2 poems
by Brandy Ryan

re verse all – jeanette winterson’s

‘cup knife compass remedy’

iii.

The strange thing about learning to look

to watch without living

… is that the eye becomes sharp, sharp

is a slow death

as a blade, and

the basil leaf left on the counter

… We start to see

unused ,

the world

that eyes me

differently, not as

as i peel, smash, and finely mince

an intellectual response, no,

the garlic,

I mean actually see

sliver the red-skinned

it, alive suddenly to

onion, julienne

ugliness and beauty, repelled by banality

(not Julian, a boy i knew once; he played guitar)

instead of habituated to it

this leaf.

The new

cannot command my attention

sight [of] art

as i heat oil

allows … no more blur

i unnotice it,

no more failure

and so its edges indigo in protest
of vision
furl inwards finally it withers to half its size in bloom.

Or, i may look – a fate no different in its inevitability.

CIBC national student loan centre

This post-amount

account Revision first revises into how

to divide infinite yielding to reckon the Wilde, number & divide their expense what of the women restrictions from discovering Revision women I could write begrudge silent-speaking—the truth the end of inquiring As a result revise the terms the letter confirm you the world Information time
I take not taken to steal and fly As the letter principle check that my scalp hadn’t melted write to see I write close start at the end to write a world pushed into have there is nothing enter stuck and catalogued with me deliciously unknown I seek letter outside terms terms unchanged holding placing open please the air and nothing chance to be other, to be either, to be ether (E)(vers 4.2) not invoiced ink put hooks in your mouth between and local and reckoned, accounted, due,

record.

*

perpetually (sometimes petulantly) playing with words, brandy ryan lives in toronto as she considers her next move.

ODE TO BOUDIN
by Kevin Young


You are the chewing gum
of God. You are the reason
I know that skin
is only that, holds
more than it meets.
The heart of you is something
I don't quite get
but don't want to. Even
a fool like me can see
your broken
beauty, the way
out in this world where most
things disappear, driven
into ground, you are ground
already, & like rice
you rise. Drunken deacon,
sausage's half-brother,
jambalaya's baby mama,
you bring me back
to the beginning, to where things live
again. Homemade saviour,
you fed me the day
my father sat under flowers
white as the gloves of pallbearers
tossed on his bier.
Soon, hands will lower him
into ground richer
than even you.

For now, root of all
remembrance, your thick chain
sets me spinning, thinking
of how, like the small,
perfect, possible, silent soul
you spill out
like music, my daddy
dead, or grief,
or both -- afterward his sisters
my aunts dancing
in the yard to a car radio
tuned to zydeco
beneath the pecan trees.





*

From Meatpaper, Your Journal of Meat Culture, Issue 4, Summer 2008.

IN PLACE OF PERSEPHONE
by Penn Kemp


Here I hide in darkness,
sullenly squeezing red
pomegranate seeds.

There was a field of flowers,
viper's bugloss, blue and red.
Their pink buds brighten crimson,
violet and then deep blue.

Sometime I will return.
Not now. Too much hurt
reverberates the will.
The bright sky shut my eyes.

The mothers still curse me with sharp
insatiable teeth, hissing through gaps.
His mother. Hers. Her. And likely yours.
The generations swell enraged.

I chew the pomegranate slowly.
No gaps in my teeth. Here I am
young. I am beautiful. Eating
this fruit I am almost inviolate.

I am the unfading flower.
I disappear half a year.
They seek me out. Close.
I am in. Closer. Closet.

The power grows in me.
The will to be different
from them. To effect
change.

I become what I'm called.
Rage prances, it dances
with jabs neat and sharp.

I don't know for how long
before the red bull roars.

The sweet surge rises,
floods till it's over.

Power spent, futile.
Ineffectual. In effect.

Ranting in the wrong ears.
Pluto never listens.



from Binding Twine.

FARE TRADE
by Penn Kemp



I would eat local food only were it not for temptation.
A green invitation of open avocado in emerald halves.
An alluring variety of mango hot to eye, cool to tongue.


