Stevie's Law

My poem, Haunt is up at Call Me [ ]—(University of Alabama Creative Writing) in the Call Me [When You’re Dead] Issue. Here is the poem:

Haunt

I thought that you
would live forever.
One procedure

after another,
like changing
the batteries in your clock.

Yet the wing chair
is empty now.
Who would dare sit in it?

You were never a talker,
content to play a part
with your presence—

and yet
it is your voice
that has gone missing

from the room
you lived in
all these years.

Is that what we sense
when we declare
an old house haunted?

The vestige of all
those voices
willing to be heard.

My poem, Riding the Rails, is in issue 20 of the Loch Raven Review. Here is the poem:

Riding the Rails

Uncle Frankie
was no longer young
when he started
riding the rails.

He was a boxer once—
his face peppered
by a thousand jabs,
nose broken

here and there,
and a cauliflower ear
he’d yank on
when he wanted to make a point.

Frankie quit boxing
to run with Abe “Kid Twist” Reles—
and Murder Inc.,
the scourge of Brownsville.

“Kid Twist” and Frankie
were two tough Jews,
my dad would say
with a humongous smile.

The Feds came
looking for Frankie
now and again.
“He’s riding the rails,”

we’d say in unbidden chorus.
Frankie would visit
every few months
and bring us stuff

to use for “show and tell.”
But we wanted stories.
Frankie was better
than radio—

with his foot chases
and near misses
with the railroad dicks.
We didn’t care

if he stretched
the truth.
We were old enough to know
so little is totally true.

My book, Seven Mountains, is featured on Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. Here is a link to the site:

Here is the featured poem from the book:

BEST INTENTIONS

I planted that copper beech
50 years ago today
for my 30th birthday.
It was little more than a stick,

barely surviving
its first three years,
although I watered
and trimmed it

and would have fed it
with a spoon
if I’d known how.
It’s magnificent now—

about 60 feet tall,
but entwined in power lines
and too damn close
to the house.

Tree surgeons are out back,
with their chainsaws
and mini-crane.
It will take a day or two

to cut it down.
Makes me wonder
if I was right to plant
it in the first place.

How responsible
are we
for what we nurture?
Trees, pets, children,

things we bring
to the world
or shepherd on their way?
Fragile as faith.

My poem, Air Raid, is up at the Red Eft Review. Here is the poem:

Air Raid

In Brooklyn,
in 1953, the air raid
sirens would wail
their warning once
or twice a week.

We would
dive under our desks,
assuming the half-inch
oak would protect us
from anything,

although the teachers
never assured us.
My brother assured me
my eyes would boil
in their sockets,

my charred skin
would peel
from my bones,
and no one
would know me from the skeletons

in the Museum of Natural History.
My parents said
that was silly talk,
but my brother told me
the commies had a missile

trained on the Empire
State Building
with a blast radius of 13 miles
and we were within the blast zone.
“Fortunately, he said, the bomb will incinerate us

before the blast blows us apart.
You’re toast,” he added,
taking a huge bite of the rye bread
that he had slathered
with half a stick of butter.

I couldn’t get the eyeballs
out of my mind,
and the day mom left me to shop,
the sirens wailed,
and I hid in the closet

covered in coats.
For the next month
or so, mom would tell friends
and relatives she found
me wailing louder

than any siren
could, and I might
be an instrument of Civil Defense.
70 years later, sirens still
make me close my eyes tighter than tight.

My poem, Zeus Redux, is up at the New Verse News. Here is the poem and a link to the site(with a great cartoon).

Zeus Redux

We do it by ionizing
the radiation and shifting
the polarization of the earth’s
magnetic core

millions of times per second.
We control it
from a basement apartment
in Hoboken—

that bluest of blue towns,
paid for by the DNC.
The four of us
do the weathering

on two old Apple laptops.
Our biggest concern
is the intermittent loss of the internet.
Damn Comcast.

We do our best
to make the heat and storms
believable—
blamable on climate change.

What a hoax.
Few have noticed
it is only the red areas
suffering the ill effects.

But now, one or two of the wise
have picked up on it,
I assure you that will end
with completion of our next project.

