MSR Winter 2006/2007
Feature:
Kathy Stripling Byer
An Interview with the North Carolina Poet Laureateby Suzanne Baldwin Leitner
The Limbs on Club by Stephen Morsk
The Communist Manifesto by Orlando W. Martinez
The Hanging Woods by Scott Loring Sanders
Breaking the Silence by Katya UroffReviews by Anne Barnhill, David Chorlton, Janyce Stefan-Cole, S. Craig Renfroe, Jr., Heather Jane Collings, Richard Allen Taylor.
of the following work:
Wake, Wake Wake by Valerie Nieman, The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez, Why Monkeys Live in Trees by Raouf Mama and Andy Jones, Terrestrial Music by John Bradley, Up North by Harry Smith and Eric Greinke, Behind Every Door by Terry Godbey, The Apparitioners by George Witte.
Poetry by Buffy Aakaash, Patrick Carrington, Peggy Smith Duke, Catherine Carter, Noel Conneely, Barbara Conrad, Barbara Cranford, Nancy Compton Williams, Jim Daniels, Phebe Davidson, Steve De France, Dory L. Hudspeth, Gary Every, Hugh Fox, Zan Gay, Bill Griffin, Dolores Guglielmo, Jerry Judge, David Lawrence, Mary Soon Lee, Barb Lundy, Ken Meisel, Jerry Mirskin, Ellaraine Lockie, Susanne Morning, Tim Poland, David E. Poston, Tom Rich, Rosemary Royston, Dan Schneider, William Sheldon, Jim Spurr, Robert Tremmel, Michael Rattee, Julene T. Weaver, Eric A. Weil, John Wheatcroft, Linda Newman Woito.
Cover Art: Acapulco Bar, NYC by Sharon Dowell.
Images by Charlotte Reeves Bowman, Doug South.
Orlando W. Martinez, Albuquerque NM
THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO
Yes, I’ll admit that I’m extremely wealthy and have enough money to buy anything my heart desires. I have possessions piled up in my Westchester mansion that I brought from exclusive shops and art galleries on Rodeo Drive and Park Avenue. When I’m bored I go shopping and always remember a saying that I read in the autobiography of socialite Doris Duke, “If you have to ask the price you can’t afford it.”
One day I bought a book I was sure would shock and delight my friends. It was a recent printing of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. Its bright red enameled cover, with black sickle and hammer, was the idea of the book’s publisher. The proprietor of the book store said the historically significant book was selling exceptionally well as a novelty, a tea table book, and a conversation piece. I brought one and put it in an easy-to-notice place on the tea table next to a very expensive vase that I purchased on a shopping sortie in Palm Beach.
When my friends saw the The Communist Manifesto they laughed and said, “How clever of you. I must get one myself.”
“Are you a bad Communist,” they asked and giggle. When I said yes—to go along with the joke—they broke out into gales of laughter. We had a lot of fun. You see we have in this country, I learned in American Government 103 in high school, an ideal called freedom that allows me to possess this bad book full of some really crazy nonsense like “Workers of the world rise and break your chains ” and the class struggle, whatever that means.
One day I went to New York to attended an art reception for Fabrizo Plessi at the Guggenheim First Floor Gallery. I was thinking of buying one of his fabulous paintings and was willing to go as high as 200,000 dollars. I stayed at the fabulous Sherry Netherland, one of the favorite haunts of Doris Duke, may the sweet dear rest in peace, and it was such a beautiful afternoon that I decided not to call my chauffeur and walked to the Guggenheim gallery.
I turned here and there, mingling with the common folks, and after taking a wrong turn I got lost and found myself in a strange part of the city that looked like an third world country or Africa. It was definitely not a place to be after the sun went down. I blinked my eyes in disbelief. There were signs of pervasive poverty everywhere: old cars, dilapidated tenements and hordes of poor people of a darker shade milling about for as far as the eye could see. It was a very depressing place and definitely not the New York that Frank Sinatra, “Old blue eyes,” celebrated in the song New York, New York.
Want the rest of the story (and more)?
The conclusion can be read in the Winter 2006/2007 issue which is available direct from MSR for $7 at
The Main Street Rag Bookstore.BACK TO TOP
Barbara Conrad, Charlotte, NC
WHAT PATSY REMEMBERS ABOUT HER FATHERSummer at Myrtle Beach, 1952
It wasn’t so much the way
he took the little girl’s hand
(our family maid’s eight-year old daughter)
and led her into the ocean, lifted herover waves, and later that night
from his shoulders onto the merry-
go-round. It wasn’t so much the shock
on people’s faces to seea colored girl on a whites-only beach
and a gilded horse.What it was, was my father’s face
as he stood there hard as a piling in sand,
and then on the boardwalk.
