I was seven when Dad died. I didn’t really know him well. He was in the Army and always away on some adventure or other. After a long tour in Afghanistan, he came home for good. I was a shy boy. Dad was built like a barn door. A fraught combination. Not long after coming home he took me to my first football match. The local derby at Anfield.
I remember standing on The Kop in-between his legs, hands like shovels holding my shoulders firmly as the raucous throng swayed and sung. It felt as if the humongous heaving body was going to swallow me. I looked up anxiously, tugging on the bottom of his jacket. He registered the fear in my eyes. I expected him to scoff at my cowardice.
Instead, he grinned. ‘C’mon lad, climb up here.’
He swung me up onto his wide shoulders. Cupping my hands under his chin, I could feel the scratchy stubble on his jaw, the beat of the pulse in his neck and the weight of those giant hands holding my skinny knees. Behind us, someone threw a plastic cup full of urine across the crowd. The golden liquid arced through the air, dispersing into a drizzle of dozens of drops that showered the unsuspecting audience below.
A chant from the crowd spontaneously rose, ‘You dirty bastards.’
Dad looked up at me. I could see droplets marking a trail down his temple. We both started to laugh. We laughed and laughed, tears mingling with the precipitation present.
The next morning Dad was found dead in the front seat of our Toyota Rav4. He had chosen to leave me by hooking up a hose to the exhaust. The doctor said it was Post Traumatic Stress. Mum said he was a selfish sod. I didn’t believe that because he had taped a note to the garage door.
DO NOT ENTER. CALL POLICE.
Now, when I think of him, I mostly just remember sitting on his mighty shoulders, both of us laughing hysterically, his life blood pulsing under my fingertips. It was a moment of ecstasy, and it tasted of piss.
Ancestral Ideas
Early in our lineage the handy man,
Homo habilis, sees in his mind’s eye
a useful connection between his hand
and an egg-shaped basalt cobble milled
by a river’s turbulent current long ago.
He fits it to his hand and swiftly strikes
another stone which produces a flake,
a thin sharp-edged chopper or scraper
easily seen as a tool to cut trees or meat,
to scrape bark or the hide of an animal.
Striding through tall grasses of the African
savanna in the bright sunlight, Homo erectus,
holds steady the image of his hunting fellows,
taking a grazing zebra bachelor by surprise,
by their combined effort like a pack of hyenas.
They circle around under shady acacia trees,
hearing casual snorts and the switching of tails;
a lame one flees too late and is killed with clubs.
A runner, having returned to camp, brings others
with handaxes, cleavers, and growling stomachs.
Tonight, around a cooking fire, they feast while
two babies fuss suckling their mothers’ breasts.
Not enough for them but more since siblings
died. One mother clicks her tongue; the other,
blows air on her infant’s face to bring on sleep.
Pinkish streaks at the horizon announce dawn.
Lanky men emit a sliding sound, eeeennaaaa.
Sleepy youngsters stir in the dust while women
search the ground for bones that their children
can break for marrow when they feel hungry.
Men slink down a slope to a muddy watering hole.
Birds burst upwards in fright. In the night a pig has
been killed while it drank. Would there be remains
for scavenging? Only a muddle of animal tracks are
found. The group will have to search elsewhere.
Into the hot sunshine this sweating group of
early humans find it pleasurable to lope over
the wide savanna. To their minds no horizon
is too far. They move toward the blue rise of
mountains in the distance, hoping to find caves.
Blue-colored horizons mean many days and
nights spent looking for carcasses. Savanna
grass gives way to scrub trees and succulents,
the latter becoming a reliable water source.
They meet other groups of roaming strangers.
Babies who fussed under acacia trees are now men.
Their deceased mothers left for predators or buried
in shallow soil. They carry memories of white-haired
Biftu who gave names to each in the small group to
organize them and enable members to communicate.
Succeeding this migrating group come others who
slip through horizon after horizon, over endless
surfaces, imagining what a difference a wooden
shaft would make fitted to a long sharp blade of flint.
Groups split apart, seeking alternative ways to live.
Homo sapiens emerges as intuitive, if not conscious,
aware of a companion’s motives and life’s potentials
around them. They thrive on the northern edge of the
African continent, adapting to variable environments,
learning from their experiences and positing “what if.”
By the seaside their outlook is flat and blue as sky.
They walk through a vegetal corridor and find a land
northward, not as luxuriant as the Ancestors had known.
Caves become dwelling sites, but here they encounter new
inhabitants who have moved from icy valleys in the north.
