The Fog                                                                                             

The fog came furtively in the night and slumped heavily upon the fields. At dawn I wondered, though this mantle is beautiful in its transformation of landscape, will it truly depart, relenting with the sun or will it remain this time, blinding us permanently to our vistas – so that we see only our own hands and nothing else before us? Its impenetrability deafens us, a pall muting the sounds of my small world, stifling dear familiar voices. I am inclined to whisper as there is uncertainty in what I might be missing. I surmise it is for this eventuality that pianists memorize an entire concerto, why actors rehearse lengthy monologues, why we weep over an aria.

            I was not acquainted with Aunt Aurelia’s voice as she died, a young woman, of appendicitis, twenty years before me. All that is left of her is a receipt for a dress for $2.35 bought in Akron, Ohio, her grave in Saint Luke’s Cemetery, and a few photographs. From her image I’d like to believe I may have enjoyed a memory of her voice. There’s now no one left to remember her conversations around the kitchen table with her mother and sisters.

            (True, gratefully, I’ve nearly gotten my mother’s shrill voice out of my head – a finality to her mania. But this preference is the exception.) I have a cassette recording of my therapist’s voice, my surrogate big sister, reading The Velveteen Rabbit. When I was a lost young man, it was a simple and effective (though somewhat embarrassing) tool in soothing long empty evenings in empty rooms – saving me from my own desolation. She died of cancer this year. This remnant, this flimsy ribbon cannot be all that’s left of her voice.

            It is my terror that a fog will surreptitiously descend upon my memory – that I’ve nearly forgotten my father’s voice – that I may somehow misplace my beloved’s. If I cannot recall the subtle wit and intimacy in her tone, how may I hope to navigate my days? I comprehend the inevitability of my annihilation. I embrace the certainty. However, I am plagued by the horror that my wife and children will forget my timbre, my tenor, my laughter – that my voice will fade over time, unintentionally becoming too wearisome for anyone to recollect. There is no other aspect of my mortality that frightens me.

David Sapp, writer, artist, and professor, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior, chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha, a novel Flying Over Erie, and a book of poems and drawings titled Drawing Nirvana.

Chuck Taylor, Fever.  Slough Press: Austin, Texas, 2024.  195 pages. $24.95. ISBN#9798866760268.

Reviewed by Janet McCann

A poetry book that you can’t put down is hard to find, but Fever qualifies. This collection shows how it felt to grow up as a boy in the mid-20^th century, and then to live in the drastically revised world of the 21^st century and encounter all the new definitions and expectations. 

The title poem pulls the reader in with its couplet form that provides long expository loops and close-up scenes. The book is like a river, running on and on and over rocks and around obstacles. The inner and outer landscapes are fresh and appealing.  The reader is carried along, and now and then there is a bright stone, or perhaps a glimpse of something frightening under the flow, and always there are startling insights.

Chuck Taylor is a veteran poet, prose writer, and photographer who taught Creative Writing at Texas A&M University for many years and has published dozens of books. This is an especially attractive volume, with Munch’s nude couple embracing on the cover and brush drawings throughout by the poet himself.

More than half the book is the first section called “Fever”, which describes the growing up of Vance, who has a somewhat rocky upbringing in the mid-20th century with a neglectful but demanding mother and a quixotic father. From there, Vance enters the adult world and has adventures which will form him and push him somewhat off the grid forever.  Sexual discovery and identity evoke smiles and winces. Young Vance reads Augustine of Hippo, who found sex “the original sin”:

         …sex is the fall

         from grace, from the garden where once the lion

         and the lamb lay down together, into the

         toil of soil, the thorn of roses and

         the blood and pain of baby birthing; sex

         passed from Eve and Adam, worm slithering

dumb into our operating systems

         at around twelve or so, starts maddening

         dreams, hijacks souls and bodies, and makes us

do what God in nature wants—populate

         the Earth to choking; forget ideal dreams…

           …Yearn instead for naked

         skin, for bare ass; the virus has grabbed our souls…(20)

“Fever” is written in a kind of flexible blank verse, ideas strung together, thoughts leaping over the rhythms.