The seduction of dark chocolate.
The slurped fulfillment in oyster.
The simple necessity of rice.


Otherwise, I would be content with my yard's fall produce.
But having tasted the world's fare, how to return unjaded
to simple pleasures that this ground offers? Beans.
Corn. Squarsh. Corn. Beans. The tree sisters thrive.


Yes, I will eat local food mostly. Except for. Except for...
Accept. Not many claim carrots for their snack. But banana.
Or chocolate. No chicory compares to café au lait. Ole!
Import coffee; import tea! On to political rant:
Our food too cheap, our farmers ruined.
Our eyes closed, we rest easy, spoiled ripe fruit in the docks,
turning sleepy to sun-rotten. Given so much, we reach for more
even when over full. Poems break off as the lunch bell rings.




*

Fare Trade is presented in Penn Kemp's DVD, Luminous Entrance: a sound opera for climate action, which was performed at Brescia University College this year. It can be heard on www. chrwradio.com/talk/gatheringvoices.

Penn Kemp is a novelist, playwright, poet, sound-poet based out of Toronto. Check her out: www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/kemp.

from QUANTUM CHAOS & POEMS:
A MANIFEST (O) ATION

by Cara Benson

Why a poem.

Why not:

Waste of time, energy, materials
Distraction from the real business of living
Cannot emulate reality -- nature's knock-off
Only emulates...
Engenders alienation and obfuscation
Poor man's philosophy
Mother will worry for your future
It will upset the status quo
Fosters solipsism
Fosters elitism
Fosters confidence to write in anyone with an ex-boyfriend, a
mother, or a therapist (it's a given if subject possess all three)
Doesn't sell product
Is barely product itself
BORING!
Unsuccessful attempts at escapism (TV = better)
Difficult / impossible to quantify
Breed flies in bottles*
Weren't those anarchy black coats reading Bukowski or
somebody other like that?
(your reason here________________)
(and maybe here________________________, too)


*(Wittgenstein was said to have thought much philosophy was generating its
own conundrums to solve. Philosophers were not necessarily brighter than most
folks, merely more capable of trapping themselves in linguistic confusion. It was
a matter of, he said, "language gone on holiday." He believed it the philosopher's
duty to "show the fly out of the bottle"; to relieve the mind of confusion.)

George Oppen:
A simple poetic undertaking: to see if life is livable,
to make life livable. Without lying.

Jack Kerouac:
I myself have difficulty covering up my bullshit lies.



*

Quantum Chaos & Poems was published by BookThug in 2008. Cara Benson's latest collection, a series of prose-poems, is called (MADE). She talks about it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTVgNNtmPGY.

Cara lives in NY State, not city, without a TV.

BECAUSE LOVE LEADS TO BUDDIES
by Mat Laporte







(click to enlarge)



*

I live on rue Laporte. Or avenue. But Mat lives in Toronto, so. Mat just started this: www.fernohouse.com. Ferno House is a brand new publishing house based in Toronto, Ontario, committed to designing and printing hand-made, beautiful chapbooks and full-length collections of fiction and poetry. Also you can download his interview with Jan Zwicky for The Puritan. Just Google him up. It's there.

MIDLIFE
by Robin Becker

Everyone here wears a full head of dark hair. Mornings,
they casually allude to parties, getting to sleep at three or four.
As usual, there are a few great beauties;
most still eat eggs.
They treat me like an older sister, hip but no
all-nighters. What happened to my competitive spirit?
My rakish scarf? Like an old man, I miss my
basset hound.

Back home, my Mountain Laurel creates curb appeal,
my mailbox salutes, a sturdy citizen on the road.
Last month I felt great communion with my neighbors
as we all cursed and mowed. Then we hauled
our recycling bins to the street in unison, we made
the collective squeal of our village.

Still, I like these young people,
some of whom still read poetry
and smoke cigarettes.
We share a taste for the linen suits I found
along the Avenue, when I lived in a studio
in Cambridge, city of brick and rescued greyhounds.
Restless, I didn't even know that wanting
was already a kind of having.

