Issue #28.2 A Triple Issue: Bill Mohr, Darren C. Demaree, and Frederick Pollack
Two Poems by Bill Mohr
Fire Is Mud
Fire is mud, slick and oozing On the lolling tongues of scorched bluffs. The slathering thickens And jells. Gelatinous incandescence.
Friends disbelieve me when I say Life has no meaning other than itself As “anomaly.” I insist, though, I’m not a nihilist. How could I be -- since Being, Individuated, collapses into sediment -- Tender, succulent, reborn sediment, The nest in which these conflagrations spew their eggs.
REDEMPTION
“Give him the darkest inch of space your shelf allows”
for L.H. (1934-1991)
A friend’s been dead for over thirty years. I knew him only twenty; twenty years from now perhaps someone might say the like of me, or so my spouse succors herself. It will be half a century then, though I will not be counting. You might, if you remember either of us still as poets who for scant wages played our instruments for all their tawdry worth. (Keep singing, I say, although the echo goes uncaught). Once, at the end of another week of typesetting commercial text, Lee read at Claremont College. Someone nearby that afternoon, in undergrowth concealed, watched him load enough into his car to calculate how long he’d be gone. While Lee exulted as Tiresias, that addict extracted every precious thing – his typewriter! -- except a shelf of books. The debacle of disrespect! The thrashing of what few hours he was given to redeem. I remember once sitting in his living room. The light began to fade, but he didn’t turn on a lamp; each jounce of diminishing shadow flickered across his face, receding, bobbing back, subsiding. We sat there quietly, waiting for the turbulent dark, then began to recite out loud the songs of what’s been spoiled.
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Bill Mohr’s most recent full-length collection of poems is a bilingual edition, The Headwaters of Nirvana / Los Manantiales del Nirvana (What Books, Los Angeles, 2018). Magra Books published a limited-edition chapbook, Displacements, in 2023. His articles, reviews, and commentary have appeared in the Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry, Journal of Beat Studies, Chicago Review, William Carlos Williams Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry Project Newsletter, Los Angeles Times, and several volumes of the Cambridge Companion series. Before becoming a professor at California State University Long Beach in 2006, he worked for many years as a typesetter at weekly newspapers. http://www.billmohrpoet.com
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Three Poems by Darren C. Demaree
Emily as Frequencies of All Kinds
Affirmed, it doesn’t matter if I don’t know why, within
the pulse of this love, I brush against the spiritual just by
mentioning her name this much, but I know, I know, I know
that directness, as fierce as it can be, loves the flirting
of a metaphor that curve around her indispensable ass.
Emily as Blue Violence
Let me be clear, I have blue eyes & Emily gets dressed
every damn day & I know she must, but it feels wrong
to gather that heat beneath a denial of the bloom.
Emily as the Mint Rises
I like a jungle that’s good in tea & Emily
thinks it’s hysterical that the one poetry professor that lives
on our street just calls me the guy at the mint house.
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Darren C. Demaree is the author of twenty-three poetry collections, most recently “So Much More” (Small Harbor Publishing, November 2024). He is the recipient of a Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and the Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently working in the Columbus Metropolitan Library system.
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A Poem by Frederick Pollack
Late Paper
What motivates the dead are trivial coincidences perceived as miracles. I became aware that my fifth-grade teacher, on whom I’d had a huge crush, lay nearby. Unremarkable in a small town, but it kept me awake. I owed her a report. She had passed me anyway (I was of course a brilliant student) but this had preyed on me. Now, with my coffin rotted, I surveyed the surrounding soil and pebbles, trying to make them into some surface, and remaining organics into ink. It was hard to do without muscles or articulated bones. Then I realized I needed a library (those were where one researched back then), and raided time and air, so far above. But the turmoil of returning illiteracy and neo-feudal attitudes among the living interfered. I did the best I could, pushed my work towards her through earth. It took a while, even longer to get her attention. “I can’t accept this,” she breathed, “it’s creative, not expository.” Then she laughed, and, I must admit, I did too, inaudibly from our untended stones.
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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), Frederick 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, etc. Website: www.frederickpollack.com.