martha graham to agnes demille

 

susan alexander | three poems about summer jobs

Making Beds with Cordelia at the Avalon Motel in Osoyoos: Summer 1973                                                                      

She could sing Desperado just like Linda Ronstadt.

I showed her hospital corners and how to 

smooth sheets like my mother taught me. 

She didn’t have one – a mom.

 

Thrown out of the house – for nothing 

according to her and I believed her, 

believed the worst of fathers in general, 

temper tantrums, hard hands and drinking. 

 

She wouldn’t talk about him, not a thing,

but I remember something about two bitchy sisters – 

one with a name like venereal disease 

while Cordelia,           

                          she walked right out of a magazine

with her long legs and sort of private smile – 

smart too though she didn’t show off like I did 

or mouth off either. 

                                 I taught her how to

tuck a bedspread under pillows then curve it 

snug like a tight t-shirt. She had the knack. 

 

When she wasn’t around I tried

to talk and dress and wear my hair like her,

be patient with my little niece, be nicer 

than I was or am. 

                             She lived alone 

in our trailer out back of the motel 

beside the slough we called a lake – 

saving up for university she said. 

 

Sometimes after work we’d lie together 

under the walnut tree. I’d play with her hair 

while she read Tess – rich green leaves 

breaking the heat of an Okanagan afternoon. 

 

I always thought she’d get discovered 

like that dairy queen girl, that she’d marry 

a millionaire. 

                       Strange thing is 

 

I was the one who kind of made it in the end,

the one with the house and European holidays. 

But Cordelia,

 

                       she was making her way for awhile, 

then somehow it went bad again – a man, 

some dark angel, following her.

                              *

The Avalon

 

It was a fast food joint on Highway 3 

where it turned into Main Street. 

Picnic tables in the breezeway, Creedence

screaming up around the bend on the jukebox.

No drive-thru windows like today. 

People had to park, get out of their cars.

 

My father was boss, shape-shifted 

from grease monkey in his own garage

to short order cook.  Short temper cook 

more like it. Hotter than burgers sizzling 

on the grill. Hotter than chips in the deep fat fryer. 

Him and his shout and his bottomless rum 

and coke just inside the cooler door. 

 

Scariest thing for me was making 

chicken dinners when he was crazy 

busy and the grill was packed. I’d crank 

up the flames under the pressure cooker

in the back, drop thighs, legs, breasts,

wings, into popping oil then twist 

the metal top on tight as I could.

 

Timing was critical and I was racing 

up front with customers at windows, 

making change with fingers burnt

from bagging burgers. Milkshakes 

whizzed on metal sticks while I erected

dazzling ziggurats of soft ice cream cones. 

 

All the time at the back the pressure 

built. Always I expected the explosion. 

My father’s holler. Flying metal, boiling oil. 

Fast food shrapnel. Casualties.

 

When the cooker’s valves got flipped up,

they screamed like murder, smeared the air 

with steam and grease. I served up impossible 

crispy gold in a cardboard container. 

 

For years I wore burn scars 

on the soft insides of forearms.

They are faded, almost gone. 

So is my father. 

Nowadays summer never gets that hot.

 

                              * 

 

Sorting Cherries

 

We sat in lines on either side 

of the belt’s endless loop. Across from me, 

a woman in her fifties, black hair dull with dye, 

flanked by cronies. She listed infirmities 

as numerous as the cherries rolling by. 

Her hands darted, deft as a lacemaker, 

picked out the split and the bruised. 

 

Beside me, the tough girls I drank 

with in high school. The ones who still smoked, 

who had sex in the back of Camaros 

belonging to boyfriends who worked 

at the mill. Girls who weren’t headed

to university when summer was over.

 

After eight days, the whistle blew for break 

and the belt stopped. I fell off my stool. 

Mesmerized. The foreman moved me 

up the chain. Alone. I pushed boxes of Bings 

around a corner. When that crop was done,

we all got laid off until the next call came.

I never went back. 

 

Some nights before sleep, I see them glide by, 

a stream of profligate hearts. 

premier league mascots

Fred the Red loves a hug with the manager. 

Buzz and Buzzette, giant furry bees, had a surprise when a 38-year-old on his stag joined them in full kit for their match-day rituals three years ago. Bertie Bee once rugby-tackled a naked streaker, who ended up somersaulting to the ground. Harry the Hornet is a cheerful, drum-bashing, man-sized wasp with a predilection for winding up Crystal Palace managers. He has been labelled "out of order" by Sam Allardyce and "disgraceful" by Roy Hodgson. 

