The poet and translator Sasha Ryzhova sent me, out of the blue, a recording she made of my poem Shamhat, based on the legend of Gilgamesh. As birthday gifts go, I was delighted.
You can listen to her recording here: «SHAMHAT». What fun and thank you ever so much!
Shamhat
I grow tired of […]
“21 janises” ZJC (2010)
I could listen to Janis all day long. Her backup band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, though, never pleases. This video is a good example. The first 3 minutes and 20 seconds of the folktune Coo Coo don’t even have her singing. Some unwashed hippie with no vocal range sings with […]
A friend and collaborator on many artistic projects, Shelley M. House is one of the finest graphic artists I know. Her mastery of the human body in simple line drawings creates complex anatomy studies and her use of color is breathtaking.
Recently I discovered that one of my poems, Cello, will appear next to her Hibiscus […]
“men at buchenwald, moments before execution” ZJC (2008)
As anyone on the outside will tell you, Sartre was dead-on when he said, L’enfer, c’est les autres, Hell is other people. We are all born to be heroes, we are all born divine, it is only those you meet growing up, those you pass on the street, […]
LILITH THE SAPPHO EXPERIMENT
“I’ve done everything the Bible says, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff,” Ned Flanders, The Simpsons.
As religions that have helped shape the last two thousand years go a recent change within the laws of the Catholic Church got me wondering what exactly is going on behind closed doors.
The appeal of […]
Frustration at history. Frustration
at … so little to work with. The defense
of Van, its fall, where this Armenian
story begins with the Turkish offense
against its citizens. Let us start there.
Women hiding in the dark, listening
to the bombs fall. Our stories of warfare
do not interest me; the massacring
at Van left what? One more war metaphor?
I hate war […]
Lawrence Raab defines, in his poem, The Invention of Nostalgia, this unique human emotion as “How much it hurts/ to want what’s gone” (40) which is something that touches every soul on this planet and yet no one has come up with a satisfactory method of dealing with. Indeed, according to the poet, prior to […]
“Do I terrify? — /
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.”
– Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus.
Redemption comes in many different forms. It is easy to criticize, especially when it comes to whole swathes of humanity, especially when I myself risk so very little. It is why shows like The IT Crowd or AbFab are brilliant; sure, they […]
In less than a year I will be 40 years old and this morning I sat in my doctor’s office waiting for my physical (I appear in perfectly good health despite my best efforts) reading a fascinating article by Freeman Dyson, When Science & Poetry Were Friends (The New York Review of Books, August 13, […]
When I was younger I loved the idea of “Outlaw Poetry.” It sounded cool without requiring me to actually do anything.
In the same way “Alternative” music had nothing to do with being an alternative to music and everything to do with marketing, Outlaw chic in America encompassed but was not limited […]
“You will never be poor catering to/
the anxieties of middle-class America.”
– Bob Marley (May 12, 1981)
It really is amazing the amount of money I have saved this year by bowing out of the world of American poetry. First there are all those dreadfully literary contests that promise publication and fame and always ask for hefty […]
“hide this shattered moon/ it
will do me no good” [ZJC, 2009]
Evil. No evil. No. Chka chariq,
arants bariq, There’s no evil without
blessings. There is a new devil. We speak
about good or bad; we speak without doubt;
nothing is so simple. There is vengeance
in me; all shades of gray. The clouds blackout
my tracks. I fly. The wind whips […]
Yarimo / To My Love comes from Datevik Hovanesian’s 1998 album Listen To My Heart. I have used the phrase before in an earlier poem but I like it so much I am using it again. Please enjoy.
Give up my name. Give up my form; this form
I call my body. Angels do […]
“hina and her dream shark” (ZJC, 2009)
The Polynesian goddess Hina appears in many stories; she is beautiful, at times vain, at times a trickster. She is credited with giving birth to the first coconut tree after she took the eel god, Tuna-roa, as her lover.
The story I am familiar with is when Hina sailed […]
“dream of the shark girl”
The use of the word “primitive” when discussing religious beliefs is almost always used as a negative; their primitive beliefs, our true ones. It is a definition that is a hold over from Western colonization; when people could use the word, without irony, as “of or pertaining to a preliterate […]
“my oboe, my reed” ZJC (2009)
Be my oboe, my reed, poisoned pen life;
one that worries the heart. Of sass and plight
I’m your first. And yes, your prodigy knife
bores me to crime. You are all soft, all light
muscles and train. It’s the “all” I highlight
here, the refrain of quick skirts, seduction,
it’s the words. […]
“this odd sense of self: english” ZJC (2009)
I don’t have no most recent books but I
do have you. It is a start. I like how
I can say “you” like that. I will imply
much from one stupid syllable. Somehow
it works. English is a language of tricks.
