daydreaming w/ Bob Arnold
Here is a book that truly works like eating delectable chocolates right out of a splendid box.
The reviews and appreciations Rand-McNally-stretch from 'Gerber’s Tender Harvest Sweet Potato Baby Food' to the southwest poet Drummond Hadley in a book design from Semiotext(e) that quickly resembles one of the hefty tomes from The Library of America — complete with typeface skill, author's photograph and excellent paper stock choice.
Win-win. Don't hesitate.
[ BA ]
Semiotext(e) 2024
Frankétienne was born Jean-Pierre Basilic Dantor Franck Étienne d’Argent on April 12, 1936, in Ravine-Sèche
d. 2025
California
Sun was an enemy in the last garden.
It blotched the mountains yellow, scorched thru the Redwoods,
The Madrone. Mesquite grew stiff, shiny-leaved
Against it. Liveoak leaves went tough and black.
Everything foreign, being tender, died.
So irrigation plotted itself in my tendons. . .
Dogdays we'd slouch a mile through stickburrs and lizards
Down the 101; then sitting on gunnysacks
We'd scud across the hot knocking rock-slide
Into the creekbed. Wallowing along it, half
For the cool, half to avoid Poison Oak,
Rattlers. The mocha dog nudging and biting
The minnow-augured water. Brambles fruited
In the one place shaded all day by the cliff-hanging.
I thought with my spine, while up on our waists in water
We hunched there like brown bears to eat the berries . . .
Five years rose up and went down. More and more
I lived by silences, by hibernations.
I woke at dawn. At dawn with a shotgun I woke
To watch in morning fog from my porch a tawny
Mountain lion come down in morning fog
To kill my chickens. I chose against those chickens.
_____________
Laura Ulewicz
Why It Is I Chose To Be Alien
selected poems
Delete, 2022
If you have never heard of The Beatles
this is the book to start with —
from the heart of the girls.
If you're a cynic, this
is the book to soften you.
NOW LET'S SEE IF THEY'LL LET US
PLAY THE BEATLES ~
Snow
Walking through a field with my little brother Seth
I pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow.
For some reason, I told him that a troop of angels
had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground.
He asked who had shot them and I said a farmer.
Then we were on the roof of the lake.
The ice looked like a photograph of water.
Why he asked. Why did he shoot them.
I didn't know where I was going with this.
They were on his property, I said.
When it's snowing, the outdoors seem like a room.
Today I traded hellos with my neighbor.
Our voices hung close in the new acoustics.
A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.
We returned to our shoveling, working side by side in silence.
But why were they on his property, he asked.
_________________
David Berman
Actual Air
Grove Press /
Open City Books
1999
A Brief History of Mirrors
Now we come to the age of sparrows in the throat.
When I was a child I spoke rain slantwise into this tree and
that.
There was a Japanese bowl from the Kamakura period.
Even then, it held the roundness of now.
Count with me here the number of owl feathers fastened to
the moon.
Ask your own mouth to consider the quiet movements of a
river refusing monotony.
At times we appear released, as if breaking with a great force.
We shyly and reflect upon and — of course — away.
There was a mirror incident in Borneo that did and did not
involve me.
So it is with the water buffalo that brought parasites from the
watering hole into my lover's arms, and brought her — after
many years — back into mine.
______________________________
George Kalamaras
Robert Desnos Finds His Sleep Medicines
Beneath Bachelard's Floorboards
MadHat Press, 2024
If Today Were Tomorrow
THE RIVER
Kneeling
on a yagual,
bent over a stone,
my mother washes
and washes
and washes.
My little sister
sleeps in a basket
covered in willow leaves.
Me? I am sitting
on piled straw,
watching how the water leaves
and how the river stays.
ON THE FLOOR
The moon
finds holes
in abode houses
then slips in
to sit on the floor.
AT THE SPRING
In still water,
a rose-winged dragonfly
sailing on a dry leaf.
A PLANK
I wish I were
simple as a tree.
Or even better,
a plank.
WHAT IS, IS
Let's cut the bullshit:
Ghosts?
They exist!
A town without ghosts
is not a real town.
But
the ghosts
have got to be real.
NIGHT
Dark night
darker than dark
and smelling of rain.
On nights like this
no one knows
where earth ends
and the sky begins.
TIRED
With the full weight
of a chopped-up tree,
the load of firewood
drips sap
down my back.
My head strap turns to fire.
I stop for a bit
and my shadow stretches out long
to lie on the ground,
maybe more tired than I am.
PRAYER
In church
the only prayer you hear
comes from the trees
they turned into pews.
STONES
It's not that stones are mute:
they just keep quiet.
THE MOON ON THE WATER
She wasn't beautiful
but she hit me
like the moon on the water.
FLIGHT
I am a bird:
flight lives
inside me.
BIRTH
Poets are born old:
as the years pass
we make ourselves into children.
WALKING BACKWARDS
Every now and then,
I turn and start walking backwards:
it's my way of remembering.
If I only ever walked forward,
then I could tell you
what forgetting is.
IN THE DARK
I learned to sing through pain
like a bird in the dark.
_______________________
Humberto Ak'abal
If Today Were Tomorrow
Milkweed, 2024
Once there was a goat
in my mother's village
that would dance while
the old knew to ignore
the affairs of the world
____________
Ronald Baatz
The Last Monkey
Black Fig Press
2024
Smithsonian Folkways, 2018
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"Liberation Literature"
ReLIT Book
edited by Arnold Adoff & Kacy Cook
_____
"Five Novels"
Library of America
edited by Julie K. Rubini