Stamford the Lion has looked much happier since the arrival of his female companion, Bridget. Filbert Fox has been to every home match since 1992 but his two erstwhile sidekicks, Vicky Vixen and Cousin Dennis, disappeared together years ago. Hmmmn.  In 1998 the fan who dressed up as Hercules the Lion to entertain the crowd on match days was relieved of his duties following a half-time kerfuffle with a beauty queen. 

Moonchester and Moonbeam surely hail from a place called Blue Moon as they are, yes, blue and, yes, Blue Moon is the club anthem. Unfunny foam creatures have never caught on at Everton, thankfully, but the tradition of a Toffee Lady throwing sweets to the crowd before kick-off is alive and well.

The death of much-loved mascot Kayla the eagle last year was greeted with an outpouring of emotion from fans. Many made donations to her former home at the Eagle Heights sanctuary near Dartford that have helped it to survive the pandemic. 

Sammy the Saint made a name for himself with some dad-dancing in 2012, performing a half-time rendition of Gangnam Style. 

Captain Canary has been rebooted for the 2021-22 season. Thinner, yellower, smilier, he now comes with massive eyebrows. Chirpy Cockerel was remodelled after a more sinister previous look. Remember the dead eyes?

from The Manchester Guardian pre-season team profiles, 2021.

pictured: Fred The Red embracing The Prince of Darkness, Jose Mourinho. Jose has since been sacked and exiled to Italy, while Fred is still going strong.

Mascots and their Homes

Hercules the Lion, Aston Villa

Buzz and Buzzette, Brentford
Bertie Bee, Burnley
Stamford the Lion, Chelsea
Kayla the Eagle, Crystal Palace

The Toffee Lady, Everton
Filbert Fox, Leicester City
Moonchester and Moonbeam, Manchester City
Fred the Red, Manchester United
Captain Canary, Norwich
Sammy the Saint, Southampton
Chirpy Cockerel, Tottenham Hotspur
Harry the Hornet, Watford

aug 8 | the holy crossing

 

refuse

 

raymond chandler, poet

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.

It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.

I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.

She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.

The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.

She had eyes like strange sins.

Until you guys own your own souls you don’t own mine.

I looked back at Breeze. He was about as excited as a hole in the wall.

I’m all done with hating you. It’s all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don’t hate them very long.

She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don’t care much about kittens.

“I don’t like your manner,” Kingsley said in a voice you could have cracked a Brazil nut on.

She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.

Leave us do the thinking, sweetheart. It takes equipment.

California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing.

I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars.

The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.

The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.

I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.

I’m not a young man. I’m old, tired and full of no coffee.

Guns never settle anything, I said. They are just a fast curtain to a bad second act.

Don’t kid yourself. You’re a dirty low-down detective. Kiss me.

diane tucker | three poems from 'nostalgia for moving parts'

Three poems about childhood that made me cry. From Diane Tucker's new book, Nostalgia For Moving Parts. So particular, so much compassion. Get yourself a copy. I'm not kidding.

Love the sad men

The small, huge things that sad men do, sad

men who build with everything but words.

Build dollhouses, train sets, HO mountains

from cereal boxes and plaster of Paris,

building the mountains they can for their sons.

For daughters they build scroll-sawed

shelves to hold phalanxes of dolls, blown-glass

animals, Barbie barns above the bed’s blue lace.

Sad fathers who’ve eluded words carve magic

circles in their back lawns for swimming

pools. They sieve stones out of the soil circles

so nothing will nick the pools’ thin blue skin.

This is the testament of sad men who live

starved of words: drywall, carport, pickle jars

of nails, lawnmower, farmer’s tan, house paint,

apple tree, soldering gun, handsaw, wood plane.

Wood shavings falling from the vise,

wooden curls on the cold garage floor,

wooden curls warm on little girls’ ears.

*

Danny

Skipping ropes at school, their woven heft.

Steel poles around the roofed playground, the rain

running down them luminous, metal-melting.

I’d press my tongue against a pole and drink.

School was a world of delicious new textures:

fat crayons, creamy manila colouring paper,

notebooks, worksheets stacked fat as animal bodies.

Tables and chairs with shiny metal tubes for legs.

Even light at school felt stronger than at home.

They showed us filmstrips of marmalade leaves

against a blue blue sky, all technicolour-crisp.

How I loved those glowing celluloid leaves!

