George Franklin

A Poem About the Mind

I wanted to write a poem about the mind,

But all I could think of were rain-slick sidewalks,

Traffic lights, and Chinese restaurants, the old-style

Cantonese-American kind, with bowls of stick-like

Fried noodles on every table. Then I wanted

To write a poem about cities, but I’d lived

In too many to pick out one or two. I remembered

Lightbulbs and the smell of auto exhaust in San José,

Of coffee and tacos al pastor in La Condesa,

Of cheese counters on the Upper West Side,

Smells of fish and gasoline on the Miami River

At night, water splashing against the dock. I wanted

To write a poem about the body. I thought it might

Be easier. But I didn’t know what it was like to be

Alive in someone else’s skin, to get up from the table

Somehow differently, walk with an unfamiliar

Movement of hips and legs. So, I started

With what I do know, how we move

Together in bed, pressing against each other,

Suddenly without names or faces, without arms,

Hands, buttocks—less conscious than the sheets

And mattress that bear our weight. I wanted,

I told you this, to write a poem about the mind,

But like that one-armed monk in the Zen

Story about Bodhidharma, when I looked

I couldn’t find it.

Seven Mile Bridge

How much sorrow does it take to fill a gas tank,

To get in the car and drive south to the Keys,

Where land stops and the sea writes epitaphs

In the sand each morning, stretching the horizon

To a fold of blue paper? It’s not the dying that’s

So hard. It’s leaving all that behind. I had

A client a few years back, a machista who came on

To any woman he met. We’d talked over coffee a week

Before I got the text. He—I won’t use his name—

Was just out of the hospital, waiting for a transplant.

He was thin and said the strokes made it hard

To remember, but he still stopped a woman going by,

Joked about the dog she was walking, made her

Laugh. He needed to go back to court, modify

Child support because he wasn’t making any money.

His hair was dark, not dyed, and he didn’t look old.

But the skin had hardened and collapsed around

His eyes. He knew he wasn’t what he had been,

What he still wanted to be. There’s no reaching

A deal with loss. You just get in the car and drive.

---

George Franklin is the first prize winner of the 2023 W.B. Yeats Poetry Prize. His most recent poetry collections are Remote Cities (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023), and a collaboration with Colombian poet Ximena Gómez, Conversaciones sobre agua/Conversations About Water (Katakana Editores, 2023). Individual publications include Cultural Daily, The Decadent Review, Solstice, Rattle, Another Chicago Magazine, Verse Daily, and New York Quarterly. He practices law in Miami and teaches writing workshops in Florida prisons. His much-neglected website is: www.gsfranklin.com.

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Jeri Theriault

After the Break-up

2006

I take a two-hour train along the Elbe

past towns & factory smoke

to Dresden

where my ex-pat friends like to shop.

I buy green suede boots

then sit for a while

in the white light of the rebuilt

Frauenkirche where I read a pamphlet

explaining

these walls—new limestone mixed

with charred stone from the firebombing

of February 1945

same month my father crawled through

Iwo Jima’s black sand

toward the gun he finally

took & fired into haze & flesh

kept firing even after he was wounded.

He carried that grief & handed it down

so that today

in this remade city suddenly

my small losses melt into his

& into this sidewalk

as it is & as it was

into shimmering glass & collapsed

churches even into the remorse

of bombardiers who dropped silver

seeds that blossomed below

into people running

or unable to run children & grandpas

late shoppers & opera goers

so many of them lying now

unnamed in Heidefriedhof

Cemetery its walks engraved with slogans

a garden of words & stone

with commemorations each Feb. 15

—never again they say we all say—

words I carry like souvenirs

of Korea or Vietnam Kosovo Iraq

or Afghanistan. Never again will we

sweep rubble aside

to make room for corpse-filled

trucks nor rebuild hospitals

with bones not in Bosnia or Angola

Syria or Nicaragua. The body

shudders remembering

& I await my return train as pigeons flutter

against the station’s dome full of echo

& solemnity

while the loudspeaker God-voice preaches

time & departure

& forgetting.