Like “you.” Who said, “Ah speak […]
Recently I sat through the anime, Serial Experiments Lain; one more angst-filled story of a lonely girl living in urban Tokyo and her freaky experiences dealing with The Wired (read: Google if it were run by an evil cabal). It begins with Lain discovering that “girls from her school have received an e-mail […]
This is actually a re-write of an older poem I wrote around the time Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans back in 2005. A USA Today account of what happened at St. Rita’s Nursing Home after the levees and dams broke:
A wall of water … hit the building, rose up the sides and then burst […]
In Japanese poetry there is the jisei, or death poem, the idea that on their death bed, in the final moment of life, a poet would compose a haiku summarizing their thoughts on death … or life … or whatever it is we think about as we leave this life for whatever comes next. […]
Nurse aides — certified nursing assistants — are some of my greatest heroes. They are the “men and women obscure in their labor,” as President Obama put it, who are the “the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things.” They are a career that gets over-looked in the world of the arts … […]
Suzan Abrams posted two poems from Grace like a Shadow by Islam Samhan, the Jordanian poet imprisoned in October 2008 for writing love poetry that incorporated verses from the Koran. According to her site these aren’t the poems that got Samhan in trouble. Since I do not know Persian or Arabic I cannot […]
a photo of Islam Samhan by Salah Malkawi (2008)
Since October, 2008, Islam Samhan remains in jail, accused of writing love poetry using quotes from the Koran. This BBC article:
Writers in Jordan are calling for the immediate release of a poet charged with insulting Islam in love poetry.
Islam Samhan’s recent collection, Grace Like A Shadow, […]
“the dead shall return” ZJC (2009)
Often I wonder what the dead do when they are not here; and by dead I mean friends who are no longer part of my life. A semester ends, a job ends, a relationship ends and friends disappear, most of which I never see again. I recall the […]
the electric company’s jennifer of the jungle
As a wee Zachary I was fascinated by a children’s television show from the 1970s, The Electric Company; especially a segment staring Judy Graubert as Jennifer of the Jungle with her friend and Paul the Gorilla.
This poem wasn’t based on that sketch, I had written it before […]
And … I wrote this sonnet about two weeks ago, an ode to Janis Lyn Joplin, Ջանիս Լին Ջափլին, rock star and saint. So far this poem has required me to make up the most words in my translations attempt to date. The words probably exist somewhere I just don’t know where to […]
Redd at Duc des Lombards
At 80 years old and still performing around Europe, Freddie Redd will always be the greatest jazz pianist for me. I know there are bigger names out there than Redd’s — and my praise certainly would never diminish the contributions of, say, Fats Waller or Count Bassie — but so […]
liana papyan
Saxophone players are rare in this world; female sax players doubly so. I had been listening to Ada Rovatti the night before; I love her hard bop sound, her song Airbop. I am sure there must be a female, Armenian sax player somewhere as well, holding court in a jazz club in […]
datevik hovanesian’s yarimo
One of the miracles of being human I find most satisfying is the simple realization that pain cannot last forever. I am not speaking for a particular person or a group or set of people — pain is an identity as much as love — I speak only for myself. However, […]
datevik hovanesian’s ervum em’
Year after year I forget more and more of the Armenian words I use to know. It is a pity, I love the language so but who can I speak it with in Grand Rapids, Michigan? I know no one. The most I can turn up are bizarre little […]
datevik hovanesian’s es gisher, lusniak gisher
I love the moon. No, let me take that back. I do not know the moon — I know the light in the sky; the feeling I get when I am all by myself, walking in a Michigan forest; the happiness moonlight brings me. One of my […]
datevik hovanesian, the breeze, hov arek
The idea that the wind and the breezes will blow us trouble, as Billie Holiday once put it in the song Ill Wind — Blow, ill wind, blow away/ Let me rest today/ You’re blowin’ me no good/ No good — fascinates me. My adopted hometown, Gyumri, sits on […]
datevik hovanesian, partridge, gakavik
To write is to let the world know what we have witnessed, we are told. Often I am cynical of poetry’s positive effect on the world, but that has entirely to do with my own short-comings as a writer, a feeling that everything I do I cast into a void that […]
charles mingus, flowers for a lady
1974; umbria jazz festival, todi, italy
The connection between leprechauns, the wee people, and jazz great Charles Mingus is obvious. Someone needs to cast Warwick Davis, famous for his roles as The Leprechaun from the movies of the same name, as Mingus in a bi op film. As we […]
