The Pink Snail

  Near the Fillmore Myth isn't cheap:  generations of blood and stagnation went into it, then billions of entertainment dollars.  Reality is always there, if you look:  he lost his looks, she looks and gentleness; this year they each died broke.  But back then the candles, not too many, actually created an effect as of appreciative spirits.  The incense merged nicely with their smells and that of weed. She kneeling, braced on his shoulder, felt desire, not again but still, and his returning.  While he talked, trying to express the rare and sudden sense of being as handsome as she was beautiful; and it was all mixed up with his hope for this poem, or was it that band, the new insight sweeping the land . . .  Those were the days of our enthusiasm. Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems,  The Adventure  and Happiness  (Story Line Press, 2022), and four collections, A Poverty of Words  (Prolific Press, 2...

  Listening to the Landscape The trees speak the language of my birth, they bend to its sonorous syllables. In autumn gales they resort to 'boom' and 'doom.' The coppiced hazels in the orchard whisper, 'shush' and 'swish' in answer to the scented wind of summer. The ancient hills in rocky enclaves, speak the old tongues of Celt and Saxon. On wild, winter nights, the wind roars along rugged crests, muttering the speech of clashing swords and flying arrows. The cliffs, chalky white, red sandstone, grey granite, echo to storms rolling in from the sea. Angry consonants sound in fury, rebounding the faces of would-be enemies. In dreams, I build words, phrases with that vocabulary which sculptures and molds the landscape, waking and living, those letters and sounds interpret, vocalize my inner silence. Cemeteries are quiet places, the dead lie silent. Yet they live on in the language they wrote and spoke, in which they would formed and which, with the hills, t...

  A Poem in Residence Everyone else gets to be a disruptor, Why not me?  Let me waddle into the middle of midtown And flash brightly in these dark domains Between the towers and the crowds I can erupt, carrying colors and patterns of flora and fauna Amidst huddles of black and blue My campaign will not be restrained, The shadows of steakhouses will have to accept me, Shorts and all, as I fiddle with silverware And in the museums, I will keep it up, Strolling through the silent galleries like a flattened flame, Until I find a work I can weep in front of Still Saving Changes Rather long time waiting to say challenge accepted would prefer a declaration but telling can be showing seizing rumors of a sunrise, or a straggling sunset claim get that new route unfurled, the end goal wide-released a finish line in theory, even  if it is not yet in its focus Metaphysical Engine Artifact Where's my gravely sonorous narrator? The voice I've been using in my head is useless, the presen...

  The Man Who Served I drove slowly by the mangled car, the bright lights, the cops, the rescue truck. The victim was in fatigues. Army reserve, I heard later. The guy had done a stint in the middle east. And I thought: so this is what it means to serve. Driving on,  the white line ahead of me wasn't a boundary anymore, just a thread of narrative spooling between Baghdad and Biloxi. I could be anywhere.  Kandahar.  Fallujah. Or just outside Amarillo, the spot where the pickup swerved. Maybe the guy was blitzed on mescaline. Maybe he was just tired of the war he didn't know he was fighting. He zigged.  He zagged. The war came home in tire tracks. Turns out he was dodging an armadillo. A damn fool armadillo.  And I thought: he doesn't even know what country he's in, let alone what side he's on. Poem for the Daughter Who Stays Out All Night It's Sunday. Dawn. Silent. Too silent. An anxious night is now a day of dread. A cruiser drifts past-- slow enough to be ...

Border Crossing From a dilated, mucous pit you came--          three-bodied, lizard-like formation. Below us:  the infectious Body of Earth.  Above us:          the seal-headed Homunculus grows a spherical retort, his convulsive fingers--          flaming columns, with claws at their ends, pointing towards the gaping wound of a grave. We have crossed the border.  Will the heart follow us, and our flesh-and-blood double, scythe in hand? Why would we seek silt at the bottom of the Honey Lake? The knight has long since disappeared from the armor, and the aforementioned          three-bodied               lizard-like figure          raises the double-edged sword . . .  Laszio Araanyi (Frater Azmon) poet, visual poet, anarchist, occultist from Hungary, Earlier books:  (szellem valaszok, A Nap es Holderok egyen...

  The Witnesses to Bigfoot It has been said that only the depressed, the anxious, the disassociates, are allowed to see the Bigfoot.  Only those we cannot trust to discern the truth can spy its eight-foot frame lumber amid the timber. The skeletons we found,  the experts term deer. The bipeds, bears foraging for berries. What cries we hear are cries, we're told, the woods ceaselessly surrender. Until who can we believe? Those who wandered from us, humming within the wood line, or rocking at midnight in the palmettos, stroking armadillos, each one to a shine. Native Names for a Simian Cryptid For "Bigfoot," the Natives had 1,000 names but only one opinion: leave it alone. Leave its mystery in fog. Leave the infrequent couplings unspied, and call the howling bobcats. Let the birthing spillage crust in meadow grass, nourish flies for miles. Let the stillborn burst its maggot stitching unwatched. Let no one see  the bones dissolve to loam, the skull, thin as an egg. Its ...