Today over lunch I will have an argument with myself
and enjoy it thoroughly, taking both sides,
gesturing and furrowing my brow. Though secure
employment is a sure sign of age, it's so still
in this glade of light and leaves that I might mistake
myself for a bear, a deer.



*

I ripped this poem out of the 1999 January/February issue of The American Poetry Review.
I was 21. I lived in an apartment where my room had a towel instead of a door.

I still like that line about wanting being a kind of having, a kind of nostalgia preparedness. And I picture Becker's hipster bevy congregating at Cosmos, the old Cosmos, the way it used to be when Cosmo himself dropped his cigarette butts on the burner and they'd get into the egg. He'd say, What you want today? I make you nice mish-mash, eh? His voice sounded like a fart, or a hangover.


www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/529

PUSSYFOOTERS
by Gabe Foreman

Scene: a muddy field at harvest

Icarus: This corn I brought to share has been cooked

all the way through, now the cobs are soft

and covered with cheese.

I extend a floppy cob to you—

Tina: I have work to do. Besides, last night I used

your father’s stubble like a tool, drawing his service

to my kernel with a sigh.

Icarus: (aside) I watch enthralled

as she chucks a whole whack of carrots

into a damp case of loam.

Tina: Icarus, as you admire my working curves and hair—

Icarus: There is straw in your hair.

Tina: —pay keen notice to the nature of my coy disdain:

I hope your silent observation may last

the entire winter.

Icarus: I see what you mean. Each speech balloon’s inflated

with virginal uncertainty—it’s a flirtation device.

Tina: Yes. But there’s a catch: “Whenever words are turned

to purely voluptuary uses and divorced from rational purpose the end result is not a real advance, but rather—

Icarus: —the beginning of decadence.” Say,

isn’t that Irving Babbitt?

Tina: Where?

Icarus: Way up there, with those pelicans.

GHOULS

by Gabe Foreman

You little hobgoblins, lavish backyard

dandies starving with your barbeques open—

what did you expect? Had you somehow heard

that fridges would spring to life in the den

as you lurched up the drive, cocktails lifting

swirling, stirring as they self-poured, and soared

past fine furniture to land (ice-tinkling)

in your decomposing hand at the door?

Listen here: our hearts and minds are not breasts

tumbling tenderized from some plane above.

You must call first, play the host, make us love

that undead bread. Stand up. Do not rest

in peace any longer. We can do the math.

Who makes toast that close to the bath?

*

(bis)

Heralding from Lake Superior's north shore,
the half woodsman, half city slicker, quarter werewolf
Gabe Foreman has published his poetry
in numerous journals, including Fiddlehead, Prism and Grain.

natural/unnatural

by Lisa Sookraj

The penthouse apartment across the way is the only obstruction. Julie's view to the end of the city. Peter tells Julie, “You're paranoid.” Nothing has transpired in two years. He licks his finger. After dipping it in a jar of pesto. Julie stares, like always, into the unused room. A stalker in hiding watching their intimate moments? A brief obsession with documentaries about serial killers. The silent business man next door. His briefcase/mini-luggage on wheels. The mystery of vacant vessels. Full suitcases. In January. The body found in one on St. Laurent. The bodies found beneath the rubble in Haiti. 3 garbage bags of donations to Heart of the Nations. Some disasters are more natural than others. What is natural? How the sun shines right through to the other side. Of the vacant penthouse. Except for on grey days. It has large windows on three sides. In the centre, there appears to be nothing. Only the curtains, pulled and tied. Peter fingers strike the keyboard. From the kitchenette, Julie checks and double checks over her shoulder. Are the shadows stationary or have they shifted? How could such a nice room, offering multiple views of the city, be vacant? “Perhaps it's haunted. Perhaps a demon,” Julie says. As she breaks another glass accidentally while doing the dishes. She breaks new glass after glass. Loses job after job. Hair after hair. Cursed. Strands. Shards. Peter picks them all up carefully, rinses her hand under the tap water. Lays the broken pieces in an empty cardboard box.