Then the cloakroom hooks’ imploring curves,

parallel silences in calm, rectangular shadows,

the pavement tap-dance beat of skipping ropes.

How I loved school, the sweet order of desks

in grids. So I wasn’t totally upset when, in grade

two, Danny with the French last name tied me to

a pole with a skipping rope so he could kiss me,

Danny with the round eyes, a cherub’s mouth,

curly hair. He was small even among the small,

as I was. No doubt I’d flirted with him, grade-two

style, cute and clueless. I thought myself a lady.

Were kisses procured? I bet there were a few.

Soon the rope loosened and I made a dash.

But Danny pushed me back. A metal pole I loved,

from which I’d drunk the rain, rushed up

and struck me in the bone below one eye.

A shiner it was called. I had a shiner. I’d seen

them on TV, cartoon-red beefsteaks on faces.

Danny got the strap then, or another time, or both.

He came back to class subdued, his crying

eyes swollen. As if a hiding could patch up his

love-starved soul. He chased girls, he lifted skirts,

he stole kisses, and the grown-ups just spanked

his ass? Poor Danny, tiny paramour, tiny batterer!

As long as I knew him, Danny chased the girls,

staring expectantly through big brown eyes.

Whatever makes boys seize girls roiled in him.

That yearning he had, no strap could smack it out.

And no black eye stopped me flirting. I was seven

and had imprinted on romance like a baby bird.

I followed its Hollywood promises everywhere,

persistent and imploring as a cloakroom hook.

*

Beautiful grade four teacher

always wore his shirt half open,

had dry-look hair and eyes bigger

than Donny Osmond’s. Sometimes

he used swear words in class.

I fell hard in grade four love.

I remember the day I had to wear

the hand-me-down dress to school.

Polka dots, pleats, Peter Pan collar.

1974 was bell-bottoms, feathered hair,

Three Dog Night and Doodle Art.

It was neither pleats nor polka dots.

It was in no way a Peter Pan collar.

But crushy teacher, lounging atop a desk,

fixed me, with round, pale eyes, in his stare.

He grafted two trees to a single rootstock,

kindness twinned forever with desire.

You look smashing, he said, in that dress.

The world lit up. I clutch that moment,

talisman still, the heat that flowered when he

noticed my smallness, my sadness, and spoke.

Nostalgia For Moving Parts is published by Turnstone Press, 2021. Copies available through their website.

when did richard allen go to the movies?

Those are the approximate prices of the various items in Richard's list in 1925 or so.  I could only find a 1935 hot dog price, but the five cent hotdog (at Nathan's, in New York) stayed constant for quite a few years after 1935, so it's not impossible they were the same price in the mid-Twenties; I assumed one hot dog per meal, three meals a day for the seven days.  Given the prices I found for movies, comics, candy bars, and hot dogs, we can figure "games" cost about 75 cents each.  In 1908, admission to see the San Francisco Seals play baseball set you back 50 cents, so 75 cents in 1925 is probably about right. 

Sounds like a pretty good week.

gilette elvgren | andy & reggie

St. Ives, a carbuncle on Cornwall’s boot,
Where, two years ago, walking the commercial drag,
The smell of lamb Pasties,
Fudge slavered with Cornish clotted cream,
Galleries with an endless parade of seascapes,
The half moon harbor, tide out,  boats cantered,
We happened by a small, old, Methodist Church.
 
Wedding music wafted onto Fore Street.
Passersby couldn't care less,
Inside the groom, tuxedo, bent over,
Was being married to a flaxen haired beauty,
Striking in her white dress and lace.
 
The bridegroom levered by two of his male entourage,
Could hardly say, “I do”.
They sat at a table, as if agreeing to a contract,
The bride had no one to throw the flowers to.
A song, then it was over, no kiss exchanged.
And as I wondered how and why,
Beauty and the  broken beast made their way,
Toward the store front entrance to the chapel.
 
In the narrow cobbled street outside sat the limousine,
Motor running, tourists gliding by on either side.
Reggie and Andy, for that was their names,
Emerged. No rice.
Reggie, in the later grip of muscular dystrophy
Was half carried to the front seat,
Where he lolled while
Andy sat in the back.
 
Scenarios played themselves out in my writer’s head,
So I approached with some trepidation
A huge bristled Scotsman kilted to the brim,
Who stood crying, and in between sobs and the rush of air,
 
Related a narrative of sorts. . .
“Been living together. . . they used to watch my bairns.
Fishing trips. . . sweetest man. . . the two of them,
Living as one, not married, oh no,
But one still daft aboot the other,
When he comes down with the limb girdled curse.
 
