Poetry Drawer: Good Fun: All Throughout the Day: Meaner Than the Devil on a Slow Day: The Buddha Comes to Belle, MO: A Grand Old Time by Jason Ryberg

Good Fun

Let’s us step into the dead-centre of some old
country crossroads one hot and starry night,
after drinking too much moon-shine and challenge
the gods or ghosts of your ancestors to a fight
just for something to do.

Let’s put the torch to the master’s crops tonight
and call him out to his front porch and dare that
old motherfucker to do something about it.

Let’s you and me put on our Sunday best,
get some flowers and a heart-shaped box of candy
and go a-courtin.’

You take Trouble and I’ll take Bad Luck,
‘cause Bad Luck is better than no luck
and Trouble is just good fun.

All Throughout the Day

Steam is rising up
from the newly
laid tarmac on HWY D
after a brief but intense
summer thunder-shower
this morning that came
and went before the sun
could even slip behind
a cloud, and the radio is
telling us to expect similar
activity all throughout
the day, and now it’s back
to the music with Tommy
James and the Shondells
doing “Crimson and Clover”

and I say hell yes to the
prospects of both more
Tommy James and the
Shondells in all our lives
as well as more sporadic
bursts of thunder and
lightning and rain while
the sun continues to
shine, brightly,
throughout
the day.

Meaner Than the Devil on a Slow Day

Hell, I read the good
book, the Holy Bible, “the
word of the Lord,” and

if there is a god
like that and even half of
that shit is halfway

true, then he’s a mean
motherfucker, way meaner
than the Devil, on

a slow day, even:
one of those big types always
answering “why” with

“because I said so,
that’s why,” and it’s their way and
no other, and they

want you doing what
they say, when they say it, not
what they do, not to

mention all the blood,
floods, locusts and plagues, the rapes
and the killing of

the first born male child
and “if you don’t like it here,
you can go to hell.”

The Buddha Comes to Belle, MO

I have only just
recently noticed the old
                         man sitting every

morning at the end
of his half-mile gravel drive,
                                 just outside of town,

in a sort of sling
seat he’s somehow managed to
                                Jerry-rig on to his

walker, in which he
will sit for hours, waving and
                            smiling, in a sort

of blissed-out yet still
serene Buddha kind of way
                               at all the cars as

they roll in and out
of town, until the mailman
                              finally arrives

with his truck full of
goodies, where it’s always hit
                              or miss these days, and

then they’ll trade a few
jokes and some local gossip
                                 and then he’ll shuffle

back to the house for
lunch and a quick nap, we can
                                   safely imagine.

A Grand Old Time

Last night
the moon made me get up
from my kitchen table and
my cracked bone china mug
of herbal tea, put on my coat
and my hat, walk out the
back door and wander off
into the hills to run with my
wild cousins, the coyotes,
through fields and backyards
and gardens, howling, yipping
and generally laughing it up,
having a grand old time of it all,
with no thoughts of tomorrow,
when suddenly the sun
began creeping up over
the distant tree line
and told us all
to get on
home.

Jason Ryberg is the author of fourteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection of poems is Are You Sure Kerouac Done It This Way!? (co-authored with John Dorsey, and Victor Clevenger, OAC Books, 2021). He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a billygoat named Giuseppe, and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.

Jason on Facebook.

Poetry Drawer: Eyes of Green: Sonnet CDLXVI: Sonnet CDLXIII: Sonnet CDLXI by Terry Brinkman

Eyes of Green

Not known strains from eyes of green
Tic pleasure of floral light
Proceeded to the Jordan River at twilight
Erin of Salt Lake Barges burning Kerosene
Seismic disturbance brings the Nazarene
She’s always a mass of ruins at daylight
Violet atmosphere perturbation night
Limb from limb drinking Caffeine

Sonnet CDLXVI

The sun was nearing the steeple that eve
Under her clean shirt Tattoo of a Feather
Old man who fished alone with a Tether
Cheerful and undefeated to breath
Nudging the door open with her knee to leave
Dark lady and fair man wearing black leather
Well so deep the bottom could not be better
Wearing her snot green scrawled sleeve
No two opinions on it lately
Porters corner Red Bridge squelch
Played Hopscotch there in Nineteen Eighty
Beer with Erin’s belch
Life begins with fishermen matai
We went to Idaho to eat like the Welch