Mei Yong (Useless) is my new addiction. The French might have their flair à la Chinoise, but Dong Qin shows us her French take, 用法语, in this song. With jazz piano and catchy refrains I find myself singing along though I have no idea what the lyrics might mean. It is what […]
mingus big band, moanin’
Sometimes music can directly reflect in a poem and sometimes just take effect all subtle-like. The Mingus Big Band is a NYC ensemble that specializes in the compositions of the late Charles Mingus. I love what Mingus does in this piece and others like E’s Flat Ah’s Flat Too, he creates a […]
bobbie humphrey’s harlem river drive
I have never been to New York City, but one day I’d like to. While the jazz flute has never been my craziest of instruments (the Mamas and the Papas killed it for me) this song is from Bobbie Humphrey’s 1973 album Blacks and Blues. It has been sampled by […]
In Chinese, the fox is 狐狸, hu-li and so 狐狸精, hu li jing, is a fox spirit. As a Western with a terrible grasp of Chinese I suppose I fall into a category of the sort of person fascinated with other people’s religions and stories and yet completely ignorant of any deeper cultural meanings. […]
janis joplin’s summertime from
the cheap thrills recording session
To listen to Janis Joplin sing Summertime in any context, any recording, is to stand in the presence of something bigger than you or I. Only then, once, did she ever rival Nina Simone in pain and anger. I never really like her backup band; that […]
Who knows? Who knows? Who cares? It must all start
with things like prayers or the way the gut fills
out with fibers. The way we push our art
out – to make it sing. But all this fulfills
what? All of this – we are so proud. The best
are dead. The worst are […]
soundtrack of rev. jesse jackson’s
i am somebody
classic sesame street, roosevelt
franklin teaches about africa
all of this is for Matthew Thomas “Gordon” Robinson, Jr. (1937 – 2002) who made the magic happen.
Way back when, before black was black, black was
purple and Mister Roosevelt Franklin
scat-rhymed live on TV. Was that because
they could not find a muppet […]
charles mingus better get hit in your soul (1959)
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” — Emily Dickinson.
What was the last thing that took the top of your head off? Besides a falling piece of Skylab, I mean? A […]
Heinrich Hoffmann was a Frankfort physician who had the skill of improvising “humorous little stories,” as he once put it, to help calm his younger patients. His collection, Struwwelpter (which roughly translates into Shock-headed Peter), is, perhaps, still a thing of nightmares and yet in its day it became the most popular children’s book […]
marvin gaye, inner city blues
Make Me Wanna Holler, is, of course, the refrain from Marvin Gaye’s Inner City Blues. And that, as Walt Whitman would say, is America.
Jazz and poetry took a fascinating step forward when it found 1970s funk, regardless of what straight, sticky people like Wynton Marsalis might say […]
miles davis performing chez le
photograph du motel … damn!
I was working in the music section of a chain bookstore in Las Vegas when I discovered the soundtrack to Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958) featuring the horn work of Miles Davis. It has been described by jazz critic Phil Johnson as “the loneliest trumpet sound you […]
Monk’s Mood with Thelonious Monk
and John Coltrane
I have been waiting for that scream, the one Federico Garcia Lorca referred to in Blood Wedding, “the dark root of the scream” ripped from the throat. It’s a long time in coming. The record player is on instead. Vinyl dreams and other strange things. […]
Part of an Elvin Jones, Max Roach
and Art Blakey drum battle
My sister-in-law, Mary, plays the drums. She is a rock drummer, not into jazz as far as I can tell (I could be wrong), but if she were and I happened to live in L.A. I would certain go and listen. The line “It’s […]
Billie Holiday and Lester Young, Fine and Mellow
Often we talk about sadness as if they were instruments, “goin’ to croon me some grief, it is my guitar.” And perhaps for some it is, in the same way certain people can hear colors and see sounds. But the more I think about the concept […]
Garnet Clark: photo by Dicky Wells
I am quietly failing my Occupational Therapy classes. This semester is overwhelming me; I live in a state of constant panic and nausea — I don’t eat, I don’t sleep, I have headaches all the time, I am constantly feeling like I am about to cry when I am […]
who killed cock robin? freddie redd (piano)
jackie mclean (sax) from “the connection”
This is a scene from the movie The Connection (1961) where a film crew attempts to interview a jazz-jam while they are in mid-session. The song, Who Killed Cock Robin, is taken from an old Mother Goose nursery rhyme, from which I borrowed […]
Guidance. So much of this without guidance.
