END OF SUMMER
—Jane Blue, Sacramento
1
In July's long heat wave we felt
we were dead, or we were the living dead.
We had no hunger, no hungers.
We couldn't wail. We couldn't smell
or even taste. But now, the aroma of coffee,
the door open, traffic shushing by.
A phone ringing, jazz, blues, gospel in the air.
A fly examines my flesh
for rottenness—grease, dirt, any way in.
It's cold enough in the morning now
to change the trees quickly
like puberty.
I like the way the sky opens in winter—
another month or two; I expect to live
to see it. But who knows? Who ever knows?
2
The Rose of Sharon, the crape myrtle, opulent
fat and messy at the end of their season.
I love them. They are a part of my life.
We don't return in the same way, annually,
cyclical and cloned. After a dormancy of nine months,
we produce revised versions of ourselves
who come into the world gasping.
I have lived in this place longer than anywhere,
even childhood.
I am planted here, yet every day I think about moving.
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Thanks, Jane Blue, for responding to Medusa's Fall Seed of the Week/giveaway! And our apologies to Jane for yesterday's snafu in the Kitchen: those turkey photos were from her, not from the intrepid Katy Brown as credited in Medusa's "early edition".
It's not too late: send me poems about Fall that you wrote yourself and I'll send you Pat Grizzell's new rattlechap, Thirteen Poems. That's kathykieth@hotmail.com or P.O. Box 762, Pollock Pines, CA 95726. This SOW has a deadline, though: midnight Friday, Sept. 26—that's tomorrow!
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B.L.'s Drive-Bys: A Micro-Review by B.L. Kennedy
Darkside
By Dennis Etchison
Airgedlamh Publications
130 Park View,
Wembly, Middx
England HA9 6JU
ISBN 0-9610352-1-8
206pp Hardcover, $35
Okay, here is the good news: Dennis Etchison is still out there writing and publishing. I cannot explain just how exciting it is to find a book by this wonderfully expressive author; I have been a captive fan of this guy since the early ‘80’s when I first discovered his work.
I think Darkside can be considered a modern classic because of its original approach to story, character and history. Darkside is classic Etchison, as well. That is to say, the book is something that Hitchcock would go bugfuck over—part mystery, part horror and all wonder. This book is part of the author’s Gothic California Series and, trust me, it does not disappoint.
—B.L. Kennedy, Reviewer-in-Residence
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CAMBRIDGE FALL
—B.Z. Niditch, Brookline, MA
An airy Jamesian noon day
suddenly recalling
a popular phrase
from Casablanca
at the Harvard Square theater.
By the Charles River
you pick up stones
near the Farmers Market
and gather wild roses
surviving the frost
in an abandoned soccer field.
A transient tourist
full of October Rothko
murders a blood orange
by a waterfall of sparrows
eyeing graffiti
on the Longfellow bridge
relocating your last hour
lost to sky and earth.
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THE COOL DANCE WITH LEAVES AND BREEZE
—Donald R. Anderson, Stockton
The tree shakers, like yellowed lobsters preceding,
causing mini earthquakes and thunder.
Then they would come!
Mothers and fathers with what they had of families together,
migrant workers that had discovered we would hire them
on our piggy bank money for the five acres of walnuts,
to help us rake and bag them.
It's been years since I was with them as a child.
The house would be lively with them asking to come in
and use our restroom, or for brief questions about things,
or conversation, the ones that spoke English interpreting
for the rest. They wore clothes almost like peasants,
perhaps the better to work in, the color of burnt umber, or
copper red, ruddy faces sun-beaten with smiling lips ever
persistent. If they had anything besides being unadorned,
it might be pennies that looked like brass, or
a bright rose pin from the past generations still salvaged.
Burgundy scarf like a mink across the neck,
maybe cotton sweatshirts held close to the neck in biting
frost and wind as the harvest mornings watch the sunrise
and do as much as light of day allowed. Sacks
brimming over like hunched old men at
intervals across lines
of trees, buckets clunk
filling with walnuts,
some even clumped on broken twigs.
Ridges where sprinklers proliferated the weeds
down mid-aisles,
raking the nuts into piles then using either
hands and backs or devices like a few thick wires
set at just less than nut's width apart,
pressed down on the walnuts to catch them in the
hollow part, then dumped through the edge of the
device's own shell of sorts into buckets,
which were given full measure before dumped into
the lumpy burlap bags set against the trees
for the truck to later pick up and load
to the huge metal trailer made to carry tons,
to go to the huller,
then the sheller.
But some of the buckets were for the helping hands.