Stockier, with a heavier brow, Homo neanderthalensis
competes with the African immigrant for lynx and foxes,
pestered by jackals and hyenas. This singing cave dweller
of the Levant crafts small flint points with gripping fingers
and his sharp-edged burin carves on delicate bone or antler.
In open-air sites men design a core stone for specialty flakes.
Fishes, hippos, small cats and bears along with wild cattle are
butchered. Women look for bedding grasses, nuts and seeds.
The two competing groups realize that combining their efforts
to live make sense so they begin to cooperate and interbreed.
When Elisav loses her daughter other women cry with her and
fold the child’s knees into her chest. A niche in a rock formation
is found in order that her closed eyes look toward the northwest.
As an intentional act of affection a red deer jawbone is placed
on the girl’s pelvis. That night mothers hold their children close.
Later, offerings of fallow deer antlers and wild boar mandibles
to the dead are incorporated into a simple ritual using words of
a rudimentary language. Competition arises when a neighboring
family shows deliberate intent to use the same burial ground. The
original group, claiming ownership, drives them away with stones.
With heads full of ideas and increasing physical skills, combined
groups, not liking a crowded landscape, disperse east and west
and proliferate along the way. Their progeny establish a variety of
races and cultural traditions. At long last successful groups beget
you and me and generations of space travelers seeking the moon.
Thus, humans evolved using an ancient cognitive toolkit that went:
I am preverbal. I am a figment embraced by imagination. I am the
moment of eureka. I am the prize of consciousness. I AM AN IDEA.
Spelling a Caste
fecal matter
emulates the interior
graffiti: thoughtful legacy passions
the gravestone shake-up delicto
ballerinas terrycloth frame-ups
triplicate facts
irritate the implicit tenant
turrmeric snatchers gone dental
( )
one-liner survivors
their cathodes gatepost noon
to stingray mourners
castle poultry tremor
vertigo seminars deluxe
varied its lemon returns
plastered
before backdrop vernaculars
lotion diction
implanting a bellicose wok
an impetigo classic
( )
limbic nettlefest
stammering tremolo playpens
darkening theoreticians
stabs forward
art fully under
auctioneer pity
affects their style velocity
to indenture divorcees
( )
the opal toecap
exhales its duct tape feeders
nearby threadbare
valuable plagiarism (audio
too scantily sorceress phonic)
tributary betrothals
pressed handicrafts
repute strata borne (hypno
sonic)
poacher tremolos
in delicto passion
roughened noon’s horn to renewal
At the End of the End of Days
pyrrhic lumber left burning
sutures shifting for the lonely
casing new murder charged in stairwell
irritation brackets wilt insignia leaks
the roaring remedies measured pine
capsules for somatic coffee brackets
or for columnar socket blades
where reactor seekers last charged
disfigured tantra tracking in retreat
buried the remedies backward
as the corporeal circus games
dull massages filter grim retribution
basket threading reduced pleasure
to a fixable granite platelet flourish
no weather security packaging
socket banter breached arrears
extreme position dismembered
remnant amenity glimmer blades
tore through the loose coma pouch
luminous grades suspected traction
impaneled scrotal parlor forays
as privileged inflation disasters
fruition stalls reply nostalgia riffs
mount a laughable tenth catalogue
with harried impertinence rehearsed
a long and clever compendia rapture
Meating at the Market
produce caught placenta
near the deadening cadavers
readjustments
travesty a cereal pedant
bracketing rotisserie voyeurs
to potential
*
ratio jackdaw boogie bang
handrails starch appraisal
crossword rendered facet
a signage assault
emptied an emulsion clerk
scaling slow rancor
cliches fodder the medically impaled
*
peacock testimonies
quilted brimming
yelp and braids
applicable implosions
keening geothermal chants
on elite
finalists
weird attributes
momentary gloating
velcro to pleasured settlers
embodies rotisserie leg when heel
archly lathered
abundant garret valedictions
over
flipped steak
Glandular Potential
testicular headrests
wrench storekeeper cans
across liniment coves
a charlatan mélange
straining
renewal geeks
gladiatorial emulsifiers
abdominal bigamists
asset ogre credits looming at birthplaces
*
a thug tympani
appealed to retired diameters
no polysyllable due
its rambler hostel
for a marshmallow enema
the mad lender boldly detonates
the hospital
divorce usher used
a synthetic seeding
for tragic panorama
suburban primers
sneezing petrochemical thoroughfares
*
a shattering
polysyllable
opalescent
tragicomedies dazzle beyond downturn
flamingo documentaries
polymer reptile cans
used malingerers
backward idyll
transforming
transit risings
rumors instance
Payback in the Works
packaging as market bait
the gondola switched a rife glade’s
lively blades rowing them away
from a pomegranate vacuum
thrust among the blockage pills
left to filter the coma gray
as though roaming impertinence
didn’t wilt before lions tore
the colosseum to rapture
the heavenly void capsules
on sale forays ventured affable
in a laughable remix tantra
no fixable position left unturned
or tuned to low vibrato brackets
in the carry-on seizure pouch
aligned the deathly software
carpet no match for the reply
to optimal regeneration totem
requests for privileged infection
prior fillers mount to story board
the suspected plenary crawl
toward scrotal insignia pablum
breached where mounting flourish
stalls the backward crawlspace
remedies burning socket mantras
measured use of cynical bursts
jangling medicinal ganglia rifts
left charged for empty retribution
BIO: Vernon Frazer’s newest poetry collection is Gravity Darkening.
