Bumble Jacket Miscellany
a miscellany for poetry and fiction
Winter 2011
Published by: Bumble Jacket Miscellany Publishing
Copyright 2011 by Bumble Jacket Miscellany Publishing.
VOLUME 2 NUMBER 2
Bumble Jacket Miscellany
a miscellany for poetry and fiction
Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, in creative works contained herein is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission in writing from Bumble Jacket Miscellany, or as expressly permitted by law. The publisher apologizes in advance for any errors or omissions and if contacted will rectify these at the earliest opportunity.
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Edited by Meredith E. Torre
Cover and Illustrations
Meredith E. Torre
Contents
Poetry
Michael Lee Johnson
Leaves in December
Fly Wings
James G. Piatt
Do Not Tell Me Lies
Leaving
Flowing
Jerome Brooke
My Lover
Janine Surmick
The Fire
Little Red
The Wheel
Joseph Buehler
Late Night
The Gem Holder's Candy
Andy Psomopoulos
iron church/iron shirts
the song remains the fame
class-if-eyed
Rodney Nelson
Gone to the Animal
The Village Part of a Time
William Doreski
At the Mournful Resort
Wine for Breakfast?
Currency Exchange
America's Sex Life Has Tired
Fresh from the One Great Holstein
Meredith E. Torre
From Whence I Came
Gertrude Stein's Balloon
Fiction
Jennifer York
Henry and Anne
Joseph Buehler
The Gingerbread Man
M. E. Mitchell
An a.m. Lament
Leaves in December
Michael Lee Johnson
Leaves, a few stragglers in
December, just before Christmas,
some nailed down crabby
to ground frost,
some crackled by the bite
of nasty wind tones.
Some saved from the matchstick
that failed to light.
Some saved from the rake
by a forgetful gardener.
For these few freedom dancers
left to struggle with the bitterness:
wind dancers
wind dancers
move your frigid
bodies shaking like icicles
hovering but a jiffy in sky,
kind of sympathetic to the seasons,
reluctant to permanently go,
rustic, not much time more to play.
Fly Wings
Michael Lee Johnson
Black wings
landing on unwanted
space, like the devil
in bad spots that itch
fly swatter hammers,
summer fly body parts splatter
blood crucifixion red,
blood stains splat against the kitchen wall.
Blood crucifixion red
Dead? Sacrifice?
Or does Jesus call, resurrect all?
Black wings.
Do Not Tell Me Lies
James G. Piatt
Do not tell me lies about
The green falling waves,
That crash carelessly upon
The burning sand,
Or massive rising
Clouds which cling to the
Bottom of the sky
In amazement;
Do not huddle in the back of
My dark earth bound brain, where
Songs of yesterday still lie
Silent, and dormant:
Do not pull upon my
Searching heart,
Nor correct the rhymes
That echo noisily
Inside my eager soul, or in the
Unfulfilled longing
Within my being,
Bring to me gaudy prisms
Of beautiful vibrant
Colors that will reflect
Delightful images
In my drifting senses;
Give me a desire,
A hunger for truth, and
For all that
Is delightful,
Pleasing, and
Alive!
Leaving
James G. Piatt
Leaving painful thoughts
Leaving hours of darkness
Leaving them,
Unloosening my
Lover’s hand,
Leaving our memories
Dreads and fears
In the beat of my heart;
Leaving the lonely song,
Death’s lonely song,
Death’s dark lonely song:
Subtle and sorrowful
Yet strident the notes,
To and fro they go
Filling the hours
Of darkness
Waning and falling,
Yet in the Fullness of the
Orange and pink morning,
The sun replete with joy
Covers the gaping hole,
The darkness of the earth:
I leave her and leave
My song with her then
Gazing to the west with
Silver beads upon my cheeks
I communicate silently,
With her fleeing, soul.