Sonnet CDLXIII

Faintly scented Urine of the Nile
Running across the sweep of the wheel
Boulders bones for my steeping stones kneel
Gun Whale of a boat bit by a Crocodile
Peekaboo molten pewter wrathful
Dane Viking torch of Tomahawks Eel
Stood pale silent during the meal
White Rose Ivory vile
Shrieked whistle thistle
Tippet proper unattended risker
Shadow lay over the rock brisker
Darkness shining in the brightness missile
Turned up trousers drinking Irish whiskey

Sonnet CDLXI

Vague loneliness of alibi
Irish Face legendary beauty’s goal
Lonely silence of the Tadpole
Butt of Cigar smoking Bar-fly
Vague loneliness she can’t deny
Deep Velvet Azure through the Porthole
Grim and aloof steel Maypole
She whispered by the wind a lonely Lullaby
Time stood still in these shoes
Red Stone White Clay whirl
Un-washed under car drinking her booze
Mescal brooding silence with girl
Like a burr sticking in a woman’s news
Slope of sage thunder whittled Pearl

Terry Brinkman has been painting for over forty five years. He started creating poems. He has five Amazon E- Books, also poems in Rue Scribe, Tiny Seed. Winamop, Snapdragon Journal, Poets Choice, Adelaide Magazine, Variant, the Writing Disorder, Ink Pantry, In Parentheses, Ariel Chat, New Ulster, Glove, and in Pamp-le-mousse, North Dakota Quarterly, Barzakh, Urban Arts, Wingless Dreamer, LKMNDS and Milk Carton Press.

You can find more of Terry’s work here on Ink Pantry.

Poetry Drawer: Crockery: Below the bridge: Shadow by Rebecca Dempsey

Crockery

My crazy paved heart.
Jagged shards.
Unmatched patterns.
Unnumbered memento mori
to floral fragments of time.
Pierced, mismatched, shattered again.
On the rough edge of forgotten.
Momentum suspended
upon filamental fears.
Hope filling spaces between:
glue holding broken
porcelain pieces together.
Like layers of greying newspaper.
Feathered pages placed between chipped plates,
mugs, and bowls every time we moved.
Until we stopped bothering to unpack.

Below the bridge

From the deck, I appreciate the view,
but sliding alongside the bridge
there’s a living thing. Connective tissue.
Monumental, vulnerable.
Piers and piles driven into the bedrock
lost beneath the surface,
looking like tide-marked, ring-barked,
mud-implanted concreted legs,
squat thighs, old knees obscured in dark water.
Substructures: the under-bridge world,
absent even of blinks of reflected light
from unceasing ripples
passing boats like mine
leave in their wake.

Shadow

We take it in turns.
Sometimes I follow, then I am followed.
As above, so below.
When I can’t see you, we converge.
We’re not the same, nonetheless
our pattern forms the dance.

Rebecca Dempsey’s works are forthcoming or featured in Elsewhere Journal, Ligeia, and Schuylkill Valley Journal Online. Rebecca holds a Masters of Writing and Literature from Deakin University, lives in Melbourne, Australia, and can be found at WritingBec.com.     

Pantry Prose: Shelter by Ian C Smith

We moved into a house within the grounds of a psychiatric hospital where the fine Australian poet, Francis Webb, was incarcerated many years earlier in rural NSW, its streets bordered by majestic European trees. My wife had accepted a key managerial position in the health service. I buzzed with a fervour to write, so preferred privacy, no next-door neighbours, while I looked after our toddlers, the terms ‘biological clock’, and ‘house-husband’ neologisms to me then.

Using a backpack and pusher, I took our boys for walks around and across the central golf course, balls sometimes cracking over our fence into the backyard, or under elms, past wards where a middle-aged man sat outside waving a grubby teddy bear, addressing us, voice guttural, unintelligible, his large pale penis erect as I increased the pusher’s pace.

Ominous resentment seemed to surround the hospital, miasmic despite the English village postcard effect. Motorised groundsmen stared from a distance. When I approached them about something they shared sly glances, monosyllabic, ignorantly difficult. I thought at first these sullen men meeting my politeness with antagonism were patients allowed to work, and I felt the presence of our laughing children exacerbated their pique.

