When the Universe closes one door
a window opens somewhere a thief
can enter. Since the coronavirus came
my home phone rings every hour
with offers from fund raisers to donate
to victims and veterans, extend car
warranty before it’s too late, and,
ominously, speak to an officer before
my social and bank accounts are shut.
Peddlers of miracle cures swarm,
touting benefits of medicine meant for other
diseases, or their drink of silver solution,
snake oil, pressed juice, vitamins, steroids.
Gun sales escalate—so many ripe targets
in rich homes and poor to defend, so many
police on the sick list. One thing's sure:
grifters, grafters, and thugs will find marks.
I suspect it’s always been that way.
Peter reads "You Can't Quarantine Crime":
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Peter confesses:"I'm working from home here in Florida and have had time to field all sorts of class from scammers and contemplate the perilous world we find ourselves in"
PETER M. GORDON won the 2019 Thomas Burnett Swann Poetry Prize. He's published several poems at The Five-Two, along with two collections: Two Car Garage and Let's Play Two: Poems About Baseball. He enjoys watching film noir.
On Day 24 of 30 Days of the Five-Two, frequent contributor John Kaprielian marks Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day with a new poem. —Gerald So
EUPHRATES OF TEARS
Tears flow like a river
like the Euphrates coursing
through valleys strewn
with corpses of families
torn apart and torn apart
the wailing echoes fade
as bones bleach and
some lives continue
making themselves forget
the horrors that they wrought.
But we cannot forget
what our grandparents told us
the ones that survived
bore witness to
unforgivable atrocities.
The knives that missed
their hearts still
struck their very DNA;
sights too horrible to bear
tore apart the deepest fibers
of their bodies and
passed them to their children
and grandchildren
We bear the marks
of every massacre
deep in our psyches
even deeper in our cells.
Perhaps that is why
a hundred years later
we still survive
bloody, bitter, battered
but unbroken.
John reads "Euphrates of Tears":
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John confesses:"My grandparents survived the massacres of Armenians in Turkey. I did not know my grandfathers, but my maternal grandmother came from Musa Dagh, and my paternal grandmother grew up in a town along the Euphrates. Every year on April 24th I try to write a poem in honor of Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, which surely fits anyone's definition of a poem on crime."
JOHN KAPRIELIAN has worked as a natural history photo editor for over three decades and has been writing poetry for over thirty-five years. In 2012 he challenged himself to write a poem a day for a year and in 2013 published the poems in a single volume, 366 Poems: My Year in Verse. He has had poems published on The Five-Two Poetry Blog, The New Verse News, The Blue Nib, The Blue Mountain Review, and Minute Magazine. His poetry ranges in subject matter from the natural world to current events and politics to introspective and philosophical themes. He lives in Putnam County, New York with his wife, son and assorted pets.
I.
Yep, I’m a sea witch. I tricked Ariel.
But don’t ask me to apologize.
Don’t call me a villain. I’m the last realist left.
I magicked merfolk into polyps. So what?
King Triton knew. You have to fight dirty
to get through. Flotsam & Jetsam,
my electric legs, my true brood, understood.
I might be a crime boss, at least I’m not rude.
II.
Last memory before I died: Heat.
Flames ate my chest as the spar
skewered my spine. Deadwood,
I thought it’d break like a beak
weak from a lifetime of lies. It didn’t.
Plasma gushed where my three hearts
hummed. The deeper the cavity
the harder to plug, like desire,
like the echo of my love,
buried in the sea cave
carved so low
gravity loses track.
Cartography can’t catch it.
No trap can map it.
III.
I invented underwater lipstick!
I was the first artist to store hearts in jars!
I’m the only sea witch in history
who could boil blood into stone!
I bit lightning to the bone!
Rode electricity to the node!
Ariel begged for legs! I gave her legs!
Merfolk wouldn’t know gratitude
if it slapped them in their scales!
I floated graveyards so ghost ships
could sail! I'm the last hope of hydrogen-
hydrogen-oxygen! My mother is Mad Science!
Don’t dress me in that trope! It won’t fit!
IV.
Say my name. Say my name.
In Ursula hides an urge.
I live in whatever world I want. Sea birds
scream on deck as my black hair traps jetstreams.
Thunderclap ripped birth into my body,
like surgery in reverse. Purple killed white
as I spilled myself through my tight
wedding dress.
V.
Wind blows eyes open, fire signs the scroll.
