Five Poems by Irene Cunningham

 

 

STEAMPUNK GOLIATHS 

 

We’re not adrenalin junkies

mad hatters swallowing or breathing in

the general poison     we’re users

following the snake-y path because it grips like a bastard.

Danger brings the actual world within an inch

of an end and your gut yells for bloody glory.

Hanging     swinging from ropes between trucks

with monster wheels in messy motion

air above us guzzles sooty smoke.

Living in the phase     dealing one thing at a time

they slip into past tense     we survived.

Next matter opens its maw.

Easy to fall in when everyone lives on edges.

Only the fearful lock themselves away     why wouldn’t

we prefer to perish on wild adventures

learning from ancients     re-forging methods of mastering

what had never sidled into our peripheral?

The previously invisible knocks us off our roller blades.

Bed-bugs can’t be a choice.

I want many hats     safety boots with steel toe-caps

and clever rubber pumps to leap from tall buildings

in startling bounds     land     stand projecting the art

of momentary bliss & relief.

 

 

INSTALLATION 

 

You may think it’s inspiring:

2hr shifts three times a day in a drafty

museum, art gallery, selected free spaces.

It’s Hell on feet in pale pink

ballet slippers; the girlhood dream

doesn’t fit this faction.

Standing still as a stuffed corpse isn’t

right for a living human body.

I don’t know how my brain

talked me into it… I thought

I was intelligent; it was probably

the long, fluffy, white peacock feathers.

Wings! Enormous angel-like wings.

I fell… so in love… wanted to sleep

curled into them on a giant

specially-built bed, swaddled, safe.

I don’t believe in angels, but

white feathers cast magic. The pull

of flight into, under and over clouds

up there in the expanse of sky spaces;

I never wanted to be a rainbow.

The cotton fluff of clouds and birds

buoyant on thermals capture me.

How elegant are swans? That gliding

beauty is what royalty covet, and it’s only

the singular ballerina who mirrors it

successfully. I wanted to be a tree.

Now I prepare myself to be a swan,

afterwards.

 

 

THE PATTERNED WOMAN 

 

Blue skitters my length     breadth     branches

to and from lochs     lakes     coastlines.

I shower in waterfalls. Words follow trails

microdots of data barely readable to the untrained eye.

To know me you need a telescope. My rivers ripple

as I dance     bend backwards     hiding age

with wrinkles. In slow motion I slice through

possessions. Clocks are dandelions in season

when fairies fly off to become babies.

All the what-ifs     secret paths     hidden chambers

wonderings how     why you were here instead of

there in trees     sprites in burns     unstoppable

swathes     quick slow     a tango     a waltz.

Don’t look for seeds. It’s too late. Naked in nests

we’d be happy to waver in wind     be sheltered

by canopy     fed whatever came to hand or mouth

learn to get on with living as soon as we crawled

climbed along branches     down the trunk and out

of our tree. Ignorant and wily would aid our escape

from dangers even from the sky. Birds of prey

would think we were fast food but what a childhood

of kissing cousins     rebellion and hellions chucking

whiners and pesky criers out of nests.

 

 

THE NECESSITY FOR SECRET IDENTITIES

 

Mizz Savage wore an animal around her neck.

Tiny paws tap Morse code when danger followed

her home from midnight rambles.

 

Blunt or sharp facts – she pointed dire warnings

at me, her nose spearing my tongue.

I was still young enough to not be heard;

 

she was so old she creaked, sailed down streets,

slow death walking the plain, a perfect invisible

hag, respectable but not caricature.

 

Some called her Crow when in her black phase,

Parrot if feathers entertained wind. She consumed

continents, and her eyes

 

knew everything, held doctorates.

 

 

FRICA GOES FORTH

 

The cat on her head seemed elated by the height

the view and constant conversation.

 

Mother said, Avoid men wearing active cod-pieces.

 

Daughter knew all about such men, had already

tipped one down a flight of stairs.

 

And look out for patterns – even in yourself.

 

Daughter’s friend had married a zero-printed

crocodile and disappeared into wallpaper.

 

What’s a mother of daughters to do when mothers

of sons allow penises free-reign.

 

Daughter agreed. Her world had reached a level

of surrealism to unearth all her usual notions.

 

I’m holding my head up with creatures, she said

hoping the wind would bless the marriages

 

offer wiliness and sneaky optimism on her hunt.

 

Irene Cunningham, a Glaswegian living in Brighton, has been anthologised, magazined & collected, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, won Autumn Voices memoir competition, and decades ago, won a week at Arvon with Roger McGough. Books: SANDMEN: A Space Odyssey, poetry conversation with Diana Devlin pub by Hedgehog Press 2019. No Country for Old Woman Dreich Press 2022. Talking to Walls, Up@Ground Level, Cartoon Cavalcade, Amazon 2023-26. She is building collections to clear space in her life and concentrate on neglected novel-writing. At the moment drowning in poems, kidnapped, mobbed.