C and B

by Lisa Sookraj

Violet hums a tune. The sky turns navy blue. Gary Numan: “I die, You die”. The precise instant the 70s turned to the 80s. Damien is on the couch. On the Cusp. Aries meets Pisces. Half-ram, half-fish. Is a crab eating chicken wrong? He wonders as he stains a piece of wood. Violet always hums. Out of tune. Often the same notes, found in different songs.

Morrisey in one of his dark castles, in Ireland. The air damp, intrusive. He licks his dry lips. In Violet's daydream. She finishes stitching the button back on her coat. Bubbles smell like mango-kiwi. While Morrissey in reality, sits in LA, with a blonde bimbo on each arm. Online, Violet sees the picture that proves it. Damien tells her he thinks it's a front for homosexuality. She prefers asexuality. Imagines Morrissey at a bus station where he's remained eternally 20. Pale, sad-faced and slim-limbed. “Is it really so, really so strange?” He sings. Over the computer speakers. He blows at a lash. Violet blows at dust. Damien blows at wood. That will soon be one of three shelves of a bookshelf. Violet brushes his hair back, up, big, with slender fingers. Her modern new-waver. Though he doesn't like new wave, he is one. In the lurid, watery mass that is her life.



*

Lisa Sookraj is the kind of friend who'll trek out to hear you read a short story in the dentistry faculty at the top of a mountain on a Saturday morning in the middle of winter. She hems her own curtains, à la main, no less. She writes funny things about groundhogs. She lives in Montreal, for now. Join with me in my plea to keep her out of Toronto 's mean suburban streets. Stay, Lisa.

And you say.

THE SHED
by Brenda Coultas

Directions: This is a very easy film to make as the hogs are predictable in their behavior and limited in range by the pen; however, they are deceased, and I took part in eating them, thus this is a most difficult film to make. Build a three-room shed out of wood with a tin roof and flathead nails. Plant thistles and pigweed. Dig a wallow and fill with water.



Narrative: The pig shed is gone and where it stood are green grasses. A neighbor bought half of the land and put up a stable of goats (says they are the main ingredient in pepperoni). I can remember our pigs without the aid of hypnosis or memory drugs. There's Pearl, the mama. Rusty with his reddish patches (my pig), and Dogfood (Peggy's pig).

Can you capture the sound of my hog call?

We stocked the wallow with tadopoles, who died despite our efforts.



Film us (four girls) in the wallow, deepening the hole.

Can you film us thinking "If we could only float a boat in here then we would truly have everything: water, mud, and navigation."


Shoot a close-up of nose rings and film us scraping out plates into a coffee can can, turning dinner into hog slop. Can you film the ghost of Pearl? Pan out to the humans, on bicycles and foot, rooting in junkyards on the old Moore place, rooting in ravines full of abandoned cars.

I try to ride my pig but fall off. I pet my pig. Lay my head down on his rump. I am a small human, so small that my underpants come up to my armpits. Bust Weatherholt's dog, Old Blue, always sat down when I tried to ride him. I sat on his back, then he sat down on hind legs and I slid off.

We wanted machines or animals for transport: swings, merry-go-rounds, and maypoles for flying. We tried to ride everything our size, living or not. Ponies were too high up. We considered a wooden wagon with wooden wheels; we could take to the prairies in this, but we needed a team. I dreamed of so many treasures buried in the earth or of just bones, all the bones buried by time, nature, or natives. Given eternity, we could find marvelous bones.

*

This is from page 87 of Brenda Coultas' collection The Marvelous Bones of Time: Excavations and Explanations, published by Coffee House Press in 2007. Coultas lives in NYC's Bowery. She began to autograph my copy of Marvelous Bones -- Melissa, Happy days -- but the pen started to leak out by the y, and she gave up, and I've never asked anyone to sign anything again. I wonder what she was going to say.

WILDERNESS PLEDGE

by Suzanne Hancock

Or if we met in Vegas.
In front of the volcano at the Mirage.
Early-evening, your head a little red from a day in the desert sun,
my cheeks the same. You’re wearing your white shirt
and jeans, both wrinkled from the suitcase, a thin wet crescent
beneath both arms, my own black dress damp from the heat.
I feel itchy and homesick, and I move closer, but, still, the full
splendor of you is hidden by Midwesterners in jerseys and cameras.

