Issue #30.8 A Triple Issue: Mark Folse, Ewen Glass, Ed Ruzicka
A Poem by Mark Folse
Memory Palace
…that which we are, we are…
— Tennyson, “Ulysses”
Is it too late to start a memory palace when frequently I misremember where I've put myself, lose an hour in a bookshelf as appointments slyly slip into the past?
Clouds assemble on the horizon and I forget the names of vague constellations; the faces in Polaroids’ faded colors. The prophecies of doctors frighten me.
I am my only hero without an Athena to guide or guard, afraid of the shades that crowd where life fades. How to navigate in this starless sea?
Forget Odysseus. Follow the cloud- drunk monks down a meandering path each moment a poem. The moon on a dark pond delights in its reflection.
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Mark Folse is a poet, retired journalist and blogger and IT factotum and native of New Orleans. His poems have appeared in the Peauxdunque Review, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The New Delta Review, Metazen, Ellipsis, Unlikely Stories and The Maple Leaf Rag. He was a member of the post-Katrina/Federal Flood NOLA Bloggers writing and activist group, and his work from that period was anthologized in What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, The Louisiana Anthology and A Howling in the Wires.
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A Poem by Ewen Glass
Fixing the Coffee Machine
My grandad died when I was two; he lived in his workshop and could fix just about anything. My dad just tinkers and disassembles. They might unscrew and prise, evaluate, re-solder if need be, my dad and his dad, my dad and me, but this coffee machine can’t be fixed, not by me anyway. I care little for what didn’t pass into my fingers, I care little for them, but I’m a thinker, I dissemble. Maybe back then things were fixable.
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Ewen Glass is a screenwriter and poet from Northern Ireland who lives with two dogs, a tortoise and a body of self-doubt; his poetry has appeared in the likes of Okay Donkey, Maudlin House, HAD, Poetry Scotland and One Art. Bluesky/X/IG: @ewenglass
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A Poem by Ed Ruzicka
Billy the Kid
Circa 1877 William H. Bonney started out as a roughshod cattle wrangler with an outfit called the Regulators in the unrecognized territory of New Mexico where Colt 44s did most of the convincing.
There were whole handfuls of drunk bastards with notches scratched into their handles. Billy was just more active, rattler quick. Before he was eighteen, Billy had a legend that kept him hiding out from lawmen.
Thugs like that, who make their name slug by slug and don’t care nothing about tombstones are worthless as a pinch of salt in a wound.
So, there was plenty of news made, but no tears shed, when Silver City’s best friend, Sheriff Pat Garrett, slid in behind Billy quiet as moonlight.
Garrett got the drop on the Kid. Made Billy’s boots point which-ways. Billy’s dusty hat fell into dust and that infamous Remington revolver Billy wielded so effectively started a long, serpentine journey to a glass case in a Fort Sumner, N.M. museum.
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Ed Ruzicka has published four full-length books of poetry, most recently In the Wind by Sligo Creek Publishing. Ed’s poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review, the Chicago Literary Review, Rattle, Canary and many others. Hos poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Ed is also president of the Poetry Society of Louisiana. Ed lives quietly under the green of live oak trees in Baton Rouge with his wife, Renee.
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