Flowing
James G. Piatt
Sounds of water fleeing
Over smooth stones
Created by eons of years
In a mountain brook,
Nature's symphony shaped
By warm gentle winds
Performing an aria through
Huge gnarled pine trees,
A ballet of Oak leaves
Swaying gently,
Green clad pixies dancing
With tranquil delight!
These are the things
That flow in my
Mind, sitting by
A tranquil pond!
My Lover
Jerome Brooke
My lover gave me a box of sweets
Long years ago, before he sailed
off to the wars, soldier of the Queen
He kissed me then, and promised to return
then sailed away in the iron ship
I remember the box, I can see his smile
I was young then, I have no more
tears
Late Night
Joseph Buehler
Late night
restaurant:
yellow florescence
glares.
She
pours coffee
carefully; a young
man and his
girl
talk quietly
in the back.
An
old man enters
and
looks around
wonderingly.
He sits
at the counter
and
fingers a menu;
people go by
outside
covered
in night
The Gem Holder’s Candy
Joseph Buehler
The gem holder’s candy isn’t pure.
It stinks of hollowed out logs and snatches of
pitch and claws full of Uncle Jack’s Impatient Rum.
It was set afire long before you were even conceived
in the hollow blue dawn glare of a false apocalypse,
thrown overboard on that silent historic starlit night
when the mighty ship slid down into cold depthless
waters of grief and ignorance, arrogance and hope.
Underneath it all, Uncle Horace struggled valiantly
(you can’t take that away from him) with the covers
that pinned him tightly to his bed, dead drunk and out
of it all---sleeping his way down to watery death.
Yet let’s remember to celebrate the flying colors of that
auspicious day when the fleet came flooding in, marching
bravely to the high pitched strains of the vigorous old
European waltz---you remember it?---old something
something striding through the cabbage swamps?---oh
come on now, what was it again?---how did it go? Some-
thing like “thump, thump, thump” to a progressively high
note and then it trailed off at the end. You remember?
“Thump, thump, thump,”---what a wonderful old tune that was.
The Fire
Janine Surmick
I.
Shattered glass littered the mulch,
impaled the stem of an orange tulip,
thrust from manicured earth.
A drizzle slowly soaked
the maple dresser by the window.
The edges of a framed photograph—
embracing sisters –
curled and folded.
In the air,
something smelled heavy, thick.
The gray sky,
smolder of charcoal,
singed memories, swirled
with the occasional draft of wind.
II.
We climbed this tree for summers,
old knobby oak.
The branches extended up and out,
but one branch grew parallel to the ground.
Vines and fallen leaves entangled
the lone, long arm.
The twigs grew distorted fingers
like Rodin’s hands,
clenched, twisted, angry.
I made up a story about the Hangman’s Tree
and climbed the gallows one afternoon.
I hung,
suspended above the ground,
my shoulders cracking as I swung like a gymnast.
The branch crackled, splintered.
I don’t remember screaming when I fell,
six feet of branch in my thirteen year old fists,
head colliding with rotting roots.
III.
Plastic peppers poked out of a bowl
in the condo style kitchen.
It was dark when we moved
with plastic bags of underwear, shirts
paid for by the Red Cross.
The smoke from the melting plastic
in our neighbor’s dryer followed us.
I wondered where those children slept
as I stubbed my toe on a stucco table.
A plastic picture frame –
family of models sitting at a table—
smiled from the entertainment center.
I looked at my little sister,
brown eyes wide,
arms folded in an x across her chest.
I took her hand and we followed
the smoke to our backyard tree
and climbed the Hangman’s gallows
until morning.
Little Red
Janine Surmick
buttoned her crimson coat
and opened her black umbrella.
The slick pavement
reflected gray skyscrapers
off puddles in the street.
In a hospital Downtown
Grandma sputtered blood,
awaited her weekly visit.
Flashes of yellow and black,
fragments of letters
splashed against legs.
Red meandered
past the crowd by the Starbucks
on the corner,
past the Italian man selling sausages
and lottery tickets.