Lightening bolts.

https://substack.com/redirect/db24254a-ef59-4706-8a70-493eec39471b?j=eyJ1IjoiNjR6a3kifQ.9qYTbqZK2l6AxgatKZVJQbZlOePwc_wfKXWRokRNlGU

My poem, Poker, was just published by New World Writing. Here is the poem

          Poker

It is nothing to me who runs the Dive.
Let’s have a look at another five.
–Robert Frost in Dive’s Dive

My grandma taught me.
She wasn’t some namby-pamby
who’d let her grandson win
to build his self-esteem.

Nah. She took my allowance
and my lunch money
and had me out on my bike
delivering the Daily News.

She showed me how to mix
and deal—from the top, bottom
and middle, like a card sharp
on a Mississippi paddle boat.

She taught me position,
the ratio of pot to bet,
and had me calculate
the odds of a draw on the fly.

Nana let me watch her games
to teach me tells—
catch when six finger Johnny taps his toes
and black-eyed Susan rubs her nose.

She taught me to look a stranger straight in the eye
and lie. Convince him my five cards,
good only to mark a place in books,
was at least a high straight.

Grandma kept the money she won
from me for in a glass pickle jar.
I always thought I’d get it back—
but not a nickel.

Many thanks to Clare MacQueen, editor of MacQueen’s Quinterly, for nominating my poem, Give Them All to Me, for the Best of the Net Anthology. Here is the poem:

Give Them All to Me

But if somehow you could pack up your sorrows…

—Richard and Mimi Fariña*

It was the year of chili dogs
and reheated beans
at the encampment
under the interstate—
between the smoldering forest fire
and the sad little carnival
in the supermarket parking lot.

The year of departed parents,
of locust and gypsy moths,
of tearful love songs
picked on a guitar
held together by tape,
with voice and harmony
hollow with sorrow.

The year of counting coins,
bottles, and cans,
and playing on corners
for dimes and quarters.
Dinners warmed over Sterno
and nickel bags
in the alley beside the liquor store.

The year of sitting handcuffed
in the back
of a patrol car—
broken teeth chattering—
gigantic shadows
in the blossoming light
of cities burning.

The year I helped you carry
our brother home.
Cares and all,
he was less of a burden
than starlight.
That year he finally slept
through the night.

*Publisher’s Note:

Epigraph is from the song “Pack Up Your Sorrows” written by Richard Fariña and Pauline Marden (the eldest of the three Baez sisters: Pauline, Joan, and Mimi). Richard and Mimi Fariña performed the song along with others on Rainbow Quest (Episode 16, 26 February 1966), hosted by Pete Seeger. The show was taped two months before Richard’s untimely death in a motorcycle accident on 30 April 1966, Mimi’s twenty-first birthday.

My poem, Four Strong Winds, is up at One Art today. Here is the poem:

Four strong winds

swirl the gathering clouds
like vapors
from a witch’s cauldron.

The road is out, car stuck
in a forest of hemlock
bordering West Virginia.

And as the moonlight
and starlight go out
under the thickening clouds,

I question my leaving—
although we talked of it
so many times before.

Tempest tomorrow
but tonight will be
the blackest

night of a black year.
No light from the sky
can pierce the clouds

and the forest
darker than night.
I try my guitar for comfort—

but there is no comfort
in the simple notes
that hang heavy in the swollen air.

How fine and simple
we were once.
How our summer stole by.

In the current issue of PA’s Poetic Voices:

INCOMPLETE

By the second week
I searched for an ending
without real hope.
Ran through the usual—
birth death,
youth old-age
middle-age, angst,
hoping to find
something stirring
I might use
to close
without a thud.

Shame.
The poem is packed
with gorgeous similes—
ice like frozen water,
and verbs—
propel, propulse, and pulsate,
that rocket you to Mars,
but I’ve no idea
how to end it.

Perhaps
a single word
might provide
inspiration,
so I thumbed through
my Oxford and its
companion thesaurus.
Millions of words
waiting to take
their place just before
that final period.
No dice.

I try to find
a way out
through memories
of friends and family,
book titles,
and words
that end
my favorite movies—
“beautiful friendship”
doesn’t fit.

Then I remembered
what my mentor
told me
that changed my life.
He said