Other sections include “Taking Off,” “Takeoffs,” and “Lizard King.” “Taking off” narrates stories of the young man completely escaped from this constrictive home, and what he learns through his first individual experiences. The last section is “Lizard King,” which is dedicated to John Morrison, and it is an unusual poem that has only one word per line. The poet pleads with us to slow down in the reading, but this is hard to do.

“Taking Off” gives glimpses of many kinds of prisons, including age. The “Lady of the Pink Slippers” wants Jack, visiting his resident mother, to open the glass door of her care home and release her.  But he can’t—the door is so constructed as to prevent its opening. He muses on prisons in his own life, then ponders the

lady of pink slippers who we

         muse, we dream, must surely

         be given, most definitely, the

         right lucky chance, given

         a great maverick moment—

         though tired, though busted,

         though beatific, though beat—

         to wing with us on through

         doors across fields into the

         long various grasses of freedom.   (99)

These poems attempt to define the relationship between men and women, physically, socially, and emotionally. The main characters growing up this during the period of rapid change in values in the understanding of sexual and gender roles, gives a unique perspective on these changes . I often wondered how the young men I knew fifty years ago managed to accommodate the difference in expectations.  Reading the poems, I can feel what a young man felt, and know what he learned as he aged.

The concluding section, “Lizard King,” the poem of one word per line, is not amenable to quotation. But the third section, “Takeoffs,” is most entertaining. “Takeoffs” gives meditations, ideas, and images based on other literature, sometimes in the form of imitation. They may be serious or laugh-out-loud funny. He kindly gives us the William Ernest Henry  “Invictus” so that we can fully understand Taylor’s version “Inlustus,” which follows it. “Inlustus” concludes:

Beyond this place of peace and grace

looms a filling Mexican dinner plate,

and the candlelit pleasure of your face

in the afterglow of our randy state.

It matters not how cold the side dish soup,

how greasy hot the plop of refried beans,

you are the dizzy center of my loop,

I am the gleeful nibbler of your greens.  (141)

Fever demonstrates the need for freedom and the various traps and prisons we find instead: sexuality, other confining elements of the male role, societal demands often based on sexual expectations.  And it shows us a side of male experience not so often explored.  This is a collection to glide though and then return to.

JUST STUPID, I GUESS — OR BLIND —OR INATTENTIVE — OR…

“So, Jean — (somebody), I said, “do you believe in love at second sight? I mean — Rum toddy, Waitress, for her; I’ll have a screwdriver — going dateless ‘s obscene! Dumb! Big crime to do! Shouldn’t I have realized the very first time?”

VAN/ITY (for Natalya)

The happy inconvenience of forced reliance on these, the sole tools I own

for prying below your oh so frozen golden skin,

The patient persistent application of these blunt lips, this inagile tongue,

trying to learn entire the inarticulate soul hiding within —

peeling it away     layer    by     layer  

from the long & blonde cool slim softvanilla Ukrainy icecreamcone

lying frostdelicious  beside my pillow.

I (reluctantlustily) Bonaparte after you Kutuzov: 

who hawkodineyed watch for every movement upon your flanks and

          (engaging not, engaging, not) withdraw, withdraw

                   withdraw apace,          another pace—

all communication broken, 

knicking off my van/

    /                (engaging not, engaging not)

    /

    /                                till

    /

    /                                                    suddenly

    /

    /

    / confront we                :Borodino                     

    /

    / frontal attack into your center

    / bodies blood contorted everywhere

    / ferocious punishment on either side

                                  /

                        The c/ity of tsars ash against stars and ice

and our dreadful painful slow long extraction begins. 

FISHING WITH A LINGUIST

I never claimed my German was good

but I can conjugate worm and hook,

and I can understand your language

by knowing of your hopes and anguish,

of your cathedrals and your ruins.

We all communicate in Human.

I’m not fluent in Russian or Greek,

but I practice my Reason and Grace.

PEOPLE LIVE IN CIRCUMSTANCE

Prophets

coffin fears.

They undim the years

and make futures clear.

Each instant starts new infinities and we want to learn our world before it leaves and the present in constant process of departure is all of time we possess and we want to change reality we say but won’t imagine others until prophetic language speaks itself and inertia is the prophet’s strongest weakness.