Can you blame me? I wanted to play,
they wouldn’t let me. It was my turn
to try the trident, stir the sea;
water rewound like a redacted vow.
VI.
Charybdis flung the gold rings back to ore.
Every sundial lies. Only a whirlpool
can tell time, devour hours.
Haha, precious Ariel! Counting seconds before dusk.
Days nest into weeks, months into years.
Yes, time is invisible, but the end stills pulls
her, me, all of us, like an underwater waterfall.
VII.
I died, but it was not for naught.
As the sea burned, my death fed
eye-less nits burrowed in silt.
Now I’m marooned on lunar sand
so taut & dry I can’t cry.
I miss ocean, my hammock of tide,
coral reef under feet.
I miss the tickle of gills.
Crying underwater is underrated.
I hope Ariel tattoos fins on her wrist
so she never forgets the price of fame.
VIII.
From here I watch it all spin—
Earth’s secret moons, coronet of sun.
I know now why the globe is a ball—
orbs can roll away, always stay lost.
Margot reads "Autobiography of Ursula":
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Margot confesses:"Does a criminal differ from a villain? Which one has more cultural currency for women? Watching The Little Mermaid with my niece, I wondered if isolation drove Ursula's depravity. My poem, divided into eight sections representing the witch's limbs, imagines her motivations, contours, and contradictions."
MARGOT DOUAIHY, PhD, is the author of “Scranton Lace” and “Girls Like You,” both published by Clemson University Press. Her true-crime poetry project, Bandit Queen: The Runaway Story of Belle Starr, is forthcoming with Clemson University Press. Douaihy’s work has been featured in PBS NewsHour, The Colorado Review, North American Review, The Tahoma Review, The Wisconsin Review, and The Petigru Review. She is the editor of the Northern New England Review.
This past week, Five-Two alum Aja Beech asked me to contribute a poem with a Philadelphia connection for Poetry Month at the Kensington Neighborhood Library.
I chose "Prayer for the Man Who Mugged My Father, 72" by Charles Harper Webb, who was born in Philadelphia. I reprinted Webb's poem with permission in the 2011 fourth chapbook of The Lineup: Poems on Crime series that preceded The Five-Two.
My contribution and commentary appeared on the library's Facebook page last night. Thanks again to Aja and supervisor of the library's Adult/Teen section Sara S. Palmer.
As a bonus, here's Keith Snyder's April 30, 2011 dramatic reading of Webb's poem. Keith will also be reading the May 18-24, 2020 Five-Two poem "CA" by Ron Riekki, about playground basketball in the time of COVID-19.
She rises at two a.m., the night outside the trailer
black over white with shivering stars. She blames
her sleeplessness on that day, years back, when
her horoscope read, "Gemini—as Jupiter enters
your fourth house, watch for your hero to appear."
That night there he was, helping push the prom
queen's car out of a snowy ditch.
Her car. Her reign.
She stands at the kitchen window, Dutch oven
crusted in the sink before her, cigarette hand
dangling from crossed arms. The bruises on
her arm had deepened to match her auburn hair.
She will stay up the rest of the night rather than
return to a bed covered with her grandmother's
quilt: Celtic squares, for luck. There her hero
sprawls, dreaming of blowsy women and new trucks,
trophy deer and touchdowns, dreams he insists
on relating with his morning eggs and bourbon.
She has turpentined creosote from his coveralls
for the last time, she has packed her last olive loaf
sandwich, she has jacked her last stream of jism.
What use has she now for a hero? Her wedding
dress went into the burn barrel a week ago, the
yearbook and tiara are packed. She is ready to
wedge open the propane valve, knowing he
will fire up a Camel before getting out of bed.
If her cousin Jewel comes through with the
promised ticket, she's on the 7 a.m. bus, gone
in search of her empire at last.
Tom reads "Prom Queen":
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Tom confesses:"I've spent many an hour cycling through the backroads of Southern Ohio, and seen the squallor that many young people have fallen into in a world that glorifies coarse living, lack of jobs and the ubiquity of narcotics. I doubt many of these people saw themselves headed here while in high school. They must have had dreams. We all do. The question is, how long can you tolerate it?"
TOM BARLOW also writes crime fiction, which may be found in anthologies including Best American Mystery Stories 2013, Dames and Sin, and Plan B Omnibus and periodicals including Switchblade, Red Room, Pulp Modern, Heater, Plots With Guns, Mystery Weekly, Needle, Thuglit, Mystery Tribune and Tough. His crime short story collection Odds of Survival is available on Amazon. See more at tombarlowauthor.com.