Signs. So much of this and I’m blind to signs.
Silence. So much. So much. So much silence.
I pick up a stick, drawn three lines, two lines
and a circle. My strength is all I own.
All I own is strength, this craft, these grapevines,
three smooth pebbles, left […]
Thespian by Freddie Redd Quintent
from “Shades of Redd” album
It is my dream to one day meet, or at least get a chance to listen to, Freddie Redd; in my opinion the greatest living jazz pianist that we have. A hard bop musician, Redd made fame in the early 1960s with his role in the […]
“Lazy Bird” from Coltrane’s Blue Train album
Today John Coltrane’s Blue Train has been on heavy rotation. It is one of the saddest jazz albums I have ever heard; not because any of its composition are moody or sentimental but because they offered so much and we have delivered so little. It is like […]
So many days gone and so much I still don’t know. I’ve been listening to The Essential Ma Rainey over and over. I listen to a lot over and over, it’s hard to shift gears when you are deep in something good. I love Gertrude Malissa Nix Rainey Pridgitt, Mother of the Blues, […]
In Armenian the word for people is “zhoghovu’rth.” I am not Armenian, but I still use the word.
Move. Blur. Echo. Even monstrosities
must dance on their monkey legs. Form that word
meaning the people – “zhoghovu’rth.” All these
things need to matter; that lost ark anchored
on Mt. Ararat; that passion to […]
“venus in chains” ZJC (2008)
I recently attended a poetry slam at Michigan State University (hurrah for Logic for winning! You were amazing, once again!) but what I took away from it was the realization that, once again, most people are rather limited when it comes to conceiving of their own erotic worlds, if they think […]
“brain in a jar” ZJC (2008)
As I have told everyone who will listen it is midterm-time and I have spending far too much time attempting to memorize bizarre medical terms (and 90% of them are diseases and terrible things that can go wrong with the human body) under the guise that occupational therapists do nothing […]
There is salt on my lips. I love that salt.
I am in love with all far-seen places.
All that rooted — red woods, sea beds, asphalt,
teeth — makes me happy. All the past, pieces
no one can recall, fascinates me. Why?
Why would we look back? Our love and hatred
all lost, a root pulled […]
The things we robbed from each other. The things we stole. Where do we go? We ruined boys without a home, a voice, a guide? In the movie, Farinelli, the famous castrato, il ragazzo (”the boy”), delights the world with his soprano voice; and yet we find the rivalry between himself […]
“the ghost girl that said no” ZJC (2007)
Now the dead avoid me. How miserable.
Language irks me. I wish it gone. I wish
all that binds me, gone. Schoolchild kisses, fuel
for the hungry ghosts, the livings’ fetish
with its own wretchedness, all this barley
and blood, all this tea and bile we anguish
over, […]
For a while I have wanted to write about the cult of the shahida; an Arabic word for a female suicide bomber. But in order to talk you need to be able to understand and this is a subject so beyond my ability to grasp time and time again I find I have no […]
“Star Lily” ZJC (2008)
This is an image I made of a Star Lily, the lilium auratum, which gets used interchangeably throughout both this story and histories of the Himeyuri.
When I started writing this poem I was fascinated with the Okinawa word kusa-nu-nuii; grass roots. Grass isn’t as beautiful as lilies, of course, but the […]
“cleaning the wounded” ZJC (2008)
This is Yukio, a 10 year-old girl from the story I am trying to tell of the Himeyuri nurses of Okinawa. The goal of this movie is not to judge one side or another but to tell a story; however, being an American born many years after all this happened, […]
“capful of wind” ZJC (2008)
In the poem The Golden Legend, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow talks about the maritime belief concerning a capful of wind:
Only a little hour ago
I was whistling to Saint Antonio
For a capful of wind to fill our sail,
And instead of a breeze he has sent a gale.
Literally the term means a sudden light […]
“another world” ZJC (2008)
Earlier this morning I was thinking about the problem with writing a haiku. The easy part is figuring out the form (three lines; the first and third line have five beats and the middle has seven beats to it). What I find difficult is the idea of having to have […]
by Diane T. Sands (2008)
My friend, Diane T. Sands, is a “a naturalist, cartoonist, librarian, and free-lance scientific illustrator, who also uses the sketchbook as a medium for recording the natural movements of the world around her.” She is also the California president of Guild of Natural Science Illustrators.