Mother Tongue

For two weeks I’ve been an island

of English at Gymnasium Arabska

teaching language for the first time

& suddenly hungry for the voice-hum

comfort of back home cafés.

In search of my native tongue

I find Líterárni Kavárna where English

is supposedly spoken. When I enter

two men are shouting passionate Czech

their table littered with beer mugs &

books the cigarette smoke so thick

I don’t notice at first

the woman sitting alone with her own

stacked books cigarettes & long blond hair.

The spines on her table—The Dead

& The Living Diving into the Wreck

All My Pretty Ones—such old friends

I can’t help leaning over to read

what she’s writing: There is a broken

circle a circle getting smaller

& smaller. I feel my life both broken

& whole grow smaller in this strange city

& then suddenly wider when she

looks up startled & English

floods my mouth dizzying

as the Frankovka we’re both drinking—

Laura from Brooklyn & me from Maine.

She says the sexism here

still drives her up the wall even though

she’s been in Prague for ten years

& I admit how down in the dumps

I’ve been relieved

to sing the blues to someone

who understands. She invites me to her flat

on Bikupsova for cawfee sometime

& we smoke until the bartender

rattles his keys in the door

& we head in opposite directions

long past the last tram both of us

emptied of words for now & full.

---

Jeri Theriault’s recent awards include the 2023 Maine Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship, the 2023 Monson Arts Fellowship, and the 2022 NORward Prize (New Ohio Review). Her poems and reviews have appeared in The Rumpus, The Texas Review, The Atlanta Review, Plume, and many other publications. Her collections include Radost, My Red and Self-Portrait as Homestead. She lives in Maine.

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John T. Leonard

Cold Black Coffee

The artist lights a match and walks alone down a dirt road in Kentucky.

He flicks burnt splinters of wood at the invisible ghost of a dead lover.

Deeply offended, she reveals herself as a mating swarm of biting midges,

but another match turns her into the rusty hinged screams of jealous grackles.

The artist is lured onward. He needs to hold that lust for murder in his heart,

though he may never act on it…reputation, decorum, and what have you.

To his right there is a forest. To his left, a field. He commands both.

Each is filled with rotting wheelbarrows, graveyards of toil and labor.

For three hundred years they have slowly been disintegrating, right

where they were abandoned by the dutiful wives of dead farmers

in holy ritual, filled with black water and the sun-bleached bones

of family dogs. Sacrifice and tradition.

The artist screams. The black water pulses with the moans of mosquito larvae.

The artist rakes a comb through his greased hair. He pulls a beardtongue petal

from thin air and, like the devil of a dead religion, turns it into a fresh book of matches.

The dirt road is absorbed into the soles of his leather boots. He is lifted into the sky

by the tornadic stench of his own thoughts. He is transported to an empty white vastness.

He closes his eyes and wills the crossroads of a new dirt road into existence.

An abandoned diner falls from the peach pit sky and lands right in front of him.

His coffee will always be cold and burnt and with one dead fly in it.

This is the only sin the world will ever make him pay for.

Applebee's Neighborhood Grill & Bar

A little ditty blares from the cobwebbed speakers mounted in every corner.

Bottomless-ranch-dressing-music, reverberating endlessly off the low, cheap

ceiling panels which shield our gaze from the innards of such an establishment:

silver apparatus of industrial ventilation, filaments wrapped in candy colored

rubber tubing, the classic treasure trail of pipes sprinkled with ancient mouse turds.