Needing to understand the reason I became a bit paranoid in my sheltered world of the imagination. Was it my wife’s managerial position? Did they know I wrote, so the vanity of this? Was it about a man caring for infants, or the time we asked them not to spray weedkiller around the edges of our yard where the boys romped? I wondered if all these reasons became enlarged in their collective psyche. I also remembered tough times when their pleasant work would have been a godsend. My wife simply said it was because they had to go out to work and I didn’t.

When I passed professionals, easily identifiable by their smart appearance, they avoided eye contact. I dressed roughly, cut my own hair, knew they saw me as a trusted patient. I like being left alone, even ignored, so this guise both suited and amused me.

Passing the wards, 1930s brick softened by those trees austerely impressive, some closed due to asbestos, I heard eldritch screams, tantrums, saw damp bedding dropped from a high window, but mostly the loneliness of its eerie quiet chilled as every turn, every building, made me feel trapped in misery, even the neat collections of beer bottles and tops around bases of tree trunks. The more I walked, the more I sorrowed. The more I sorrowed, the less I wrote.

Not understanding future’s nostalgic gusts I searched for echoes of Webb, possibly Australia’s most spiritual poet, but felt only an absence of happiness, believing his melancholia would have become entrenched in wretchedness there. When the time came to leave, although glad, I also experienced a sense of loss accompanying the end of this, one of many periods in my strange life. Always finding endings difficult, I wondered if Webb, stubbornly writing, recalled hopes, wishes, happier days, ended.

Ian C Smith’s work has been published in Antipodes, BBC Radio 4 Sounds,The Dalhousie Review, Griffith Review, San Pedro River Review, Southword, The Stony Thursday Book, & Two Thirds North. His seventh book, wonder sadness madness joy, is published by Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.

You can find more of Ian’s work here on Ink Pantry.

Poetry Drawer: Days of Our Lives by Robert Demaree

Between college and the Army
I had some time to kill at home
And discovered quite by chance
That my parents watched soap operas.
They tried to make it look accidental.
“Let’s see what’s on,” my dad would say
As he turned to the channel
That carried their story,
And the afternoon coffee
Came to a boil in an aluminum saucepan.
Now, at 83, I wonder what our girls
Have figured out of their parents’ lives,
The rituals of two people
Together almost sixty years,
An accrual of idiosyncrasies,
Toast sliced in thirds,
The favourites bookmarked
On the internet of our lives.

Robert Demaree is the author of four book-length collections of poems, including Other Ladders published in 2017 by Beech River Books. His poems have received first place in competitions sponsored by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire and the Burlington Writers Club. He is a retired school administrator with ties to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Bob’s poems have appeared in over 150 periodicals including Cold Mountain Review and Louisville Review.

You can find more of Robert’s work here on Ink Pantry.

Poetry Drawer: desperation: gillian anderson: norm: victim by jack henry

desperation

a single black crow
caws from his perch atop a mesquite tree
deep in the Mojave Desert.

it watches me pass as i wander by,
waiting on my collapse and
a skull upon which to feed.

gillian anderson

she sits across from me uninvited
late night at a Starbucks near Hollywood

hi, i’m…

yeah, i know
            i say, voice cracking suddenly 15 or 18
            or something less than 58

you dedicated something, to me

yeah, i did

she takes a bite of blueberry muffin

i slug back the remains of my coffee

congrats on the Emmy,

congrats on the book, can you sign my copy?

yeah, of course

i follow her up a long driveway,
in a town that’s not Bel Air or Beverly Hills
she unlocks the front door, kisses me in the foyer
holds out her hand at the foot of the stairs

i keep it in my bedroom,
            she says, red hair cut short, blue eyes sparkling

next to the Emmy?

yes, of course

her main bedroom is massive
king bed, couch, fire place
sitting area, treadmill, walk in closet,

wanna shower first?
            she says, unexpectedly
            her clothes bread crumbs leading to her silhouette

before i sign my book?

yes, before that

i follow quickly,
just as my fever breaks

and i wake up

norm

i keep thinking of
this old man
this old poet
a man i barely knew
other than a few
notes traded
back & forth

this old man
down in the Village
he’s dead now
almost a year
maybe two
i can’t keep track

lots of folks die

i think about
his words
legacy
how everything
stopped
when he died

maybe that’s how
it’s works

everything stops
when you’re dead

but maybe
if one person
keeps thinking about
an old man
an old poet

more than just words
carry on

maybe that’s legacy
maybe that’s
enough

for norman savage

victim

the thick wet sound
of shotgun blast
rips from the apartment
next door
and i race

ten steps down
the hall
to investigate.

