Chicano Dialogues on Community and Globalization (2009)

Resolute
or reconciled to our folly
we seek
year after year
La Resolana
the place where the sun shines
the south-facing wall
where, in north em New Mexico
(El N orteiio)
villagers gather to talk out issues

Or, at the Gell Center, before west-facing hill
usually bathed by spring rains
or walking streams full of frogspawn
hoping something will jell besides tadpoles and mosquitoes
our poems so much flotsam and jetsam
but what else is there to speak
send forth on the pollen-laden breeze

The only way we pay our rent (resolutus)o n this planet, dissolve
the impediments blocking acequias’ lifewater, keeping
each man or woman hidden from the other, the secrets
poisoning the polis
must be voiced, somehow antidote found
uranium tailings and sacred objects reburied
the fracking stopped
No poem stopped at the Border

by John Roche

(From Mo ‘Mo’ Joe: Further Adventures of Joe the Poet, manuscript in progress)

They call him Thrice-Hanged Joe
because, each time, the rope broke
until the sheriff decided to let him live

Joe puts it this way,
When I was up there on the gallows, being Thrice-Hanged,
I suddenly felt the majesty, the glory, of the Eternal Poem

Now he drives his horse-drawn Poetry Wagon
across the Plains
spreading the Gospel of Poetry
and selling mildly addictive elixirs

by Gary Margolis

Wouldn’t mind if you voted me in.
As your first constable again.
No real duties I know of.
Not like the old days.
When you’d have to buggy

the ballots to the state capital.
Stop overnight in a tavern.
Flash your badge for a drink.
A good omen from any of the women.
These days there’s nothing better

you’re commissioned to do.
Than stand at the back
at town meeting. Look over
the crowd of voters. Ready to
lead anyone to the door

who seems to get rowdy.
The last of my official duties.
Having left my horse hobbled
to a railing. Given up any power
I had. The state assigned me.

To keep order in my town
of Cornwall, Vermont.
To call the game warden
if a dog looks rabid. When
a flock breaks out of its pasture.

Inform my neighbor, appointed
fence viewer, if there’s a dispute
between neighbors. Needing
a neighborly opinion.
Speak to our weigher of coal.

As if there was still coal left
to be delivered. Chuted into
somebody’s cellar. And miscounted.
Assist one of our elected library
trustees. If she has to knock on

a door. Retrieve an overdue book.
The History of Cornwall, 1850.
By the looks of it, its readers passed on.
Family to family.
Not worrying about the law

of returns.
If whoever the constable is
would arrive at their door.
Appointed or elected.
The most heavily debated issue

at today’s town meeting.
Whether to appoint or elect a citizen
to one of these coveted positions.
Whether to cast votes for a herd’s
democracy.