She pulled out her cell phone
while she waited at the bus stop,
the battery flashing low.
Grandma could feel the Wolf
surging inside her.
Her heart monitor beeped
while she waited and wheezed.
She could almost taste
the raisin bread
Red brought every week.
She closed her eyes:
twenty years ago,
hand over hand
with her five year old granddaughter
rolling and pounding the dough.
The bus pulled up
and Red crushed her cigarette,
smoothed the plaid cloth
wrapped around Grandma’s
shared recipe.
The bus hissed as it pulled away.
She remembered the first time
Grandma taught her how to bake:
fingers thick with dough,
the flour-speckled kitchen table.
Red giggled as the yeast rose,
opening the oven door.
But that was years ago.
Before lung cancer.
Grandma clenched her wrinkled fist
around the metal of the hospital bed.
The machine beside her beeped.
Red listened to her iPod,
tapped her heeled boot
as the bus came to a stop.
Grandma closed her eyes,
slid into a dream,
as Red’s warm palm
wrapped her swollen knuckles.
She heard a whisper,
Grandma look at me with your big eyes.
Grandma dreamt of twenty years ago,
a kitchen, the sweet smell of bread
filling her house.
The Wheel
Janine Surmick
In a tarot deck, the Wheel of Fortune predicts a change, representing the life cycle. In Greek mythology, the three Fates, sisters, determine a person’s birth and death.
The loom wheezes as it revolves.
My sisters stopped talking years ago.
The golden thread is thick and slices
my pale fingers each time I raise the shears.
I have bled for every life
I’ve been compelled to take.
My fingers and the shears are heavy.
As my sisters wrap the thread,
the massive wheel clicks.
I see a man draped in purple,
at a yoga class, like a lotus, praying.
I don’t want to kill him;
I don’t want the thread of his life
to cut into my eternal own.
I try to pause, to freeze the ongoing
motion, the constant clockwise spin
of the Wheel of Fortune.
My body is connected to it.
It hurts to not follow;
my hand is heavy,
a magnet compelled to its poles.
My scissors snap the thread.
The image of a man suspends
Midair before he slides out of the lotus
and tumbles off the wheel.
Drops of my blood
follow him down
and the Wheel revolves,
heavily clicks,
and another life is given,
forever bound to me,
althou
gh I can never take my own.
iron church/iron shirts
by Andy Psomopoulos
caress of steel screems diemond rush
apocalyphtica jewels air second crush
spit-shine savior o-neil brush
snapper master dapper bush
ruddy sleeving wilson show
little drummer boy time flow
portable faith stavretti glow
immortal cross horizon snow
know Sabbath blemish angel whirled
no strap-shoe comfort clearing girled
burnside cleaving bloodmade kyrled
sum funky orthodox coltrane swirled
arctic epic seldom writ
directed trumpet wraith
godless angels just a bit
erased blackbored faith
camphor bastards leeking shine
panning diamonds in a brine
sublime black-ajax lasting wine
st. george penny my machine
black blue white arresting marks
black box radiation sharks
hellenic loving windsor-arks
jerusalem-steel-british-barks
iron church
iron shirts
black on black believing
density-fein-concieving
iron lurch
iron birch
crew oak super milk
roaring rodent Luna silk
calling golden tensor angles
split cry fashionista wrangles
super-scry-a total tearing bangles
bloody loving cosmic mangles
the song remains the fame
by Andy Psomopoulos
all I say is cupid
(dirty goddess!)
my milk strays black and artful
medea flanks a magic ingrane..
a horse-drawn-desserts-promise
celling soles-devil-lived strata; of
sirus angel-maker prize
can you dig it?
in disguise?
star star atlantis:
it’s the warriors….
the warriors killed sirus
broken soldiers
the crows ruby liver
hard deep supernova
black yardbirds clanging
little flames
corroded cracks
wall wailing fames
morocan buxom greyded splendour