Daft
Skint of wisdom I strained to capture,
push-ups propelled my fitness regime.
I worked my six-pack, women’s rapture,
skint of wisdom. I strained to capture
zest when I suffered a contracture
earning male respect for self-esteem.
Skint of wisdom I strained to capture,
push-ups propelled my fitness regime.
Clouds Racing Overhead
Through binoculars I spot a yacht,
a man, his woman, hair streaming free.
Horizon stretched, these yearning hours hot,
through binoculars I spot a yacht,
Mitty-like, spray on deck now my lot.
Exploring leagues of fathomless sea
through binoculars, I spot a yacht,
a man, his woman, hair streaming free.
Bones Beneath Us
Hoping lights like low-slung stars appear
dappling the harbour, a warm hotel,
late in, we faced massed waves, black walls sheer.
Hoping lights like low-slung stars appear,
we hold our course, shark jokes a veneer.
Wreck charts curled, awash, we share this shell
hoping lights like low-slung stars appear
dappling the harbour, a warm hotel.
Biog: Ian C Smith’s work has been published in Antipodes, BBC Radio 4 Sounds,The Dalhousie Review, Griffith Review, San Pedro River Review , Southword, The Stony Thursday Book, & Two Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.
How everything turns away…
~ W.H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”
to its small purpose, the plowman’s hands holding
reins and plow, the shepherd’s gaze upward
inventing stanzas for the month of June.
The lowlands are pasture, the terraces arable.
Stouter to the myth Breughel has seen
the far-away world of fate close to his world.
The local and contemporary eye
has pictured that as this in terms of home.
Green is the sea under a thawing sky
as unlike Greece as Shakespeare’s Rome and Rome.
A partridge clutches to a waking vine stock.
Columns accent the city far below
with its harbor awaiting the ship that may be expensive
and delicate, gliding on a stiff breeze.
Palirunus Marginatus
Not everything red is a lobster.
But the part of us fed to love
pried from our armor and prominent claws
is easily imagined all buttery succulence.
Instead it refuges further beneath the surface
in a different ocean without grammar,
spiny and recessed. It has shed its defenses
though remains distinctive with hair-tenuous
antennae precisely watchful enough
to sound us from its other side of the world.
With Seaweed
Dreams are dreams only—once woken from.
Everything ran slower in that sluggish
element where your hair floated freely
with the seaweed and love became a salty
buoyancy of smiles and stinging tears.
I was subsumed with the acorn barnacles,
sea vases and the translucent baskets
of Venus’ flowers, learning my sessility
under the hover of dead man’s fingers that clothed you,
a spiny carpet of urchins at the bottom of my feet.
There you were: Belief made you, in entries
of the log books of sailors from flooded
explorations, in your blended topos of history
and myth, topmost human yet by
our day’s thorough fathomings no more than tale
and so there I dreamed, dimly yet surely
aware of my natural shores, little by little
insisting I must breathe as speech
intoned beyond words to the single unbroken
high C beyond me in the pressure of my hearing.
Conch
I kept
turning away
to become
the staircase I climbed
from the bottom up
spiraled by the encompassing
element,
hoist
up my mast
for a Hindu ceremony’s
music of the spheres,
my door given way
to this riddle
of speaking mouthless
from an exterior
I unfolded at one with.
Michael Todd Steffen is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship. His poetry has appeared in journals including The Boston Globe, Everse Radio, The Lyric, The Dark Horse, Ibbetson Street, The Concord Saunterer, and Poem. His second book, On Earth As It Is, will be out in early 2022 from Cervena Barva Press.