"Mrs. Allagash is here," Violet my secretary buzzes from the outer office, I say, "Gimme a minute," eager to tell my stunningly wealthy client how I’d confronted her husband about his plans to eighty-six her, how in the ensuing brawl I took a kick to the gut, a punch to the ear drum which still rings and rings, how we tangled over a .38, how he took 1-2-3 bullets and flatlined, I say, “Gimme a minute,” eager to tell Mrs. Allagash she was free of her greedy spouse, eager to ask her if she’d like to celebrate, night on the town, she deserves it, why not, I need that minute to check my teeth, shake the weasel, do a few pushups on the floor of the can, fix my satin tie, check for bats in the cave, blow my nose, then march to the outer door, and there’s the nubile widow splendid and platinum, and she raises her gloved hand and I raise mine to shake it, and at the same moment we both see the wet toilet paper pieces left wadded on my fingers. "I...," I say, "Gimme a minute, I..."
Richie reads "...Death #4"
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Richie confesses:"I recently re-saw Jack Palance's 1955 movie I Died a Thousand Times, and it made me wonder about what each particular death could be. This poem's death was inspired by something that happened to a friend, yeah, that's it, a friend."
RICHIE NARVAEZ is the author of the anthology Roachkiller and Other Stories and the urban thriller Hipster Death Rattle. His next book, the YA historical mystery Holly Hernandez and the Death of Disco, is due out in May.
For Day 5 of 30 Days of The Five-Two, my thanks to frequent contributor Charles Rammelkamp for this commentary —Gerald So
Written with incantatory power, “Just Shoot ‘Em” highlights the shame of crime and punishment in the United States in which the punishment is so often the crime, especially in the context of our national stain of racism. The repetition of the phrase, “shoot ‘em” hammers home the injustice, the inhumanity. Faye Turner-Johnson’s anger, despair and disgust are on vivid display as the poem repeats the phrase, over and over like a drum beat, brutal as a blunt object.
Turner-Johnson does not even have to mention the names – Stephon Clark, shot by police in Sacramento holding a cellphone, Walter Scott, shot down running from a policeman in Charleston, Philando Castile shot by a cop reaching for his registration in a Minnesota suburb, Botham Jean, killed by a police officer while sitting on his own couch in Dallas, Atatiana Jefferson, shot by police while playing a video game with her nephew in Fort Wayne – as she
lists the litany of horrors and injustice that seem to occur daily in America, as frequently as mass shootings. We’re already too familiar with these instances of people simply “seeking justice and freedom in America.” Just shoot ‘em, shoot ‘em dead.
April is National Poetry Month, as "inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996. Over the years, it has become the largest literary celebration in the world with schools, publishers, libraries, booksellers, and poets celebrating poetry’s vital place in our culture."
The Five-Two joins the celebration with a month-long blog tour. Since this year's COVID-19 outbreak has affected scheduling, I'd appreciate if you simply link to any Five-Two poems you enjoy on your social media. I hope your followers share links with their followers, and so on, promoting poetry in general and The Five-Two specifically.
We will feature four debut Poems of the Week and any guest posts contributed in preparation for or during the tour itself. If you wish to post any Five-Two-related material, email me a link to your entry or the entry itself to post here.
Also challenge yourself to write poems and submit to The Five-Two by April 23 (Shakespeare's birthday). Accepted poems will be published in May and beyond.
The official hashtag of National Poetry Month is #nationalpoetrymonth. Our specific Twitter hashtag is #30OfThe52.
Participants and promoters of the tour may download the badge image above and add it to their entries or follow these instructions to copy-and-paste the image HTML code.
All April revenue from Five-Two and Lineup books and merchandise is donated to the nonprofit Academy of American Poets, supporting poets at all stages of their careers and fostering the appreciation of contemporary poetry.
Wednesday, April 1 -
Thursday, April 2 -
Friday, April 3 -
Saturday, April 4 -
Sunday, April 5 - Charles Rammelkamp on Faye Turner-Johnson's "Just Shoot 'Em"
He goes to the rugby field
and draws swastikas, Stars of David
and the ever-popular “Suck D*c.”
As a gay man I wonder about
the “Suck D*c.” The bad spelling
advertises his fantasy
he writes out large in public—
a coming out
even if he thinks he’s staying in.
