Poetry of Issue #6                        Page 31
Previous Next Table of Contents	Weathered & we remained it wasn't too late spilling air We talked about what Buddha meant in the stagnant night Going back to our women he said In our underwear The watermelon eating fizzing stars & global warming before us we were sixty-three on the wooden chairs silent & California was drying up On an Echo Park stoop he & I sat It was the summer he had the chemo hoping for a breeze It was the summer lawn turned to straw & we were burning down side by side He told me O the watermelon how sweet & icy it was   Michael Dwayne Smith __	All Those Ideals of Rivera’s Some mornings throw open, inexplicably, like unguarded prison gates, and there he goes, a what-we-can-accomplish-together conversation machine, so certain he's fixing everything he broke yesterday. In his teens, he pissed on wall— school, police station, museum, hospital, library, church. Painted murals and talked to Diego in his head. Walls didn't matter. Separation did. He taunted barricades, and he danced atop the cinderblock that corralled neighbors' homes. It was better than a movie-house matinee, all those candid backyard snapshots. He glued the Polaroids to his parents' rooftop, a mosaic only he and God and a few Cessna pilots could view. From up in the air, we look all get-along, related, familial. Eye to eye, we be all racist, rapist, murderous. How to hide our bodies. But they're so heavy full of brokenness. To drag them out. To hop the wall. Give ourselves up, cop a plea to what seems fixable.   Michael Dwayne Smith__ ©Patricia-Carragon: Set-Me-Free (1)	At Sixty, a Young Woman Can Be Mistaken for a Spiritual Experience He thinks about life after death, decides not to believe— once around is enough. Decides secretly to be a large hibernating mammal waking up to call himself “B. Curious.” He stopped talking to Santa late (at eight), though Saint Nick seemed realer than Holy J.C., who was really kind of a drag. Nothing worse than a lecturing hippie. Television did in a pinch. But now! Sleepy time is over. Mother died, then he only had sister, and she died, too, so together that makes Two Wolves and a Bear. Coyotes hang around bungalows once occupied by contract actors. What sort of paradise was that, one wonders, during those golden reeling years. And what are poets thinking, anyway, optimism always giving in to gravity because we need to believe in the kind of everyday falling we do, as a matter of course, obvious, and in need of a song. He wouldn’t have flapped homemade wings except for poets falling, too. At this Hollywood bar and grill, he thinks you are glamorous. He thinks you are in his price range. That you are either mysterious or a case of buyer’s remorse. Either way, he’s going to regret not regretting you. You’re so beautiful, he growls softly, How do you even have to pay rent in this world. He sees right through you through Jeffrey Lebowski shades. Outside, coyotes crowd The Strip to watch you drive your new white Lexus right into the sun.   Michael Dwayne Smith__	Jackson Healy Turns a Corner From the backseat of John’s Prius Jackson can hear both Ken Kwan, breaking down the five indisputable reasons that The Stones are the greatest rock and roll band of all time, and driver John, always agreeable by way of an indisputable Southern charm—him answering Ken’s string of idiosyncratic assertions with “yes,” and “absolutely,” answers syncopated with swigs from the leather-encased flask earlier filled with a particularly fine bourbon (whilst worrying about Democracy’s impending demise, how the worst of the South has indeed risen again, like a petty, sadistic Jesus). Jackson turns his head to the left, to the right, and can feel late California summer afternoon passing both of them by, sunsetting his life, a moment not unlike when one first realizes a small happiness, after a great many years grieving a particularly cruel death.   Michael Dwayne Smith__