Robert Cooperman

FELONY ADULTERY

Adultery isn't a felony, unless, of course,
you want to end your marriage and avoid
paying your wronged wife any alimony:
what the brother of a college friend had
in his twisted mind, when he fell for
a beautiful woman young enough
to be the daughter who refuses to talk to him.

Frank's idea: pay someone to, as he called it,
"Take care of Louise," otherwise known as murder.
He met the killer under the 42nd Street Library
stone lions, and brought a briefcase stuffed with cash.
The assassin? An FBI agent wired to catch
everything Frank said, then cuff him quicker
than Houdini escaping a filled water tank.

He spent the next ten years in prison,
his brother Lloyd lamenting, "No one died!"
which showed loyalty, even if for a scumbag;
Frank's lover sang her ignorance at the trial.

Me? I'd have sent him away for life,
having met Frank's wife, a kind, generous soul,
who happened not to be beautiful or bad.


Steve Peacock reads "Felony Adultery":



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Cooperman confesses: "I changed the names of the characters in 'Felony Adultery', to protect the guilty and the innocent, but this actually happened. After many years, I recently saw this friend again, and we talked about the incident, both of us shaking our heads over, aside from the horror of trying to contract a murder, how abysmally stupid his brother was.

ROBERT COOPERMAN's latest collection is Just Drive (Brick Road Poetry Press). He won the Colorado Book Award for In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains, a trilogy of tales about the gold boom towns of the 1860s and '70s.

Catfish McDaris

LEFT HOOK TONY

For Tony Szolwinski -- gone, but never forgotten.

Tony was 93, he used to box
all through World War 2, he
punched & fought, fists & guns

As he got older, he liked wood
working, building bird houses,
carving fishing lures & ducks

He taught me to find mushrooms,
how to use certain tools, & how
to throw a punch & dodge one

Tony called me & said he had a
problem, he needed my help with,
I came immediately, there were
2 knocked out cold black guys

Bleeding on his kitchen floor, he
said he’d been working in his shop
in the basement & these 2 bastards
were eating his oxtail soup

They’d told Tony, to hit the road
before they whipped his ass,
Tony hit them with a deluge

He wanted me to help drag them
outside & clean up their blood,
before his wife got home from bingo

I called the cops, Lorraine, Tony's
wife got home from church & took
one look & hit the ceiling, I tried to

Slip out & make a clean get away,
that's when I was told I was a bad
influence, the cops looked at Tony
& I & we all cracked up laughing.


Steve Peacock reads "Left Hook Tony":



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Catfish confesses: "Tony Szolwinski was my neighbor for 15 years. He was a tough old bird, that died in March 2014. Tony had three sons that all hated each other, each of them had names that started with R. I asked him what if he would've had a fourth son. Tony said he'd name him Rumplestiltskin. I miss my friend."

CATFISH MCDARIS has been published widely, in The Louisiana Review, George Mason University Press, and New Coin from Rhodes University in South Africa. He's recently been translated into French, Polish, Swedish, Arabic, Bengali, Tagalog, and Esperanto. His twenty-five years of published material is in the Special Archives Collection at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.