Naturally, accompanied by pictures
of guy genitals. Maybe
if he spells it wrong, the truth
slips away. Instead, it turns
the field into his own gay bar,
private in public, says who
he really is. Hating who he is,
he wears the latest swastika,
a popular design now. Lil’ Redd,
like Little Red Riding Hood who entered
a stomach to await rescue. Come out,
Lil’ Redd, there’s work to be done.
Ken reads "Lil' Redd":
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Ken confesses:"Hate crimes are getting more numerous in the age of Trump. Vandals are drawn to symbols of hate. This particular vandal included gay-hating designs/language. I take it personally. Perhaps he doth protest too much—and his fury at gay people is a fury of what he fears in himself."
KENNETH POBO has a new book out from Clare Songbirds Publishing House called The Antlantis Hit Parade. He has work forthcoming in: Switchback, Other Terrain, Trinity Review, Total Eclipse, and more.
E.F. Slattery is a freelance editor (mostly of mysteries) living in New York, and has been published in Poetry, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Criminal Element, and Crimespree Magazine. She offered the following commentary when I mentioned on Twitter 30 Days of The Five-Two was open to songs. Follow her @EFSlattery. —Gerald So
"I’m not a normal man," Stevie Wonder told Oprah in a 2004 interview, and his 1973 classic,
from the Grammy-award winning Innervisions album, isn't a normal song; it's a compressed, layered, tightly wound work of storytelling that does extraordinary things with language. It's a poem—and, at its center, the protagonist is framed for a crime he didn't commit.
From the opening line, "A boy is born in hard-time Mississippi," you're dropped into the chronicle of a specific family; through the first four verses, parental strength and love insulate a small boy and his siblings from the systemic racism of pre-1964 Mississippi. (The first three lines of the first four verses scan as iambic pentameter; you get a sense of comfort, repetition, security.) Wonder's specific details—"His father works some days for fourteen hours"; "His mother goes to scrub the floors for many"—were the lived truth for families in the Great Migration. In her 2010 book, which takes its title from this song, Rutgers Professor Donna Jean Murch describes this sense of loss that accompanies the family’s struggle: "The melancholy of Stevie Wonder's ‘Living for the City’ comes not only from the displacement of migration but the recognition that the longed for escape from Jim Crow had not materialized.”1 The rhythm of the last line, "Living just enough, just enough for the city," is where the internal structure of the line breaks, and you get a series of trochees that disrupt the stability and underscore the obvious tensions and questions: Will the family make it? Will this central character make it?
The song's narrative trajectory places the children on a collision course with the disillusionment and racial injustice Murch describes:
Her brothe'’s smart; he's got more sense than many
His patience's long, but soon he won’t have any
To find a job is like a haystack needle
Because where he lives they don’t use colored people
Living just enough, just enough for the city
“Haystack needle” is a phrase Shakespeare would’ve stolen if he could: it hits you with trochaic punch and alacrity, and you’re likely to never forget it. Wonder’s language, rhythm, and characters in the first half of the song evoke Robert Hayden’s 1966 poem, "Those Winter Sundays":
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
In the second half of “Living for the City,” the song shifts out of the rhyme and rhythm of the first four minutes, rooted in 12-bar blues, and into a spoken interlude—the story within the story. The little boy held in his family’s embrace in the first verse becomes a young man framed for a crime, moments after arriving in New York City. The economy of language in the first half of the song mirrors Wonder’s narrative speed, and, in seconds, you hear the young man’s awe—“Wow, New York, just like I pictured it / skyscrapers and everything”—undercut by sirens and a hasty invitation to run something across the street for five dollars. Awe instantly becomes panic and disbelief: “Hell no, what did I do?” New voices entering the song, including those of the bus driver, the drug runner who frames the young man, the white police officers, white judge, and racist white jailer (who yells a racial epithet), are immediate and disorienting.
By this point in the song (which runs over seven minutes long), you’re riveted as a listener not only by the commentary—as damning today as in 1973—but by Wonder’s lyricism, power, and narrative and linguistic compression. In seconds, the young man is arrested, booked, and sentenced to ten years in prison; in the last image we have of him, in the second to last verse, “[h]is hair is long / his feet are hard and gritty / He spends his life walking the streets of New York City.” The narrative arc plunges as far down as you can go. Living just enough for the city is impossible: “He tried and fought but to him there’s no solution.”