I woke up this groggy […]
“if the stream called me” ZJC (2008)
It was that rancid smell that made me drive
her off. Damn! What a foul stench! Of course she
fought and cried. Of course. How would she survive
on her own? Who would take in a dirty
thing like her? No one, I am sure. That smell
of […]
“gilgamesh waits” ZJC (2008)
In the oldest poem, in The Epic of Gilgamesh, the warlord of the city Uruk, the part-man part-god Gilgamesh, has become a tyrant. His people suffer and cry to Heaven for justice and Anu, father of all, hears them and instructs Aruru, mother of creation, to:
“go and create
a double for […]
“i’d make a great crow” ZJC (2008)
Have you ever searched for a friend on mydeathspace? Not to be morbid but I have a history of people disappearing from my life suddenly, without notice. What has happened? One day you’re chatting like normal and all of a sudden you realize it has […]
“goat of my soul” ZJC (2008)
I have been working on this sonnet during the long night (tomorrow classes start and my sleep schedule is all thrown off, whaa!) and wanted to share it with you. It is a rough draft. Very rough. But life is like that in the wee hours of the morning before […]
“red bamboo” ZJC (2007)
I can understand my poetic grandparents of the 1920s and 1930s wanting to throw off the mantle of Formal poetry; let’s face it, after Romanticism the idea that perhaps rhyming poetry had gotten a bit stale, that forms for forms sake did not make the best verse was, I am sure, a […]
“old woman & cat” (2007)
Did I mention last Monday I was involved in a head-on collision that destroyed my car and banged up my knee? I didn’t? The good news is no one was hurt, not even the person who ran a stop sign on the icy road as I was entering the intersection […]
“fox pup fingers” (ZJC, 2007)
Imagine my dismay at finding out that the paws of a new born red fox are not yellow after all but black. I learned this after I had spent all day trying to get the colors in the fingers just so. I played around with the ideas that maybe […]
“Winter, cemetery across the street from my house — I” (2007)
Of what I will miss the most – wings. Graceful
fits a winged boy on a high rock above
fields and towns; taking only a handful
of what is. The hedge sparrow and street dove
are a narrow valley; their movements all
benign. Finches cannot trust in olive
orchards […]
“gagged by roses” ZJC (2007)
The metaphor of friendship being like a plant (a night blooming rose, let us say) is not new but I think it will work nicely. Two people agree to combine their energies and fortunes. A plant roots itself in the ground. To break that connection, for whatever reasons, […]
“begging bowl, calcutta” ZJC (2007)
“i’ve been in sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots” — nora zeale hurston
Why write of potato soup when a suddenscowl means the folly of blind jealousy?Why praise what others lack? Perhaps someoneelse will get these words flowing. But not me. Not now. What is this line I […]
The Chinese Baiji Dolphin was declared extinct this week. The Week Magazine briefly noted:
“Goddess goes extinct” (Yangtze River, China) The Baiji, a freshwater dolphin know as the “goddess of the Yangtze,” is extinct, scientists said this week. The latest search of the river produced no sightings of the species, which lived in the […]
I wrote this poem back on December 19, 2006 under the title “a pretty piece of flesh, i.” The title really had nothing to do with the poem except that it came from a line in Romeo and Juliet I liked and probably had hopes of using it somehow in the poem. Oh […]
This is a repost of an older sonnet I wrote in the beginning of the summer. My friend Stephanie Dominique, from Las Vegas, wrote to me saying she enjoyed it. I tried tightening up some lines and added music in the background, I don’t know if it worked (earlier experimenting with music drowned […]
Here is a forest and you should linger.
The sun is bright and I am a forest,
river, a creature of August. Offer
me green sap, gold leaf, say the word, “August.”