Poets,

clothed in words,

are philosophers

who live as paupers,

ambassadors of imagination, and their hands acting as mankind’s tongues make

the machinery that molds humanity and their chisels read our marble’s manuscript to free its sheltering angels. The poets’ sort of characters presses their texts on the stubborn world’s soft tissues.

Healers

seek to cure

the pains of the world,

improve the impure

with powders potions pellets promises prayers prophylactics and prosthetics and redeem the work of their harbinger barbersurgeons, barbarous locks smiths, who balded us while tonsured ones whittled our natures away.

Teachers

reach our minds

by opening blinds

to show us our signs

bright enough to darken our sight, reveal our oceans’ icebergs, use their mistakes instincts and stimuli to instruct our eternal youth eager only to grow old.

Scholars

caulk the cracks

in the walls of fact

caused by careless lack

of application as their brains’ gray boredom yearns to learn about all the abouts to catalog and diagram and quest to close the gap between the sag of our intellect and the stretch of actuality, but our tired libraries strive for arson because we know when nothing is left all will be understood.

Rulers

view their role

as plugging the holes

in their fated goals

and they deploy their troops their laws their clubs their crusades their mobs and their parades to advance their cause of making the patch of our earth a carpet for their comfortable feet and leave us as shirazless as Shiraz. We say we need rulers to draw our lines straight but the rules rulers impose are intended for us ruled ones only.

Soldiers

know: to kill

they must always drill

and harden their wills

to deform enemy stones into tombs and they expect command and stratagem to stand up their haughty uniforms against opponent motley and bayonet resistant pacifists.

Judges

budge the law

from hammer to saw,

from justice to fraud,

they are the chaste prostitutes who should always be on trial for verdicts that sentence abstinence with masturbation and we must prepare to wear our loudest scarf to their dockets their gallows and their guillotines.

Prophets live in confusion, poets in fantasy, healers in contagion, teachers in ignorance, scholars in mystery, teachers in ignorance, rulers in entitlement, soldiers in destruction, and judges in wickedness.

WHERE DO THESE, OUR CASTRATI, GO?

On the march–

the rag, the drum, the bugle’s linger.

In the church–

the wine, the crumb, the seedless singer.

By the curb–

the road, the thumb, sundrunk and cindered.

Remnants of sacrificial souls.

…

Varnish


“Hold me oldly,” she
says. for

love, not for 

long. dipped in the

darkness 
of the dancing night.




Ephemera


Once we 
were. once there was  
a sensation of stillness in a kiss. once

the air 
lapsed 

pinkly
before your lips—collapsing 
camellias. 




Tryst


A room awash 
in the wan androgyny

of the moonlight. she
tells him, “Say

little words, they 

end 
quickly but
last longer.”


Eric Mohrman is a writer living in Orlando, Florida. He's the author of the chapbook Prospectors (Locofo Chaps, 2017), and his work has appeared in The Citron Review, Otoliths, One Sentence Poems, M58, Moss Trill, Gone Lawn, BlazeVOX, Eunoia Review, and other journals.

My stomach is the palace of hunger

My tank clatter ironical song that clutter my pleasure,
Rhyming chronicles cock like confused can,
For course that clamps my container.
Chuku-chuk-chuku-ku-chuk!
Causing sounds as cavalry choke on war,
Itching as chisel choking on wood.
Crawling core my heart chimney.
Converting charge to body weakness.
Coercing me clutches calm humbleness,
When feeling uncomfortable like comb choking my clatter container.
I conclude to comply to its command…
Conning me to comply as he concise.

I am a miner of peace

I have been mining peace with my peace digger core metaphor
Arranging words to sentence with the alphabet of inspiration
Laddering rhyming sword that kills conflict
Filling my leaves with my shape edged pen build up of simile
Pouring hyperbole water to fills the leaves of crafted poems.

Nuraini Mohammad Usman is a passionate writer and student from Minna, Niger state with roots in Kano State. Inspired by his experience and culture, he crafts uplifting poems and stories that ignite positive change with a strong foundation from Dayamas Model School, Better Treasure International School, and Al-Fawzul Azeem International School, Nuraini is currently honing his skills at Legend International School and the Hilltop Creative Art Foundation. He believes in the power of words to inspire and motivate others.