Houdini
Straitjacketed,
dangling
from a construction
crane,
Harry Houdini,
above 46th
and Broadway:
two small navel
oranges
roll on the
newspaper editor's desk.
“Death, be not
proud,
though some have
called thee.”
Would you like some
grapes instead?
The cats watch out
the screen door and
wonder
where all the
bicycle people have gotten to.
I have a slightly
competitive friend
from Greece who
says I will never
make it unless I
enter the chamber
of the honeysuckle.
I eat from a jar of
mixed nuts,
drink sparkling
water.
The Grand Canyon
is still right
where it was.
I make a conscious
effort
not to sink.
Whenever I see
Houdini's photograph,
his screams echo
off walls
of brick and steel.
Song
of September
The skeletons were
sprouting
sky-blue flowers
from their
fingertips.
One skeleton asked
me, “ça va?”
The
skeletons drank white wine
from
big green jugs. The wine
splashed
through their rib cages
and
over their coccyges
and drenched the
polyester thatch
of the lawn chairs
they scraped
across the concrete
patio
in the dwindling
peach sunlight.
Most of the
skeletons
were tenured and
laughed
at each other's
bones in modern German.
Even though I was a
new adjunct,
they invited me to
their party,
and through a
misinterpretation of their invitation,
I brought my
children
which visibly upset
the department chair skeleton
and made her drop
all her sky-blue flowers
prematurely into a red
earthenware bowl
made by New Mexican
artisans.
Still, I spoke
boldly of my love
of the orchard.
Overripebananas
A table full. What
now? Muffins?
Smoothies? Bread?
Liqueur?
It's Sunday. The
orange kitten sleeps
in the laundry
basket. Try to move him,
you get a wrist
full of claws.
I sit by an open
window. Crickets sing
after a rain. A
baby locust tree grows
all thorny in the
middle of the back yard.
Won't you be my
neighbour?
Music from the
Kasbah plays on the radio.
The kitten kicks
back and falls asleep.
A good example. God
is with us:
black bananas mixed
to a paste
in a stainless
steel bowl,
vanilla, cinnamon.
We adopt
a black Labrador
named Mother.
Sarah's hair is
apricot flames.
Jules sketches
pictures of alpacas
who are the hippies
of the animal kingdom.
Banana pancakes,
safe deposit boxes
full of frosted
banana nut bars.
I visit Nebraska
and bring Mexican
jumping beans from
Stuckey's.
I bring pecan nut
rolls.
The orange kitten
watches
the beans jump and
bounce and roll.
He swats them
across the kitchen floor.
I hear cows mooing.
I have a table
full of overripe
bananas.
I have a fridge
full of expired milk,
black olives,
transistor radio batteries,
acrylic paints, and
master copies
of the Mona Lisa.
I saw them sitting
together
at the poetry
reading, plugged
drain and Mr.
Plunger,
sniggering about
his “way
too high” poem the
college
girls adored.
Simultaneously, I was
contemplating a
fundraiser for
my impossible
health insurance premiums
and also a
fundraiser to have me put down
at the vet, curious
to see
which fundraiser
filled first.
Thankfully, I was
distracted
by a friend who was
constantly
haunted by his
girlfriend who
suddenly spoke to
me in a crystal chime
in my right ear. I
told him
what I heard and he
was pleased
and said he never
felt lonely
anymore. When it
was my turn
to read, they (the
cafe) cut the
lights on stage and
I had to guess at
everything
in the darkness,
mumbling deranged
utterances into the
braille of the
microphone. A
former student told
me afterwards I had
never sounded
more confident and
clear and
entertaining, like
I was a muffler loose
on a pickup truck,
dangling and
sparking on the
pavement
in the night.
The
Make No Sense Room
is where my tribe
will dwell
at the end of time.
We carry
that room inside us
now and the
long corridors that
connect that
room with all the
other nonsense
rooms there ever
were. Our fathers
stumble out of them
and wander
in the rain looking
for a late
night bi-carb at a
24 hour
pharmacy;
vaporizers, camphor,
cherry cough drops,
ex-lax,
small cans of
Hormel chili and
cellophane packages
of oyster
crackers. It is the
flu of doom; I
am Swiss cheese
talking to
the flash of a
cherry-top ambulance
fainting into the
fog of February 1964,
the sky no joke,
Jesus so much
more popular than
an insect, and
my mom drinks crème
de menthe
after stirring it
with her crucifix,
and I am Chaucer
clipping his toe-
nails and vomiting
Lithium 7-Up
and Campbell's
chicken noodle. I
will close my eyes
and you will
never find me; I
will skip
a century. I will
skip two.
public radio
classical
november 6 pm pitch
black
nativity of
darkness
train heaving over
rails
stirring a single
can
of Campbell's
chicken noodle
Joshua Bell plays
many notes
on his violin
meanwhile
my friend my friend
my friend
mirror or the land
of dreams
upside-down puddles
of starlight
someone plays a
drum over and
over as if asking
to enter the house
of life
too wrecked with
hostility
someone showed me
the handwriting
of a holy man today
it was
a neat and legible
cursive in English
as if he had
eternity to accomplish
his desires when he
died they
shaved his head and
beard and
set his body
upright as if to
receive guests for
a lecture Afterward
there was a long
ceremony many people
gathered in boats
to drop
his ashes
into
the
river
Silence, Earthling
The entire English
Department
was high on angel
dust,
which was scary as
hell
as they bragged
about it
at their public
reading
while swilling
goblets
of Merlot
as their devoted
undergraduates
shrieked
like approving
vampire bats.
The faculty was
edgy,
in your face,
dressed like
organic farmers
in their Sunday
best
as the
cappuccino machine
performed multiple
acts
of oral sex
and the barista
smirked
and mixed froth
like a demented
scientist.
In his Spider-Man
onesie, the
department chairman
thrust his hands
into his armpits
and led everyone in
the German
duck waddle
dance.
He unabashedly
relieved himself
in his PJs,
the urine stain
like an old school
television test
pattern
radiating out a
hammer and sickle mandala.
I decided I was
just too old for this shit
so
I stumbled home
slobbering like a
sheepdog.
Rustin Larson’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, and North American Review. He won 1st Editor’s Prize from Rhino and was a prize winner in The National Poet Hunt and The Chester H. Jones Foundation contests. A graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Writing, Larson was an Iowa Poet at The Des Moines National Poetry Festival, and a featured poet at the Poetry at Round Top Festival.
He is a poetry professor at Maharishi University, a writing instructor at Kirkwood Community College, and has also been a writing instructor at Indian Hills Community College.
Among his published books are Library Rain, Conestoga Zen Press, 2019 which was named a February 2019 Exemplar by Grace Cavalieri and reviewed in The Washington Independent Review of Books; Howling Enigma, Conestoga Zen Press, 2018; Pavement, Blue Light Press, 2017; The Philosopher Savant, Glass Lyre Press, 2015; Bum Cantos, Winter Jazz, & The Collected Discography of Morning, Blue Light Press, 2013; The Wine-Dark House, Blue Light Press, 2009; and Crazy Star, Loess Hills Books, 2005.
His honours and awards also include Pushcart Prize Nominee (seven times, 1988-2010); featured writer, DMACC Celebration of the Literary Arts, 2007, 2008; and finalist, New England Review Narrative Poetry Competition, 1985.
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