This is the architecture of not even trying. I’ve read somewhere that the cynics secretly

love it. We’re paying for precisely this wall-mounted-banjo-atmosphere because it makes us

feel less guilty about what our parents did to the actual atmosphere. We’re paying for their sins with our ripped inner cheeks, mouths shredded by the throwing star tortilla chips and south western egg rolls. We’re paying with our sexless grunts and indigestion, with our blood sugars exploding like Pop Rocks or the Fourth of July or whatever else is Americana enough for this grandstand moment in time. And the salt from a fourth silver Patron margarita coats my tongue

as an homage to havoc, the wrinkles on my forehead forming a shape that can be described

only as “insects dreaming”. There’s even a moment during my visit where I almost forget

that we all have baseball bats hovering over our heads for some strange reason. I shouldn’t be reminded of the film series Saw when I come here, but the comparison stains my teeth like a half pint of barbecue sauce, the way each film, like each line in this poem, keeps getting worse, and more exposed for its fraudulent, bottom shelf creativity. Those ceiling pipes again,

with their thick layer of dust, only disturbed by the small paws of rodents.

I could see you for what you are, but I’d have to see myself.

Storm Drain, Moonlit

1.

All I ever wanted to do was go to wine tasting parties

with the rich friends I made in New England—

Trust fund snobs who liked to sneak into movies.

But here I am, less centered than Kansas,

just Hoosier-ing around at a barbeque.

There’s a beer bottle rolling across the trimmed lawn.

Alexandria is cackling over the music.

Someone brought Chinese lanterns,

just for fun!

There goes another bottle!

We’re just glad to be alive. And to be alive, together,

drinking vodka with Sweet’N Low,

under our almost sun,

in our almost state.

To be alive. Together.

2.

I love you. I love you,

but I’m turning to the Beefeater again

and my 10 p.m. verses.

(Is it funny that I stole that line?)

What a poet!

Soon, I’ll be thinking of a bourbon eyed girl,

bucolic and tan—sand from that lake beach

dressing her legs.

I’ll be thinking of the walk we took in the flush part of Connecticut ,

in my rented shoes and the jacket I saved up all Spring to also rent.

I’ll be thinking of how we stole her father’s Sea Ray,

how we treated it like a lake skimmer…

All those feelings, all that summer air

which could not please.

The world breaks everyone,

and if it doesn’t break them,

it kills them instead.

The rhythm of clanking chains

I don’t think Hemingway ever vacationed in Westport.

I’m not sure I could walk those streets again.

3.

Back at the barbeque, there’s the Schnauzer lady from a few blocks over,

walking past us with her late-night pack of Schnauzers,

strolling along and alone in her big, black, fur coat.

She’s even dressed like a Schnauzer!

She’s our only celebrity…

other than the billboard dentists and insurance queens.

I’m telling everyone a story about the time when, only ten years old,

I tried to feed an apple to a horse, and she bit me!

But now Alexandria is bawling because her favorite song ended.

The lawn is littered with bottles and I’ve burnt everything.

(even the salad)

So,

some of us smoke a little bammer and watch the late-summer night bloom

into nothing more than ennui and a faraway chorus of mute-deaf children.

4.

One day you’ll be standing in the last Kmart on earth. The floors

will still be sticky, but why should anyone bother mopping?

You’ll spring an extra tooth and pay an extra dollar

just to hear the cicada fog of a Rust Belt lullaby.

The roof of the old porno shop downtown will have caved in.

Crickets will chirp while you light another cigarette

on the front left burner of your tenement stove.

You don’t believe in it, and you aren’t going to do

anything to make it happen.

---

John T. Leonard is a writer, educator, and poetry editor for Twyckenham Notes and The Glacier. John Leonard/574-612-0465/jotyleon@aol.com Bio- John T. Leonard's previous works have appeared in Chiron Review, December Magazine, North Dakota Review, Ethel Zine, Louisiana Literature, Hole in the Head Review, Jelly Bucket, Mud Season Review, Nimrod International Journal, The Indianapolis Review, Genre: Urban Arts, and Trailer Park Quarterly among others. He lives in Warsaw, Indiana with his wife, two cats, and two dogs. You can follow him on Twitter at @jotyleon and @TwyckenhamNotes.

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