Poetry from Mahbub

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To Have a Finger In Every Pie

 

It was summer’s rain

You came to me blowing soft wind

I became cold from burning coal

Firing and the body was burning

The world seemed to be hazy

Mind crazy

It is you who came to me

Gift me a life

My eyes got power to see

When you kept your eyes on me

Hold me my body tight

made me soft and mild

my heart to beat high

I was trembling with joy

I saw through the whole world

When you fully started to —-

I saw nothing but the colourful —-

It was you my love, my sense,

That I had a finger in every pie.

 

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Cristina Deptula reviews San Francisco State University’s 2017 Personalized Medicine Conference

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sfsu-2017-personalized-medicine-100-has-changed-yo-54

Amy Lynn Santiago’s three-year-old son Nicholas Volker was suddenly, terribly ill. Problems that had started with a fever and an abscess that would not heal now trapped the boy in the hospital for years. He endured multiple surgeries, chemotherapy, dangerous and powerful drugs, and the permanent removal of his colon. Finally, as Nick’s care exceeded the family insurance’s two million dollar lifetime benefits cap, the physicians in his Milwaukee hospital decided to sequence his genome.
Upon discovering that he had two rare genetic diseases, they were able to successfully treat them with a bone marrow transplant. However, Nicholas, now 11, lives with long-term side effects from his ordeal, including PTSD, learning disabilities, social issues from living in near isolation for four years, and a permanent ileostomy.
His parents believe that gene sequencing could have saved him and others from much of what he went through, and advocate for this sort of personalized medicine through their nonprofit One in a Billion Foundation.
Dr. Michael Goldman and the San Francisco State University Department of Biological Sciences also see the promise of personalized genomic medicine, and hosted a one-day conference in South San Francisco June 2nd to highlight developments in the field.

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Poetry from Vijay Nair

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                         Mouse Eats Cat

He a white mouse

Eats white house-

Cloned in conspiracy

Trump, card a covenant

Put’in, entraped first lady

His vendetta led coventry

 

He in nature a rat its modern,

Spread bubonic plague

He a black death;

Cowboy, his coven are

Lynchpin causing

A lymph node in lynx

Bob cat in burial ceremony

By the lynch mob

 

©Vijay P Nair -2017

 

 

 

 

 

Tony LeTigre reviews Tom Robbins’ Still Life with Woodpecker

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GIVE ROMANCE A CHANCE

 

A Belated Appraisal of “Still Life With Woodpecker,” by Tom Robbins

 

“Unwilling to wait for mankind to improve, the outlaw lives as if that day were here.”

—Bernard Mickey Wrangle

 

In 1980, Ronald Reagan became POTUS, MTV turned negative one, & Tom Robbins published Still Life With Woodpecker. Peradventure, your mother was a Tom Robbins fan when you were growing up. You remember his books & their quirky titles — Skinny Legs And All, Jitterbug Perfume — & Uma Thurman as a hitchhiker with prosthetically enlarged thumbs in the film adaptation of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. You may have borrowed your mom’s copy of Even Cowgirls the novel, on the pretext of reading it, but being an adolescent at the time, all you really did was flip through the pages looking for sex scenes.

 

So, you nearly missed the Tom Robbins express train to cult literary Nirvana. Luckily, in your present life as a grownup in a whole new millennium, you chance upon a rack-size paperback of Still Life With Woodpecker, from a free pile or tiny library, & take it home to read. Suddenly, your mother’s enthusiasm all those years ago comes back, & makes perfect sense. You are soon hooked by this winsome yarn about a wayward modern princess named Leigh-Cheri, on the cusp of adulthood, who breaks away from her punctilious parents for a fateful sojourn on Maui.

 

“Who knows how to make love stay?” That’s the question asked early on & woven through the novel. We are invited to ponder the fleeting & elusive quality of love, why we can’t hold on to the first rush of connection & stay in love, forever. At the core of Still Life With Woodpecker is a love story, irreverently told by the inimitable Tom Robbins, comprising equal parts oldfashioned storybook romance, Greco-Shakespearean tragedy, Lady & the Tramp, & Bonnie & Clyde. This love story begins & ends with a bang, literally, in the form of dynamite. It dispenses with sentiment, skips over courtship, & cuts to the chase. If you’re a reader of warped sensibility who usually spurns romance, given what it signifies as a modern literary genre, here is an alternative romance that may suit your taste.

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Poetry from JD DeHart

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The Nose
First appeared at Apocrypha and Abstraction.
They say the nose knows, but that is just a not-too-clever play on words in my case. The last memory I have as a full person is the feeling of the steering wheel slipping out of my hands, that moment when touch ceased and then the spinning sound of metal and magic.
I no longer pay attention to sounds.
I was either a banker or was looking for work, I am no longer sure. I remember stuffing money into envelopes. Perhaps I was a very organized criminal.
All I know is that, upon waking, the smells were too intense to manage. I could smell the kindly nurse and her floral perfume, the bathroom down the hall that needed to be cleaned (badly), and the gelatin being stirred in the cafeteria.
I am slowly learning to manage my senses.
When the raspy voice in the bed next to me asked his doctor how long he had, I sniffed out his very life and told him, with accuracy, “About two more hours.” Everyone smelled stunned when it turned out to be true.
The day I finally get out of here, it is not going to be easy. I am no longer a set of eyes or hands, just a nose. Does any love noses? How does a nose become a productive member of society? I may not even be able to walk around.
Perhaps I can become a consultant in a cosmetics store (if the odors are not too overwhelming), or a fortune-teller, sniffing out the longevity of my clientele. I would make a great chef, as I now have refined tastes by virtue of my olfactory system.
Perhaps I will fold up and go away with the rest of what used to be this body, an appendage without a home and, worse yet, with no one to wipe me when I get runny.

Poetry from Ryan Flanagan

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6.7

 

NOT ANOTHER EARTHQUAKE!, he yelled,

standing up

and shaking all over like Elvis

 

his family gathered around the dinner table

doing their best to ignore him

 

as he grabbed a broom

from the hall closet

 

and ran around jiggling all the light fixtures

on the ceiling.

 

When it was over

he sat back down to

dinner.

 

Passing the dinner rolls,

a perfect gentleman.

 

The threat of aftershocks

ever present.

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Poetry from J.K. Durick

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                  Tipping Point
There’s that moment, we’ve all lived it,
felt it, survived it, the moment when
everything slips, slides, even cascades
away from us, beyond our control, we
become watchers, witnesses without
a role to play, but to hang on and pray
if we can remember prayers for just
moments like this, chaos theory plays
out, the butterfly we watched last fall,
the monarch we watched set things in
motion, and now once again we get to
watch, witness as everything slips away,
history, when we live it, amuses itself
with the irony of it all, we read the past
and pick out these moments and know
the future will read our present and draw
time lines, our tipping points, our tripping
points, like this one when everything begins
to slip, slide, cascade away, the Niagara river
going by, heading for the Falls, and here we
are midstream, knee deep, waist deep, and
here we are, hanging on, watching it all go by.
 

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