Epic in scope, “Living for the City” is a remarkable migration narrative that tracks the progress of a single young man from birth in the Deep South to near the end of his life, in New York. It’s an indictment of systemic racism, a song of innocence and experience, and a nesting doll of a story within a story. I’m always awestruck by the power of this song to stop the listener in their tracks, and the more I listen to it, and the more of its layers I peel back, the more it reveals of Wonder’s musical genius, prowess as a poet, and strength as a storyteller of Black experience. It’s worth noting that Wonder’s voice in the last two verses is raw, hoarse, and shouting, that of a prophet issuing a warning: the song ends, "Stop giving just enough for the city." —E.F. Slattery
1 Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2010) 230.
Her cornrows braided with baubles
the young girl sits between her mom and
her grandmother on a shabby sofa
drapes drawn, one bulb lighting the room
all of them sobbing as she explains
she’d wanted money to buy candy
so for a quarter she let neighbor boys put
their hands in her panties, but older
boys from Spring Street gave her
a dollar and raped her behind a dumpster.
Nancy reads "For Want of a Dollar":
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Nancy confesses:"As a caseworker for the State of New Jersey, I saw on a daily basis how poverty impacted lives in ways we, who don’t have to worry about putting dinner on the table, can hardly imagine. This was a good, church-going family. None of the boys was ever charged."
NANCY SCOTT has been managing editor of U.S.1 Worksheets for more than a decade. She is also the author of nine books of poetry and a novella, Marriage by Fire (Big Top Publishing Company, 2018). Before she retired and turned to writing, she had a long career as a social worker for the State of New Jersey which informed and inspired many of her poems. Originally from the Chicago area, she has resided in New Jersey for many years. www.nancyscott.net
As I lay here devastated, humiliated and degraded,
I try to reminisce of a time I didn't feel hated.
Any good memories all seem to fade,
I try so hard, but your hateful words stayed.
My feelings are hurt, my confidence is shot,
a laugh at your expense, but my misery is what it brought.
I don’t think I am good enough, it’s hard to look in the mirror,
you make me want to just give up, I've never felt so inferior.
I used to be scared to die but now it doesn’t seem so bad,
at least you won’t have the satisfaction of laughing when I’m sad.
I didn’t want this for myself, I used to be full of joy and whit,
I had goals and dreams for my future, but you’ve now ruined it.
I just can’t go on living this way where each day is a nightmare.
I’m one step away from being a social media story you share.
You may laugh it up now, thinking it’s all in good fun,
not knowing your slowing pulling the trigger to my dad’s gun.
I know I’m barely a teen, but I can no longer deal with all the teasing,
Is that what you want? To kill an innocent kid for no reason?
You may think what you say or do means nothing,
but you will see how much it really hurt me, when you read my obituary,
and know that I wasn’t bluffing.
Sincerely,
Bullied
Erin reads "Dear Bully":
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Erin confesses:"This poem is meant to give a voice to all the young children who have committed suicide due to depression caused by bullying. In February 2019, an 8-year-old boy hung himself because of bullying. After watching the story on the news, I was in tears. I just felt the urge to write. I took out my phone and began typing, and within five minutes the poem was finished."
ERIN BRYANT is a mother of three from Louisville, Kentucky.
"She was beautiful. This was not her opinion; it was as close to being a fact as beauty can be.” – Jo Nesbo, The Leopard
When the police arrested Crawford and his stepdaughter
at the Mexico border, they’d been convinced
they’d pulled off the perfect crime.
Crawford’s wife – Belinda’s mother –
had been stabbed to death in Columbus
by a panhandler to whom she’d offered a ten-dollar bill,
while she and her husband waited at a stoplight.
The panhandler held a sign that read,
“Please help me feed my baby.”
A woman with an infant stood nearby in the rain.
Crawford rushed his wife to the hospital
but she couldn’t be saved.
“The woman actually said, ‘God bless you,’”
the tearful widower told the cops,
but something about his story sounded fishy –
details, like the location, kept changing.
The story made the national news –
Oprah did a cautionary feature story.
Everywhere people started throwing trash
at the people standing at streetcorners
holding “Homeless” signs,
convinced they were swindlers, conmen.
When Crawford fled with the stepdaughter,
driving away with everything but a “Just Married” sign
trailing from the bumper,
authorities sent an alert out all across the nation.
The Texas highway patrol stopped them
at the Brownsville border, Crawford breaking down,
looking at Belinda through tear-blinded eyes.