Maybe later the real beginning is a shared humiliation
in finding the volcano’s drawn-out explosion
beautiful—those 3000 lights simulating lava flow.
We’d toast to that.

Or we run into each other in the elevator
we share with the funny drunk bride in her beaded
dress and bucket of tokens, and you’re going to get a bag of salt and vinegar chips
from the vending machine, and I’m fooling myself into thinking
tonight is the night to learn craps. “Bet with the house,
my dad always says, “even if it makes you unpopular.”

You follow me and peel a fifty from your roll and tell me to go crazy.
“Anything above the fifty, you can keep,” you say with a smile.
We fall in love the moment after you lift my arm, declaring, “You’re the champ!”
while the rest of the players around the table give us the wood eye. We walk
and I whisper, “Let me buy you a drink every day for the rest of our lives.”

Or we’re in line for a show (hopefully Nearly Neil,
the Neil Diamond impersonator) and you say,
“I’m going to fuck the Christ out of you,” and I think,
excitedly, what does that mean? Does he think I’m
Christian? What is it about Neil that makes him so friendly?
The view from your room is Egypt, Hollywood, Pirates—
a synthetic warmth that makes me dizzy and hungry.
Go back downstairs for those potato chips
while I take off my lucky boots, my lucky socks and dress,
come back while I’m saying yes, yes, yes,
draw the curtains and,
for a while at least,
unplug all those landlocked lights.

*

We swim at the same Y in Chinatown. When she found out I didn't have goggles, she left me a spare pair at the front desk. "Yes," she says, "swimming is good. Do it, do it, do it!!"

Suzanne Hancock has been published in a variety of journals, including Prairie Fire, Arc and Geist. Her collection, Another Name for Bridge, was published by Mansfield Press in 2005. Her most recent work, Cast from Bells, out of McGill Queen's University Press, is slated for release in April 2010.

OVERRIDE
OVERRIDE
OVERRIDE
OVERRIDE
OVERRIDE

To prevail or have dominance over;
have final authority or say over;
overrule.
To disregard, set aside, or nullify; countermand
to take precedence over; preempt or supersede
to extend beyond or spread over; overlap
to modify or suspend the ordinary functioning of;
alter the normal operation of
to ride over or across
to ride past or beyond
to trample or crush;
to ride (a horse) too much
to ride too closely behind (the hounds).



*

Jessica Howarth stumbled across this poem on dictionary.com. She uses her paper dictionary to keep the living room door shut. It's a drafty house.

LITTLE CURSES
by Sasha Manoli

Sharing toothbrushes is unhygienic
cats are non-refundable
possessions are liquid
forever in just three syllables
x-large condoms only count if you use
them and private parts are marked with invisible expiry dates
people curse.

Music is sad as
apple pie and casserole
for serial monogamy hobbiests
monogamous like masturbation
alcoholic socialization
no one’s drunk enough strumpets
are instruments
strumpets are instruments
people curse.

Look at this city it’s populated
with warning labels for dyslexics
people curse.




*

Sasha Manoli's one half of the WithWords whole (www.withwordspress.com) and the third of two cats. She spreads hand-me-down cheer on the backs of grainy quasi-porny photos: Happy Holiday! May it be filled with hairy men and floral bed sheets. xoxoxo

TROIS LIMERICKS
par Robin Le Massart

Un curé de Saint-Léonard

Visitait la caverne un soir…

Dans le parc Pie-XII

Il avait les blues —

Et se masturbait dans le noir.

*

C’était un peintre en bâtiment

Qui avait perdu son amant.

Peignant les plafonds,

Il criait son nom :

Normand ! Normand ! Normand ! Normand !

*

Un chef d’État mélancolique

S’était enfui de sa clinique.

Penché sur un gouffre,

Il cria je souffre,

Et s’y jeta d’un bond comique.