I give you myself freely. The queerest
things happen in forests. Do you
know that? I am the blue August witch; lust,
tempests, transit. In […]
This is a drawing of the sorceress, Circe, painted by my friend Shelley. I love it! She actually looks like she might come from Italy or Greece, which is more than I can say for other Circe portraits. I am thinking of John Waterhouse’s exquisitely done painting, Circe Invidiosa. In it we […]
The era of classic women blues singers spanned roughly from 1920 to 1930 and was dominated by such giants Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Sippie Wallace and Alberta Hunter, to name just a few. Without a doubt, my favorite singer of that era is Ida Cox; a fiercely lyrical and independent woman who […]
This is a shout out to my friend, The Absinthe Review Network, a fellow Michigan resident who probably knows more about the French poet Charles Baudelaire and his love affair with absinthe than I do. However, my first exposure to Baudelaire was via Liam Clancy (of Clancy Brothers fame), when he read Charles’ famous […]
The cafe I am at right now has been playing a Patsy Cline CD on their old-fashioned speakers. Her song, Walking After Midnight, keeps repeating itself in my head: “and as the skies turn gloomy/ night blooms will whisper to me/ I’m lonesome as I can be” … and I think about that strange […]
Where will I go with such thin wrists? Often
I watch snails crawl through bogs. I’m unable
to find such narrow roads, compass. Drunken
in the devastated paddies, scornful
of dried beans and mulberry. Silly bean!
You do not taste of clouds or caramel
or rain. I’m drunk on rain. Salt, milk between
my teeth. O love, be […]
“Crying out loud and weeping are great resources.
A nursing mother, all she does
is wait to hear her child.
Just a little beginning-whimper
and she’s there.
Cry out. Do not be stolid and silent
with your pain. Lament,
and let the milk of loving flow into you.
The hard rain and the wind
are ways the cloud has
to take care of us.” […]
I took this video down by the river that runs through the center of Grand Rapids, MI. Of course, in order to get me in the shot all you can see if a tree in the background … so I guess I could claim I was anywhere. Hmmm … ok, this is a […]
“friends part/ forever — wild geese/ lost in cloud” Basho.
Not all poems need explanations. Like this one. I recorded it outside the Children’s Museum in Grand Rapids, MI. The two gentlemen in the very last shot walking behind me turned and began to heckle me a bit after I switched off the […]
I am trying out a new experiment. As soon as I write a sonnet I also video tape myself reading it out loud so there is a visual to go along with the poem. The downside of this is that I am not actually familiar enough with the poem to read it right […]
I am looking for a home for Ma Cat. Technically she is ex-Ma Cat since I took her to the Humane Shelter a year ago and had her fixed. Since I could not keep her (and still can’t) I released her back into the wild. She disappeared during wintertime but come spring […]
Did part of you miss all the attention?
All that time; the urge to kindness that bent
my knees before you. Later, will someone
ask you, now that I am back, just what sent
me from you? and why did you let me go?
You fed me; let me grow lush on misspent
rain. Now my strength is growing, my shadow
long […]
“circe” by Shelley 2007
My dear friend Shelley drew this for me. Originally it was for a different poem about the goddess Circe, but Shelley said she still wanted to work on it. So I am putting this with the sonnet I just wrote. When I get the new version of the […]
from Copyright Free Primates page (2007)
Love gets a bad rap in this life. I feel sorry for it at times, but then I think of all the poems people have written about it and guess it can’t be doing too badly for itself … even if it is so amazingly ugly.
Nighttime, more time; […]
from Copyright Free Primates page (2007)
What can I say? I dig primates … except poo flinging monkeys. No poo flinging, please.
The murky bottom primates
begin their migration a flock
of white scars breaching
the skin their silent babies all
painted in bright colors and
the blackberry bushes, swampy
ground diving, all that asphalt-
black glass and copper, tongues
of fire, villages […]
“hide away mask girl” photo by evseyeva ekaterina (2007)
Ekaterina is an amazing photographer. I hope my poem does her photograph justice.
Do not be a child of Sylvia Plath
with gas and all or denied rank and fame
and locked away from your science and math
because of your biology. Reclaim
that which I wished for you but […]
“love koi” ZJC (2007)
And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul? — Walt Whitman.
I have friends who worry about the state of their souls. I understand their worry because if their souls are anything like the filthiness of their homes, their terrible physical health and their lack of a sense […]
Today I see the importance of friends. It is good to have them and it is even better when a friend puts up with your pestering to have your poem translated into his or her language. So today’s Shout of Joy and Thanks goes out to my wonderful pen pal who goes by […]
“send us on our way” ZJC (2007)
Certain things will never save you again.
Poems about loss should end. Change their verbs
to ones of joy, remind us how passion
is still our birthright; that nothing disturbs
grief more than passion. Ask any widow
left in Palestine, Israel, any
who can mourn, who can see the sun, follow
its long arch […]
“moon loves frog” ZJC (2007)
The space to be at peace with oneself comes in different forms. Today I am happily studying my amphibians. Omakakii is the Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) word for frog. I am not yet at a point where I can construct anything more than baby-talk sentences (and I have my doubts […]