Bombshell I

Alfred Eisenstaedt

The Revolving Door

Alfred Eisenstaedt

The Revolving Door

read this and other poems in Taylor's upcoming book of poetry, Bombshell Bohemia: poems from the underground.

City Poems

read this and other poems in Taylor's upcoming book of poetry, Bombshell Bohemia: poems from the underground.

The Kiss that Burned Chicago Down

"After all, a girl is... well, a girl.

It's nice to be told you're successful at it."

-Rita Hayworth

In the Ruin

Downtown NYC after Sept 11, by Tony Karp

In the Ruin
by Colin Dodds


We are gone, so gone from that place
that we have stationed the angel
with the flaming sword before it,
just to be sure we would not go there anymore.

It’s just down the street
from where the world hinges
on the difference between
one piece of paper and another.

Last week is so long ago
that the firemen digging through the rubble
have become archaeologists
digging in the ruins.

They do so to learn how folks
lived a week ago, if any did.
They dare not remember a week ago,
but are lonely for it.

Fall creeps in like an anonymous letter
under a closed door.
Everyone is dead in the ruin.
But something must be done

to guard against our weakness
or to find the right way to die,
to forget or subdue the knowledge
we summon too much of.

The will is strong. The senses
are subtle. The intelligence is deep.
This is not easy
and does not end.

It is the time after the cracked glass
has been shattered anew,
after we’ve been slaughtered, but before
we’ve undertaken slaughter of our own.

By the deli, the jewelry store with its sale,
our neighbors rot in an uneven cage.
There is nothing beneath them but gold
and nothing above them but the sickened living.

The firemen do not dig for clues
The case is open and shut. Nor for the dead.
The dead and the world are so strange,
we think them odd stones shaped by chance.



Forgetfulness is what will wash us to newness.
We can not yet guess if a year, a life
will be the right length
for the forgetting that needs to be done.


[copyright Medium Rare Publishing, 2003]

Critical Mass

Alfred Eisenstaedt

Critical Mass
(for justin and pierre)

There was anger outside of saint marks church
The day Pierre died
Bikes hung from every steeple
People littered streets with empty cups
It was September and my naked heart fell
Down the perennial well.

We’d sought hope and we harnessed it
Down at the Center
Collected the numbers hovering close to the ground
Cut our hair into brushes to dip in the soot
And drew zeros all over our foreheads—

But I’ve been impressed on the sidewalk
Since June
My old man keeps rifles, now, in with the spoons
The boys hide their faces and grow out their beards
And curse the war years.

And my heart’s in the water
Looking for my friends
While these stubborn men stand on the ashen blue plans
For a fat, lonely country and a little oil land
The right ones who grip on their crosses like triggers
Just nod at the sheepdogs
And sleep by their windows
And wait for September again…


[copyright Taylor Roberts, 2004]

Critical Mass Arrests of 2004 amid the RNC

For The Boys

Anita Ekberg 1953, by Phil Stern

Initiation
by Colin Dodds

With one ejaculation,
I was exiled from mythology
and pushed into the streets.
I made my debut in that birth canal
that never gives birth,
but only replaces and replaces.

I found a spastic moment of peace.
And it bothered me more than loneliness did.
Its relief was just one more law sunk into me.
I was no match for that peace.
I spent half my life chasing it down
and the other half trying to escape it.

I wanted my desire to swell enough
to dissolve the rest of me
or to vanish altogether.
Neither occurred.

Not Built for Wisdom
by Colin Dodds

I spurned those who wanted
to be closer to me
because you can’t be god
in someone else’s heaven.

I told myself and them
that I wouldn’t be around too long,
that I heard music in my head
that was really music.

Only a sound, a voice
that exists completely
before giving a hint of itself
can appear like that, like music.

And I wouldn’t be so
selfish
if it didn’t seem that what I had
was so specifically my own.


[copyright Medium Rare Publishing, 2003]

Dylan Writing, by Daniel Kramer

Anita Ekberg contact sheet, 1953 by Phil Stern

Fallen Magnolias

Alfred Eisenstaedt

"New Orleans, meanwhile, remained mostly deserted on Tuesday, with the occasional resident who ignored the evacuation order sweeping up outside. There was scant evidence of the clean-up promised by officials, with a carpeting of tree limbs, fallen magnolias and fractured crepe myrtles on the streets."

- NY Times September 3, 2008

Weegee's "Water Main Burst Uproots Madison Avenue," circa 1938

Marble-Sized Song

Marble-Sized Song
by Albert Goldbarth

Does she love you? She says yes, but really
how do you know unless you undress that easy assertion,
undoing its petals and laminae, and going in
below all trace of consciousness, into the neuroelectrical
coffer where self-understanding is storaged away,
and then lifting its uttermost molecule out, to study
in its nakedness as it spins
in a clinical light?—the way
we all, in our various individual versions
of this common human urge, go in,
and in, and in, the physicist down
to the string-vibration underlying matter, and
the Appalachia fiddler getting so
(as she puts it) "into my music," sound becomes
a flesh for her to intimately ("in"-timately)
enter, "its thick and its sweetbreads."
Is he cheating on you? He says no, and feigns
that he's insulted, but for certainty
you'll need to delicately strip the bark away
and drill, and tweeze, until you can smear a microscope slide
of the pith and can augur the chitterlings
—the way the philosopher can't accept a surface
assumption of truth, but needs to peel back
the fatty sheen of the dermis, soak the cambium layer
into a blow-away foam, and then with pick
and lightbeam helmet, inch by inch begin
spelunking through those splayed-out caverns
under the crust, where gems of cogitation are buried
—the way the diver descends for the pearl,
the miner: in, the archaeologist: in, the therapist: down
the snakier roots of us and in, and in, the way
the lone, leg-pretzeled yogi makes
a glowing bathysphere of worldliness and sends it in,
and further in, tinier and heavier and ever in,
the way the man in the opium den is floating forever,
toward a horizon positioned in the center of the center
of his head. . . . If we could stand beyond the border
of our species and consider us objectively, it might seem
that our purpose in existing is to be a living agency
that balances, or maybe even slows, the universe's
irreversible expansion out, and out . . . and each
of us, a contribution to that task.
My friend John's wife received the news: a "growth,"
a "mass," on her pituitary, marble-sized, mysterious.
And the primary-care physician said: Yes,
we must go in and in. That couldn't be the final word!
And the second-opinion physician said: Yes,
my sweet-and-shivering-one,
my fingerprint-and-irisprint-uniqueness,
someone's-dearest, you
who said the prayers at Juliette's grave, who drove
all night from Switzerland with your daughter, you
on this irreplaceable day in your irreplaceable skin
in the scumbled light as it crosses the bay in Corpus Christi,
yes in the shadows, yes in the radiance,
yes we must go in and in.


[copyright © 2008 by The Poetry Foundation]

Well Wrought

A piano rests under a tree a few days after hurricane Katrina.

Well Wrought

read this and other poems in Taylor's upcoming book of poetry, Bombshell Bohemia: poems from the underground.

above photo by Debbie Fleming Caffery