Doris Day, “The Very Thought of You” from Young Man with a Horn (1950)
The film Young Man with a Horn often showed on TV when I was a kid. I think the first time I saw it, or part of it, my mother was sitting on the couch in the foyer, which rhymes with lawyer (the living room was rarely used, and it didn’t have a TV), watching it (maybe on “The Early Show,” maybe on “The Million Dollar Movie” ) on our RCA console. “What are you watching?” I asked her.
“Young Man with a Horn,” she said. “It’s based on Bix Beiderbecke.”
I hadn’t yet heard of Bix Beiderbecke, so I thought she said, “It’s based on Big Spider Back.”
I knew Doris Day was a singer because my brother Bart had all her albums. But I knew her mainly from those romantic comedies with Rock Hudson and Tony Randall. I don’t know if I had yet heard the schoolyard rumors that Rock Hudson was gay, but I remember thinking that Tony Randall was probably gay, though this may have been a tad before the word “gay” had gained any currency.
I probably started paying more attention to the film when I was a teenager and had started seriously listening to jazz. In it Kirk Douglas plays a “tormented” trumpet player based, yes, on Bix Beiderbecke as fictionalized by Dorothy Baker in her novel of the same name; just as when he played a boxer in Champion the year before, he gets to grit his teeth and growl a bunch. The brilliant actor Juano Hernandez plays trumpeter Art Hazzard, likely based on King Oliver, the young man’s mentor. Hoagy Carmichael, who was part of Bix Beiderbecke’s crowd, plays piano and pal, and Doris Day, who may not yet have achieved full virginity, is the love interest.
Besides Douglas’ scenery-chewing descent into alcoholism, the thing I always remembered most was Doris Day singing “The Very Thought of You.” It was the first time I really listened to her singing, and it was beautiful, so smooth and natural, sexy at a simmer. Behind the scenes, the ghost trumpet for Kirk Douglas was Harry James, whom I remember doing commercials for Kleenex Man-Size Tissues, where he’d put a tissue at on the bell of his horn, blow a high note, and miracle of miracles, the tissue wouldn’t break.
I fell in love with the 1950 version of Doris Day and I fell in love with the song. A great melody, and a great lyric, written in the 1930s by the British bandleader Ray Noble. “The mere idea of you, the longing here for you…”—that’s what I call a lyric. “Mere idea”: Don’t you just love it when two words that were meant for each other meet like that?
Joe Cuba Sextet, “Bang Bang” (1966)
I remember incinerators. Until I was a teenager, we threw all our garbage down the incinerator chute. All our garbage. Food scraps, papers, tin cans, dead turtles, broken radios and alarm clocks. There was no recycling in the sixties, and it was not until around 1970 and the advent of the Clean Air Act, the Resource Recovery Act, and the EPA that compactors replaced incinerators. So every afternoon, or every other afternoon, I can’t remember, all that trash would go up in flames, with ominous black smoke billowing from the chimneys of the apartment buildings, a choking smell in the air, and cinders raining down on us, sometimes charred scraps of paper large enough to still make out some of the type. I associate the burning trash with warm weather, I suppose because that’s when we’d have been outdoors in the late afternoon, playing punch ball or shooting the shit.
I associate Joe Cuba’s record “Bang Bang” with warm weather and burning trash, though I don’t think it was even a summer hit. But it feels like one. In my mind I hear it blaring, tinny and distorted, from a small transistor radio for all the assembled kids to hear, “beep beep, ahh beep beep,” a quintessential sixties city summer song, an open-the-fire-hydrants song, a real New York sound, where even if you didn’t live among Latinos there was always Latin music in the air.
I also remember fireflies on Brooklyn summer nights, and trying to capture them in glass jars.
odyssey of glee and throb leaving behind stones
our Lady of Akita violating the laws of physics
mugwort fulfilling its destiny in a cinder strewn lot
bazooka deaf Uncle Jimmy rolled dead cats under his tongue
offering rhubarb to the woman from another world
tzimtzum in the breakdown lane of the Cosmos
it's like asking if the Comet Moth will live through the winter
all this way to find a snowflake in the hair of the girl made of stone
she soaks whelk shells as I write in Prussian blue
they're all asleep while I'm running water running water running water
after the Chelyabinsk meteor I was back listening to Yes
nearing Mount Unzen I point to where the ropeway should be
this morning I'm dealing with the rapid dialect of sparrows
beginning to understand Ugarte's need for the letters of transit
leaning on a bolt of dyed cloth the Ryukyuan girl checks her messages