We couldn't have had harvest without them with heavy
prime-producing trees caught ablaze in riot of color.
I still see their flushed faces, not dallying yet still
a stimulus of lingering on the natural,
laughing at the children in a knowing way.
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Today's LittleNip:
Morning—cutting firewood, filling my jug
with pure water, gathering wild grasses
while a cool autumn rain gently falls.
—Ryokan (translated by John Stevens)
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—Medusa
SnakeWatch: What's New from Rattlesnake Press:
Now available at The Book Collector in Sacramento or from rattlesnakepress.com/: Thirteen Poems, a new chapbook from Patrick Grizzell; #2 in Katy Brown's series of blank journals (Musings2: Vices, Virtues and Obsessions); a free littlesnake broadside (Wind Physics) from Jordan Reynolds; plus Issue #19 of Rattlesnake Review (also free!). Contributor and subscription copies of RR19 will be going into the mail this week; if you're neither one but can't get down to The Book Collector to pick up a free copy, send me two bux and I'll mail you one. Next deadline for submissions is November 15.
Coming in October: October’s release at The Book Collector on Weds., Oct. 8, will feature a new rattlechap from Moira Magneson (He Drank Because) and a littlesnake broadside from Hatch Graham (Circling of the Pack). That's at the Book Collector, 1008 24th St., Sacramento, 7:30 PM. Refreshments and a read-around will follow; bring your own poems or somebody else’s.
Then, on Thursday, Oct. 30, 8 PM, Rattlesnake Press will release two SpiralChaps to honor and celebrate Luna’s Café, including a new collection of art and poetry from B.L. Kennedy (Luna’s House of Words) and an anthology of Luna’s poets, artists and photographs (La Luna: Poetry Unplugged at Luna’s Café) edited by frank andrick. Come travel with our Away Team as we leave the Home of the Snake (The Book Collector) for a brief road trip/time travel to Luna’s Café, 1414 16th St., Sacramento to celebrate Art Luna and the 13 years of Luna's long-running poetry series. Who knows what auspicious adventures await us there??
Medusa's Weekly Menu:
(Contributors are welcome to cook up something for any and all of these!)
Monday: Weekly NorCal poetry calendar
Tuesday: Seed of the Week: Tuesday is Medusa's day to post poetry triggers such as quotes, forms, photos, memories, jokes—whatever might tickle somebody's muse. Pick up the gauntlet and send in your poetic results; and don't be shy about sending in your own triggers, too! All poems will be posted and a few of them will go into Medusa's Corner of each Rattlesnake Review. Send your work to kathykieth@hotmail.com or P.O. Box 762, Pollock Pines, CA 95726. No deadline for SOW; respond today, tomorrow, or whenever the muse arrives. (Print 'em out, maybe, save 'em for a dry spell?) When you send us work, though, just let us know which "seed" it was that inspired you.
Wednesday (sometimes): HandyStuff Quickies: Resources for the poet, including whatever helps ease the pain of writing and/or publishing: favorite journals to read and/or submit to; books, etc., about writing; organizational tools—you know—HandyStuff! Tell us about your favorite tools.
Thursday: B.L.'s Drive-Bys: Micro-reviews by our irreverent Reviewer-in-Residence, B.L. Kennedy. Send books, CDs, DVDs, etc. to him for possible review (either as a Drive-By or in future issues of Rattlesnake Review) at P.O. Box 160664, Sacramento, CA 95816.
Friday: NorCal weekend poetry calendar
Daily (except Sunday): LittleNips: SnakeFood for the Poetic Soul: Daily munchables for poetic thought, including short paragraphs, quotes, wonky words, silliness, little-known poetry/poet facts, and other inspiration—yet another way to feed our ravenous poetic souls.
And poetry! Every day, poetry from writers near and far and in-between! The Snakes of Medusa are always hungry.......!
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Medusa encourages poets of all ilk and ages to send their POETRY, PHOTOS and ART, as well as announcements of Northern California poetry events, to kathykieth@hotmail.com (or snail ‘em to P.O. Box 762, Pollock Pines, CA 95726) for posting on this daily Snake blog. Rights remain with the poets. Previously-published poems are okay for Medusa’s Kitchen, as long as you own the rights. (Please cite publication.) Medusa cannot vouch for the moral fiber of other publications, contests, etc. that she lists, however, so submit to them at your own risk. For more info about the Snake Empire, including guidelines for submitting to or obtaining our publications, click on the link to the right of this column: Rattlesnake Press (rattlesnakepress.com). And be sure to sign up for Snakebytes, our monthly e-newsletter that will keep you up-to-date on all our ophidian chicanery.