August 3: Opening Ceremonies, Kyle Dargan, "Olympic Drive"

Well, in two days the Summer Olympics in Rio kick off with the Opening Ceremonies.

I'm not usually a fan of sports.  I go to high school football games in the fall simply to see my daughter play in the marching band.  I watch the Super Bowl for the commercials.  However, I love watching the Olympics.  I think it has to do with the combination of competition and cultures.  Learning about a country's history and people.

Well, I came across a poem by Kyle Dargan that I thought was about the Olympics.  It's not.  It's about race and poverty and the end of the world.  Another quasi science fiction poem.  It's a great poem, but has little to do with the Olympics.

Saint Marty thinks there should be an Olympic event in poetry.  How about a sonnet slam?  Or a villanelle vault?  Haiku high jump?

Olympic Drive

by:  Kyle Dargan

Across from the gorgeous dog park,

men dream against poodle-pissed trees — 

their pillows made from breath captured

in milk cartons. Only arid, temperate

climate offers respite. Let us suppose

they have tales, here in this city

where filmed stories turn a mint.

All around, one wide screen — the dark hills

due north pixel-pocked with villa lights.

Below, streets hemmed with haggard

brown men — jack-in-the-box bodies

ever unfolding. Who is pitching

this script? Title: “The Child of 1968.”

Voiceover: After the Integration Apocalypse,

one man must find his way in a land

where the sole survivors who look or speak

like him are those rendered disturbed

and indigent. Assume the Motion Picture

Association eager to levy a “Rated R,”

then remember that those who judge

violence never shared your definition

of savagery. A culling is all your eyes

decipher — your herd thinned. No urban

wildlife anywhere to be found,

yet hunger for a hunt remains.

Tagline: A hero must choose — 

between starving or bartering one’s own

skin. Plot: Amidst the solar famine, bio-

electric studies revealed melanin’s subtle

charge — the brown population gone

mad from being sapped like CopperTops.

Imagine The Matrix without the extra-

terrestrial machines. Imagine that among us

there have lived men churning statistics,

devising a human harvest, a brutal method

to subsist off fellow men and leave their bones

for the gnawing of next century’s mutts.

July 11: Messed Up Place, Poet of the Week, Jericho Brown, "Dear Dr. Frankenstein"

The world is kind of a messed up place right now, if you haven't noticed.  Police officers are getting shot in the streets of Dallas.  A reality TV star is going to be the Republican nominee for President of the United States.  Two Broke Girls is still on TV.  Isis.  Terror threats.  Body parts washing up on the beaches in Rio where the Summer Olympics are scheduled to begin in less than a month.

It takes a poet, sometimes, to make sense of senseless situations.  Jericho Brown is my choice for Poet of the Week.  He was also recently Rita Dove's pick as one of the poets under 40 to watch.  Brown writes about race and sexuality and gender.  He's as concerned about our messed up world as I am.

Sometimes, Saint Marty thinks that God just shakes His head at the world and thinks, "I could have done better."  Just ask Jericho Brown.

Dear Dr. Frankenstein

by:  Jericho Brown

I, too, know the science of building men

Out of fragments in little light

Where I'll be damned if lightning don't

Strike as I forget one 

May have a thief's thumb,

Another, a murderer's arm,

And watch the men I've made leave

Like an idea I meant to write down, 

Like a vehicle stuck

In reverse, like the monster

God came to know the moment 

Adam named animals and claimed 

Eve, turning from heaven to her

As if she was his

To run. No word he said could be tamed.

No science. No design. Nothing taken 

Gently into his hand or your hand or mine, 

Nothing we erect is our own.

February 29: Fall Like Adam, Leap Day, Poet of the Week, Matt Gavin Frank

I am puffed clay, blown up and set down.  That I fall like Adam is not surprising.  I plunge, waft, arc, pour, and dive.  The surprise is how good the wind feels on my face as I fall.  And the other surprise is that I ever rise at all.  I rise when I receive, like grass.

Falling and rising.  Like Adam on that apple day, making a choice, accepting the consequences.  With one bite of that naked fruit, he sentenced Annie Dillard and me and you to a lifetime of falling, plunging, wafting, arcing, pouring, diving.  That's what life is:  a constant lesson in falling and learning how to rise, reaching down and then up again.

Today is Leap Day.  February 29.  It happens once every four years.  Always in a presidential election year in the United States.  Always in a Summer Olympics year.  On February 29, you're supposed to make a leap, do something you normally wouldn't do.  Sometimes, like Adam, you fall.  And then you pick yourself up, add some water, and turn your face upward.  Toward the sun.

This morning, it was snowing.  Blowing.  Cars were in the ditch, on top of snowbanks.  It felt like a day when something bad could happen.  Or good.  That was my state all day.  Waiting for something bad or good to come my way.  And I waited.  And waited.

I did not make a conscious leap today.  In the past, I've bought weird hats to wear.  Worn strange earrings.  Gone on trips.  Instead, I went to work and started taking an online class.  Nothing earth-shattering.  I haven't taken a class in a long, long time.  Don't like following other people's schedules, I guess.  Perhaps that's my leap today:  I am a student for the next four weeks.  For better or worse.

Hopefully, I will rise, not fall.

This week, I choose Matt Gavin Frank as Poet of the Week.  Matt is a friend of mine, a writer who always takes chances, makes leaps.

Saint Marty hopes you take the leap with him. 

Elegy for the Whitefish

by:  Matt Gavin Frank

The grandfather, surrounded by Illinois doves,
does not see his wife in the rowboat.  She imagines

smothering him in his sleep, his hair pulling off
with the pillowcase.  The greenest feather

remembers the earth.

The whitefish dive, their beds behind them. 
Women, tighter than glass, forget,

happy...

They raise their fingers before their hands,
whitefish hanging in the seaweed, throat

and spine disown their avenue, begin
to take in air.

Down the street, the synagogue closes its doors,
Rabbi Kaminker packing blue prayer books

into a blue duffel bag.  My grandparents can no longer
buy him lunch, but they still remember the pink

of his wrists.

He holds his son to the radiator vent.  Mrs. Papier
upstairs singing a Polish opera.  In the morning,

he writes my family name on a piece of yellow paper.
He forgets to prepare breakfast,

writing and writing.