I know my family down in New Orleans is loving this. Don’t know how my dad feels, but I’m sure being a Saint he’s smiling. (dude has a t-shirt… like what? D’artagnan Martin Loves Me T-Shirt)
We needed this. New Orleans needed this.
It’s beautiful.
Jason Kane over at Eject! was kind enough to do a write up of from Quantum Leap which was published in December by Juked.
An excerpt from the review:
To summarize, Michael James Martin’s poem from Quantum Leap works. It is fragmented and joyous and desperate, communicating via vignettes run amok. They spill on top of one another, separated by disorienting “leaps” from one circumstance to the next. The sense is of futility; Dr. Sam Beckett’s self-imposed task was to repair what he could in any given situation.
Read the whole thing here.
Thanks Jason!
I am amazed at how many writers are still deciding to call themselves White or Black, or writing books based on these wrong titles.
I find it amazing that something as simple as holding up one color against another color and realizing that this long history of mis-naming should be broken is not broken.
Especially by writers. If we are the users of language and understand how easy it is construct reality via the lingual and visual artefacts of language — why have we not made a consistent and strong effort to destroy the beliefs that an African-American individual is not black but brown. And a Caucasian individual is not white but brown. That all across the world, the language used to force separation between peoples is false, that we are various shades of the same.
If writers cannot hold their skin up to the actual color others say they are and see they are not that color… aren’t we lost to a system of control?
The cover of the newest Ep;phany made me rethink Moses and the giant fish. The cover has a rock formation that looks like a fossilized giant fish. I didn’t notice it until after I couldn’t stop looking at it. What I mean is, I sat staring at this cover for no reason except I felt I had to look at it. I was missing something. And then it hit me. I turned it sideways a little. Freaky.
Here ya go: www.epiphanyzine.com/index.html
It is easy to become caught in the folds of the everything. You know, work, drama, ex-lovers who know how to move you, and they’re deciding they still want another piece of you. Easy to forget that although we’re truly WE, that the I is apparent and needs some love. Easy to fall into a community and the buzz of the hive mind. Harder to break away and feel comfortable with the true alone. It’s okay.
A woman used to appear around campus when I was alone and wanting to be alone (or rather having no other choice), and she kept saying, “IT GETS WORSE”. Whenever I thought I was alone, there she was with her “IT GETS WORSE”. The first time she said that, I said nothing. She stopped to talk to me about what I was writing and I told her it was a poem about a guy on an acid trip who seems big ass bunnies get out of a car and he kills them with a machine gun. As she left she said, “IT GETS WORSE” and I told her, no, it gets better.
Her response, “No it doesn’t.”
Plenty. About eighty sole survivors standing less inches apart and more a conglomerate of selves. Questions by bitchy children: You fart dust? And if you did fart dust how much skin does it have? How sour is it? Why I’m flabbergasted. Everyone knows everything now. How many brains does a frog have? Six months old and talking not only that but maintaining a conversation on the heavy stuff. NBC smells oily. Both oily and lacking like reduced fat oreos. I’m greeted nervously, tenderly, crush my hand if the wind blows. They smile. I’d like to see my dressing room though I’m already dressed. Jay Leno interviews me for his last show. He jokes about the McNally of my face and sidelines his eyes to his audience. Laugh. Don’t know if I crack a smile. Don’t know how many vienna sausage cans I went through before committing to airfare and a hotel in Vienna to task their sausages. It isn’t the same.
*
The bright. It all shining. My skin. My old skin. I can’t take the everywhere anymore. Open up the spaces beneath my fingernails and escavate what other excess bile of my chakras and deliver me something packaged and viewable as a gateway — how to see the death if never perceived and therefore never feared, in fact, such unfear reinforced.
And the dream died when I awoke. Though what survived I kept in a medium sized box able to fit in medium to large spaces.
Those brains, those brains right there — those’re mine. Francesca blew them all over the place, I mean, it is kind of a rude thing to do, but when the brain-explosion is so pleasurable, it really isn’t much of a big deal, really. Although I’d recommend making sure you have cleaning solvents on hand when reading her work, just in case.