Cecilia stands in
the doorway,
her cigarette
smoking as much
as the end of the shotgun
in her hand.

she smiles at me
through broken teeth,
     skin bruised; clothes torn
takes a long drag
and says,

maybe now somebody’ll
listen to me?


cops tramp up old wooden steps
guns drawn
scream in unison,
get down, get down

and Cecilia turns
her head and says,

then again,
maybe not…

jack henry is a queer writer based in the high desert of south-eastern california.  in 2020 jack’s third collection, driving w/crazy, was released by Punk Hostage Press.

Poetry Drawer: My Lovers, a Puzzle: Opiates of the Masses: Electioneering: The Mythic Archaic Cub, His Mandalas, and Me by Duane Vorhees

My Lovers, a Puzzle

I believed love would transcend all fashion
and outlast all time and surpass all distance.

Memory would always recall the “once”
even though that moment’s lovers would change.

Memory, I thought, forged eternal chains.
Now, none of the jigsaw pieces will match.

They repose, inert, scattered, unattached,
though I recall some names, some body parts.

I can’t make out their shadows in the dark
though I know they once lit up my passion.

Opiates of the Masses

Crucifiction, Failosophy, Hisstory:
Tomorrow is a myth. And so is yesterday. Now is all.
Physicks, Asstrology, Isometricks:
Yourself, as you are at present, is your only guide.
Medisin, Accupunkture, Sighchiatry:
There is no cure for reality.
Litterature, Statuwary, Musick:
Art is a grand mirage — and it takes great pride in being so.
Soshellism, Dicktatorship, Demockracy:
All government systems are synonyms for slavery.
Kingdumbs, Milittearism, Onerousship:
Allegiance to others is suicide.
Noosepapers, Liebraries. Educashuns:
“Knowledge” so-called is mere pretense.
Relashunships, Guarantease, Freedumb:
Promises are illusions. But illusions may also be promises.
Ambishun, Suckcess, Sellebrity:
Self-promotion is the greatest deception of all.
Syphillisation:
Truth is what you trust.

Electioneering

The pigeons
coo and nod on
the raven’s
coy oration.

The Mythic Archaic Cub, His Mandalas, and Me

I wait here still for the wise old man
and his chatter of universal traits,
how they shape my acts like hands
on a potter’s wheel (but hereditary, innate).

“Archetypes are to psychology
as instincts to biology.”

I sit in his psyche, peeling my mandarins,
and wonder, is this a proper asana?
Some tables down someone plays a green mandolin
and my self stifles respondent hosannas.

My me was always confused by the we,
and I was never the one I used to be.

I used to take my tea with cream
but now I prefer lemon.
Why do I have all these dreams
about so many different women?

Decades have passed like clouds over seas
as I searched for any available lee.

The minutes pass like birds in flight
and my shadow cowers in shadows
I interpret as monstrous daytime nights.
Mandolinist fingers dissolve into adders.

Duane Vorhees writes after teaching University of Maryland classes in Korea and Japan. Hog Press in Ames, IA, has published 3 of his poetry collections, HEAVEN, THE MANY LOVES OF DUANE VORHEES, and GIFT: GOD RUNS THROUGH ALL THESE ROOMS.

Poetry Drawer: Path of Peace by Ray Miller


It wasn’t that her parents wouldn’t attend
because the wedding clashed with Remembrance Day
and poppies exerted a powerful hold;
nor that my Best Man was newly diagnosed
as a schizophrenic cum manic depressive –
though we were both in two minds about that.
Neither that my sister’s husband turned up
in a T-shirt bearing the legend
                    BULLSHIT
overdid the bevvies and insulted my mother,
obliging me to step in and suffer
the traditional wedding day glass
smashed over my forehead,
a visit to Casualty and several stitches.
And in retrospect I can see it was funny
to be trapped in a lift for 2 or more hours
with a freshly bought packet of fags and no matches.
But the worst of all was when Path of Peace,
a horse I’d followed with more faith
than reason, triumphed at 25-1
in the last big race of the season.
What with one thing and another
I never got to put the bet on.
40 years later and I’m still chasing losses.

Ray Miller is a Socialist, Aston Villa supporter, and faithful husband. Life’s been a disappointment.

You can find more of Ray’s work here on Ink Pantry.