Another poem from April made it into Matter

(Oh the implications of this title.)Here is something from poem-a-day 2017, revised and in the world -- about family, politics, and family politics. It's called "Some Curses."

On summer barbecue nights, family nights

when the grandfather raised his voice

called damnation, was he saying damn nation?....

Oh good: a Mourning and Melancholia erasure is up on GlitterMOB.

20 April 2017 made it to GlitterMOB.

Erasure: 21 April: Final page of M&M

One of last year's NaPoWriMo pieces published.

Did you know there were many nudist resorts in Palm Springs? Now you do.

If I could, I would change the second two lines of this poem pretty specifically.

But since it's on the fabulous Juked, I must have done something right. Here is "Palm Springs." 

What to do with Poetry Month? Erasures, Dear Hillary, and more, I guess. No rules.

My First Revolutionary

My first revolutionary was Mario Savio. I was fifteen, it was 1977, and we met in a book that was lying around the house I grew up in in Houston.

[I met all my revolutionaries in books, which might hint that I’ve never been arrested.] [Never.]

Mario was dark and handsome and a leader of Berkeley’s FSM, or Free Speech Movement. A bright son of Italian immigrants, his first arrest was at a 1964 protest against the San Francisco Hotel Association, which only hired blacks for menial jobs. He spent that summer in the south registering black voters and returned to learn that his university was banning political speech on campus. It seems hard to believe now—or maybe not. (Though I’m not one to believe that trigger warnings are another kind of ban, they did come to mind.)

Anyway. On one December afternoon in 1964, Savio found himself in the middle of a protest about this speech ban, the ouster of a few students, and the disbanding of a few groups. So, after considerately imploring his listeners not to harass the union workers then painting the administration building and not joining their strike, he jumped on to a car and made a speech, a speech printed in that book in my mother’s house in 1977, a speech now featured on AP history tests. Today I found his words spliced into a Linkin Park song called “Wretches and Kings,” and some Bernie-or-busters are enjoying the video of the speech that’s here on YouTube, with a Marxist analogy that all can understand, claiming Berkeley’s board were the factory managers, its faculty were the employees, and the students were the raw materials being processed. Savio knew that no student wants to turn into a product, and he said so beautifully from the top of a car:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

How can a sixteen year old gal not love a guy like that? I love him still. This semester, I assigned Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” as a text in a freshman comp class and saw what I’d never quite realized. You’ll see it for yourself:

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go...perchance it will wear smooth - certainly the machine will wear out... If it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.

I guess Savio had been flipping through his Thoreau that semester.

            Mario Savio ended up as a university “lecturer”—basically an adjunct, like me, and died at 53 in 1996. 

30

And April 2: Erasures: even though I've learned that Donald Trump signs all his mail in gold sharpies

This was also April 1: Can't make up this mind

Poetry Mons Begins

Some years

Didn’t want any more surprises

on the couch

with dog

a three-word Moroccan spice

spring

came today it was just a click like

the future’s snapped fingers

like how she does she does some years

like she didn’t want to miss poetry

month either                   party girl

meanwhile today’s code continues

shredding yesterday’s careful knit

someone has to be

be the last to know

decipher one long walk

city swanning until he stepped

on the trick door in the sidewalk

and dropped quick, scraped leg,

rust spot on the corduroys and

clambering up, brushing and

why did you laugh, he said

but I had waited and waited.

New Poem on Word Riot

I've got a new poem up on Word Riot. Thanks to the editors and to David Letterman. 

"What I Liked" -- first drafted here for Poetry Month -- is in Rhino now.

My poem "What I Liked" is here in the wonderful Rhino. 

"Vienna's Kunstkammer to Reopen" is up on The Human

Very cool crime-writing issue of The Human Journal, with Susan Rich as poetry editor. (As opposed to the crime-committing issue, which would be interesting, too.) My poem, begun after a press party for the city of Vienna a few years back, is here. 

I've got a poem in the wonderful Tinderbox Poetry Journal: my own Nature Poem (2)

There are lots and lots of good poems in this issue of Tinderbox, so go exploring here. My poem, which was begun on this blog during a poem-a-day April, is here. 

Poem up on Villainess Press The Plot

My "Five Volvos In and Out of Texas" is up on Villainess Press.