Wolf in a field published a cache of her poems. All of them are equally good. But it is the second poem of the groupings, titled THE WORLD HAS TURNED AND LEFT ME HERE, which is just mwah:
You are getting a root canal
at a dentist’s office in Waco.
You do not live in Waco,
and you are still sleepy
from flying. When the stewardess
asked everyone to turn off
their electronic devices, they did,
but you left your walkman on.
The plane was descending
through the part of the sky
where you are in the clouds completely.
A woman was floating.
She was wearing wings
made out of tin foil.
You tapped on the window and said
are you god and she said yes I am god,
and she turned into a sharp edged silver ball.
The ball dropped down faster than the plane,
you felt so overcome
you ripped out your teeth.
When you arrived in Waco
there was a sign that said
Home of the Largest Tin Foil Ball.
There was a parade, you stayed to watch
your favorite band pass by on a float.
You were in pain, you threw your tooth
at the lead singer, he used it as a pick.
But be careful of of the first poem, You are Crunked in a Totally Green Dress, You are Paranormal… that one hurt my teeth.
I’m not really “in the poetry scene”. I write and read it, and still come across new poets no matter how prominent they may seem after I research them a little. Someone said, once, that some poets are a trickle to the ocean, others are a river, some are stronger rivers, etc. So the idea that you can be on wet earth and have to dig to find that massive river running underneath is distressing, but worthwhile. Her (I know this someone was a her that said this) analogy is right, but faulty. I don’t believe in trickles or rivers or oceans, I believe it as an entire body of water in movement. Singular. These separations or, perhaps more these, specifications/dissections of a “one thing” is perhaps why there are “camps” instead of true communities.
I first read Wayne Miller, I think, in the most recent Best American Poetry. This was nearly 4 months ago. I came across his poem IN THE BARRACKS: A FOUND POEM. I don’t want to ruin the experience of reading it, but perhaps you do not have access to the poem, so — it is about how a snipers bullet was stopped by blocking the windows/walls of the barracks with books. The poem moves at a quick pace. After the sniper shooting has stopped, one of the soldiers picks up the book, a thick monster of a book, called Treatise on the History of Western Europe (350p). The soldier opens up the book and there’s a halted bullet on a specific page, through a specific word, but we never find out the word. And AH! How this made me want to look up the Treatise and see what words could’ve been pierced to make the soldier contemplate what he contemplated (I will leave out exactly what he thought, so at least there will be one surprise for you if you happen to find it). I realized my palms were a bit sweaty after reading the poem and I had to wipe my palms and the book cover off, because, I’ll admit I hadn’t purchased the book, I was just in the store reading it (no money at the time). I reread it many times over. In a collection of poems that didn’t really “do it for me”, his poem will be worth the price alone.
But he’s not a one hit wonder, so to speak. I found an ‘old’ poem of his on Verse Daily called Street Fight. No explanations of it, you read it. It’ll be worth your time and the future-time you spend reading it again. Promise!
Although it only nearly brought me to tears, it made me forget this sinus headache I’ve been aching about for two days. And for the seven or so minutes it took me to read and reread it, it was — what headache?
I don’t know what more to say about this poem by Reginald Dwayne Betts (his website). I mean, its just so heartbreaking and so essentially poetic in a different way without being arcanely poetic. Its gorgeous in its ugliness and sadness. It made me remember my homeboys who have lost their way. My boys who were real friends back in the day who now have tried to pull guns on me or who fell into drugs and then climbed back out that dungeon but blamed me for not holding onto the back of their clothes as they swerved around the watery sinkhole. And even though it wasn’t my fault, after reading this poem and writing how it made me feel, I apologize. I scream it in my head. I want them to know I’m sorry and maybe we aren’t friends now my brothers, you are all in my hearts (yes, even you, even you who disrespected my family that way).
Please read the poem over at The Collagist. He has two there.