Five Poems by Frederick Pollack

 

Fabulous

A trumperson has one of those

cups emblazoned with stars and stripes,

an eagle and the phrase “Liberal Tears.”

One night it’s filled as suggested.

More detail would make this a realist poem

with shrieking and carrying-on, even

cops, however understanding;

but that’s not what it’s doing, except

abstractly, towards the end. After

a while our hero goes into

his back yard, which is weedy and stony, lights

a smoke and ceremoniously pours

the contents of the cup onto a rock.

Which talks to him. It says he shouldn’t smoke,

cites studies and statistics, makes 

other suggestions, some quite personal

(the liberal is mentioned). “What the fuck

are you?” asks our hero.

“The future,” says the rock, then hurries

to give more advice and connect it

to larger factors, tariffs, wars, 

immigrant contributions to Social Security,

etc. What drives our hero nuts

is its tone of concern, which means it doesn’t

think he’s smart, can’t take care of

himself, and he kicks 

the fast-drying rock farther into the yard.

Sometime later he remembers

a rash, or a noise in his car, would like

info, finds the rock and (making sure

no one is looking) asks. But the rock

is silent, for that’s how the future is.

Penny Ante


The multiverse theory

limps on

never sure of it

can’t get rid of it

my favorite is one

where we were decided on

behind half-closed doors

in a dim old building

then basically forgotten

they had larger interests

elsewhere

left town

and each of us

is exactly the same 

as here, except safe

A cenar teco

Before disease, it was my

bad habits that got me; but

before that, as Wilde

or was it Shaw said of Frank Harris,

I was invited to all the best houses,

once. I, too, known for wit

(a thing less and less known),

but mine 

was creepy. E.g.: after dully, genuinely 

praising the food, I was asked by hosts

how I felt about the rest of

their thing. (“I know I’m asking for it,” laughed

the one with jewels.) “Well, your paintings –” I said,

“I didn’t know people had

so many ancestors. I’ve none myself.

It’s a new experience. A landscape, a still life,

God knows an abstraction – one can

sort of drift into them, escape;

but those faces (and they do look like you)

are like sentries, they keep me locked in place.”

Of course they said that wasn’t strictly true.

The drip, the liquids

sucked painfully by throat or veins,

the sleep-destroying pills,

the inadequate television

symbolically near the ceiling,

the nurses who sometimes save me

a bit of their own despair, the docs who speak

for a busy world

that never really claimed me … the bird 

I hear at 3 AM, then strive

till dawn to interpret … 

these aren’t important. What counts are the moments

when nothing happens, including dying.

And they can be divided and divided

until, with the right attitude, 

I drift away on them as if

they were art. (The paintings here 

are of skies and beach scenes, which

can only mark the borders of the prison).

Mentor

Some memories are generic,

which doesn’t make them false.

Repeatedly, apparently,

I was in the position

of urging someone to read

a given book. And when that person

did, we talked about it,

which usually meant I talked about it,

which also happened when he or she

didn’t read it. The image comes

from my youth or late childhood

or earlier. There’s that cute

photo of me with Mitch from next door

(we’re two) on a sofa. I’m brandishing

a book. It has cloth pages,

cows, ducks, and the sun,

no words. His descendants

may see this poem as a testament

to egotism masquerading

as brains – a possibly valid insight 

mimicked by many slobs.

Hand in Glove

Since the last time my desk was such

a mess, I’ve grown aware that it’s connected

to one much larger and more elegant –

van de Velde’s mahogany, Olbrich’s rosewood ...

The questions Where it is and Who or

what uses it are both unanswerable 

and, one may say, inane. I only

know that when half-thought, half-written

items (once there were also ashes) 

cover my desk the light dims

there; depression, war, the final 

heat-death lie heavy beyond 

the incomparable window. Conversely, 

when I produce a decent line, work

there progresses through the night,

word spreads through the cafés, Freud 

and Lenin meet and talk at length,

the church bells ring under new auspices.

Frederick Pollack - Washington, DC. Author of two book-length narrative poems: THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS (both Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press), and four collections of shorter poems: A POVERTY OF WORDS, (Prolific Press, 2015), LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), THE BEAUTIFUL LOSSES (Better Than Starbucks Books, 2023), and THE LIBERATOR (Survision Books, 2024). Pollack has appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Magma (UK), Bateau, Fulcrum, Chiron Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, etc.  Online, poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire  Review, Mudlark, Rat’s Ass Review,  Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, Lothlorien Poetry Journal (2022, ’23, ’24, ’25)etc. 

Website: www.frederickpollack.com.