So’s things worsen,
And he gets bit by what’s drivin’
The brethren in there,
Never had time for it myself.
Plus there was matters of money,
Gettin’ married so the State don’t
Scarf up the leavin’s.”
 
I think the worse: 
Marriage of convenience.
Separate vacations; a lover on the side.
Patience running thin.
How long can this last?
 
Two years later we return to St. Ives,
Older, slower, cliff wary, joint weary,
And on the spur, Sunday morn,
We make our way into Fore Street Methodist
 As the Congregation Sings,
“Nearer My God to Thee”.
 
On the right, across the aisle,
Sit Andy and Reggie.
Sit isn’t an apt description,
For a quiet  but continuous frenzy ensues.
 
As his hands become gnarled, she soothes them out,
She turns his head, lifts his hands in a mute praise,
And with a cup gathers saliva.
She catches me watching,
Her eyes reading, “steady on” no desperation,
No pleas for justice or put-uponness,
Just a resignation to thirty second ministrations
That will never end until. . .
 
During the sermon they left the service,
Doing a strange broken dance as she walked
Backwards holding his hands,
Opening doors and dancing thru.
A pause, then back again to sit,
But the dance will never end.
 
The Minister was preaching from the Gospel of John,
Of a time before the Messiah’s death,
When he knelt and washed his disciples feet.
“I have set you an example, that you should do as I have done for you.”
And across the aisle it was being done.
As hands were smoothed,
Neck gently rubbed, arms lifted for the release of breath.
Communion would round out the service.
Andy broke off a piece of bread,
And held the small plastic cup of juice,
Serving her mate, the body and the blood,
A liturgy in and unto itself,
As He would have us do for one another.
 
I became more aware then of the woman at my side,
Fifty years my companion,
And wondered if I too would kneel and serve,
And do a dance with her, one breath,
Together, until the temporal exigencies,
The husks that awkwardly encapsulate our Spirits,
Turn to dust and swirl towards the light eternal.

So thank you Andy and Reggie,
For the Word become flesh
For  the reminder that a tremor
Or a breath from the one we love,
Are worthy of our  lasting attention,
And that you allow us to catch a brief glimpse of
The Christ Within.

photos | michael pasche

 

bc ferry terminal, tsawassen

photos | tom balke

 

Active Pass, off Mayne Island

Brockton Point, Vancouver

tim klein | no hotter human hatred

Surely no hotter human hatred exists than that of one who has spent years achieving a respectable measure of success in life by following the rules, only to encounter one who has achieved greater success by violating the very same rules. 

 Tim Klein Facebook, June 9, 2021

photos | barb bowen | garden

 

photo | michael pasche

 

photo | bruce stewart | fred herzog + drink signs

 This photo of Fred Herzog was taken by his friend Bruce Stewart on Powell Street in the 1970s.

photo | vincent laforet | racetrack

The New Yorker, May 15, 2021

photo | american gothic II

 

Grant Wood’s sister, Nan, sitting next to his dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby, 1942

A near cousin to the photography of Stefan Draschan?

ralph waldo emerson | persecuted

 

photos | rebecca deboer

 

josé francisco borges | wood cuts

 from Davi Rabelo's Regent College arts thesis presentation 

literatura del cordel ("string literature")

folk novels, poems, and songs printed in chapbooks, illustrated with wood cuts, 

sold in Brazilian street markets 

garrison keillor | the pope & me

The beauty of freedom is that you don’t know what might happen. I flew to Rome once on a sudden impulse, my first trip, and the day before I left, I got a haircut and told my barber George Latimer that I was hoping to meet the pope and he said, “No way. You’re not even Catholic. You won’t get within a mile of him.” I got to Rome and ran into a priest from Milwaukee, Father Reginald Foster, the head Vatican Latinist, and he took me on a tour of the Vatican and showed me the Latin ATM he’d designed, the only one in the world, and who should be withdrawing cash but the pope himself. He invited me up to his penthouse. There was a ping-pong table. He made popcorn. Offered me a Pepsi. And then he said to me, “Qui in nomine Domini Dei tui interficiam capillos? Et tamquam degradatur monachus. Et maior patera exsequi oportuit meum iussum.” (“Who in the name of God cut your hair? You look like a defrocked monk. He should’ve used a bigger bowl.”)