“She’s just so beautiful,” he sobbed.
Charles reads "The Fatal Wound":
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Charles confesses:"In Baltimore, recently, a man and his stepdaughter tried to frame a homeless person in the murder of the man’s wife, which the man – a convicted bank robber – had committed himself. A nationwide backlash against the vulnerable homeless followed. The man and his stepdaughter were arrested trying to cross into Mexico."
CHARLES RAMMELKAMP is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. A chapbook of poems, Jack Tar’s Lady Parts, is available from Main Street Rag Publishing. Another poetry chapbook, Me and Sal Paradise, was recently published by FutureCycle Press. An e-chapbook has also recently been published online Time Is on My Side (yes it is).
For Day 6 of our National Poetry Month blog tour, commentary from frequent contributor Charles Rammelkamp. —Gerald So
Nancy Scott’s “That Alternative Universe” is full of the pathos and smoldering outrage you will find in her poetry collection, Running Down Broken Cement, which basically covers the same ground, narrative and lyric poems about her life as a social worker, investigating cases of child abuse. In this poem, she describes the usual process of interview and denial on the part of the abuser, the implicit shame on the part of his wife, the enabling bystander. The criminal here is a chemical engineer for a “multi-national company,” from which we infer that he is educated, middle class, a “normal citizen,” we’d like to think. All the more reason for his wife to demand that the case worker interview the husband in the basement and park her car – probably with official insignia on the fender or hood – discretely away from their home, so the neighbors won’t suspect anything.
But that’s just the first part. The man, who has been molesting a four-year old (I was sure it was his daughter, but re-reading the poem I can’t be sure), is eventually caught after a repeat incident and thrown into prison. But the case worker – the narrator – goes to an appointment with her therapist (and who is surprised she needs therapy?) only to learn that he, the doctor, the person who is there to help her, is just as big a creep as the child molester. He tells his patient that for fun he takes the train to Philly, loaded up with his photographic equipment, where he tries to get young women to pose for him for “outdoor glamour shots.” He promises free photos “if they come to his studio, wonders why they never / show up. Not even a call to cancel, he complains.”
So many lines have been crossed already in the narrator’s experience, but this one feels like a real violation. But where’s the actual crime in the revelation of the therapist’s character?
I'm getting a migraine. I'm tired of dealing with creeps,
especially this one in whom I've confided.
When he asks if I'm coming back next week, I say, Yes.
No need to explain why he'll never see me again.
Not even a call to cancel! Wonder why?
The title is curious. Does it refer to the purely “abnormal” that is on display all over this poem? Or is it specific to one of the characters? Alternative to what universe? I love that title; it alone makes you read the poem several more times. —Charles Rammelkamp
Was it-
the him and her-
were they-
dying a slow death
or
were they dead already-
long dead-
and
it was just a matter
of waiting
for the bodies
to decompose?
Paul Churchill Mann reads "Dying a Slow Death":
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J.H. confesses:"I try to expose myself to as much information as possible. At the same time, I work hard not to make value-judgments about the info. Then, sometimes, maybe, it just comes to me. Of course, in my case, that means having notepads, pens, etc, around me- and within reach at all times. Because, it is fleeting- whatever you want to call it- put it down or else it will be gone."
J.H. JOHNS "grew up and came of age" while living in East Tennessee and Middle Georgia. Specifically, the two places "responsible" for the writer that he has become are Knoxville, Tennessee and Milledgeville, Georgia. Since then, he has moved on to Chicago—for a brief stint—and New York City—for a significantly longer stay. Currently, he is "holed up" in a small town where when he is not writing, he tends to his "nature preserve" and his "back forty." His goal is to surround his house with all sorts of vegetation so as to obscure it from the gaze of the "locals." He is assisted in this task by his coonhound buddy and companion, Roma.
Our 2018 National Poetry Month tour concludes tomorrow with our Poem of the Week April 30–May 5, "Body Language" by Susan Barry-Schulz.
Today. Mystery Playground features "Her Beheading" by Anne Graue, and I want to use this space to thank all the participants and fans of this year's tour. Souvenirs are available 20% off today in my Zazzle store, with all proceeds donated to the nonprofit Academy of American Poets, supporting poets at all stages of their careers.
I first read "The Colonel" in a college Intro to American Poetry class where Forché was the youngest poet covered. The poem's barbaric image of a jar of human ears has stayed with me.