Cold stone his face, dull and hollow
as the sound of fog on a February sea.As if he knew his bold gestures
would not make the world right.
Not for the glaring strangers — or
his own children, busy in our own bliss,
or our mother gazing at stars. Not
for the little girl squealing Hey Mister Jack,
on every turn. Again, again!
Steve De France, Long Beach, CA
AMERICAN LANDSCAPE
Hollywood Indian Pow-Wow—tribal dancers,
potters, weavers, and silversmiths. City Indians
wear beepers & raspberries on beaded belts,
photocell phones rest in leather pouches, some
upload to personal websites, others call
theatrical agents.We haggle over prices for trinkets.
A century earlier it was on a blanket
at the side of the road—now in a movie studio
parking lot. I buy a lithograph. I overpay with plastic.
I am told to “Go with the Owl.”Their eyes are dark—moist somehow. Talking to you
they seem indifferent—detached. I try to move behind
distant eyes, but my vision is obscured by the
Trail of Tears, the Massacre at Sand Creek,
and a Slaughter at Wounded Knee.
Eyes clouded over with blood and darkness
and the death of a culture.It is the price of growing irrelevant.
I drive back to town on Sunset Boulevard.
Hollywood—a town with its legs wide open,
an American landscape where fast food swathes
the night sky with burning cow flesh. Lowered
cars gyrate, rumble, boom, and with dark windows,
prowl among fleshy bistros teeming with stale sex,
XXX rated movies, and live sex acts.
L.A. is a gun waiting to go off in your face.
Angels of the night wait on street corners,
streets teem with new immigrants,
or domestic freaks,
or zoo people from Montana—
here to touch Bogart’s wig,
or Monroe’s wax breast.
All have vaguely heard an ancient culture
plans to kill them. They are not impressed.
They still consume all things plastic
They laugh compulsively.
They only know less than more is always nothing.
They are haunted by the success of the greatest generation.
They feel guilty—ill at ease. Shallow. Unsure of themselves.
It is the price of growing irrelevant.
Jerry Judge, Cincinnati, OH
WRITING AT THE WAFFLE HOUSE
My waitress pours the maple syrup
on my triple stack of flapjacks as she reads
over my shoulder and asks in a raspy voice,
“What’s that?” I tell her it’s a poem.
She snorts and strides away.In five minutes she refills my coffee cup
and drenches my dwindling stack
with more syrup. She asks if I’ll write a poem
for her. With my mouth full, I just nod sure.
She wants verse about the ultimate highshe got from killing her old man. Grinning
at me, she confides he looked like me
with bushy red hair and brash moustache.
Only three years did she serve in the can.
The judge told her that the bastard had it coming.With a look of transcendence, she says,
“The poison took hours to finish him off,
and I had the longest and best orgasm
a woman has ever had.” I start writing
the poem like my life depends on it.
Susanne Morning, Pusan, South Korea
SEX WITH JESUS
Shouldn’t the bride of Christ be consummated?
This Jesus, like a gay straight man,
does it for me.
He’s a sensitive feminist,
“Get your rocks off
that woman.
He who is without sin
cast the first condom.”This Jewish lad’s got class and culture,
any class, any culture, he’ll go there.
First New Age citizen of the universe.
Yet he’s a simple maize
(password: “Jesus is the Way”)
decked in Swandry* and boots
peddling his stories over the farmlands.
A Pushcart winner by today’s standards.
And what with a make over and nose job
he’d be fair game on The Bachelor show.
Romantic touch this guy, regular poet on a hill
complete with open air sushi bar
feeding 5000.
Not a mummy’s boy.
Self actualized in his teens
when he buggered off (reverently I might add)
to do his own thing in the temple.
Bit of everything, he is.Introvert, extrovert, personality mosaic.
Magic man really.
Could pluck a rose from behind a woman’s ear
(even if it had been sliced off)
It’s that slight of hand that got “their” back up
Never mind He always had something up his sleeve.
Came back like he said, man of his Word.
First reappeared to Mary Mag.—a WOMAN—
YEAH! Gotta love him for that,
Calvin Klein Eternal aftershave or not.
So getting back to the original question.
Should the bride of Christ be consummated,
the two becoming one,
the ultimate holy communion?
Jesus said it himself,
“You can’t live alone with bread,”
So here’s to the second coming
and the third.
Ah....heaven.
I’ll break the bread and drink to that.*Swandry-brand name of New Zealand outdoor jacket, popular with farmers
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