*

A contributor to Plafond : hors de la grotte (2009), an anthology of mostly new Quebec writing with a contrapuntal dash of absurd French classics that kicks ass, Robin Le Massart anime des ateliers de poésie dans des CPE et des maisons de retraite. Because skanky limericks are for all of life's seasons.

www.revueplafond.com

SOMEWHEY ALONG THE LINE
by Kenny Proute

A train is moving at great speed
the wind is bashing among trees
but all and all we are in
somewhey along the line.
With wheels screeching along
then it come to a sudden stop
somewhey along the line.

*

Born in 1961 in Trinidad, Kenny Proute is one of the original members of Montreal's St. James Drop-In Centre. He also paints.

MY WORLD AS I KNOW IT, 10/18
by Gillian Sze

A finished espresso crusts the afternoon

someone tosses popcorn out the passenger window
and pigeons ignore traffic

the raised pant leg of a cyclist bares
a Herculean calf, just as it presses on the pedal

a puppy leads the way

deserted ice sits outside the grocery store,
bits of broccoli find their way through as it melts

someone buys yesterday’s newspaper

a man grieves for his father

the fossilized tire print in mud becomes brittle

the sun throws a milky gaze over
all that pales.



*

The author of two chapbooks, A Tender Invention and This is the Colour I Love You Best, Gillian Sze's first machine-bound collection of poetry, Fish Bones, published by DC Press, was nominated for the QWF McAuslan First Book Prize. Say it like C.

SAGITTARIUS A
by Cornelia Mars

The misleading appearance
of a solid entity
is the result of a slight hand.
Micro-expressions emitted quick
don’t betray a porous nature.
In actuality, these bodies
are maimed remnants
of an irresistible attraction
to something bigger and darker –
torn apart by an exponentially
stronger grasp.

To exist, they attached themselves
to a bright core, however elusive
(a ghost, maybe a furious child
bred from perturbation),
stretched their needy arms.
The orbiting embrace
has positioned a kernel
that will eventually (by the velocity of its desire)
rule as a heart, an impenetrable master,
a horrifying raison d’être.

Starved in a constellation
and at the point of no return
you won’t reveal any information
beyond your horizon –
you are a bright compact emission
that leaves nothing. You might kill,
grow, collapse me into this.



*

Crowned Miss Sweden in 2003, Cornelia Mars can unknot linguistic tongue twisters and wield knives in a pub kitchen AT THE SAME TIME.

ANNA ANDREEVNA AKHMATOVA
FIGHTS ANTONIN ARTAUD
by Eugene Ostashevsky

Akhmatova: AAA! AAA! AAA! AAA! AAA!

Artaud: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Akhmatova: AAA! AA! AAA! AA! AAA!

Artaud: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Akhmatova: AAAAA! AAAAA! AAAAA!

Artaud: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Akhmatova: AA! AA! AA! AA! AA! AA!

Artaud: ?!?!

Akhmatova: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Artaud: A! A! A! A! A! A! A!

Akhmatova: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!


(Artaud absconds, abdicating.)




*

Eugene Ostashevsky is a Russian-born American poet from New York City. His books include the poetry collection Iterature and a volume of Russian 1930s writings in translation called OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism. He currently lives and teaches in Florence.



EDITOR'S NOTE:
"When her father learned that his daughter was about to publish a selection of her poems in a St. Petersburg magazine, he called her in and told her that although he had nothing against her writing poetry, he'd urge her 'not to befoul a good respected name' and to use a pseudonym. The daughter agreed, and this is how 'Anna Akhmatova' entered Russian literature instead of Anna Gorenko. (...) The five open a's of Anna Akhmatova had a hypnotic effect and put this name's carrier firmly at the top of the top of the alphabet of Russian poetry. In a sense, it was her first successful line; memorable in its acoustic inevitability, with its Ahs sponsored less by sentiment than by history."

- from "The Keening Muse" in Less Than One: Selected Essays by Joseph Brodsky

NEVSKY PROSPEKT
by Melissa Bull

A suited-up drunk careened off his steed, shouting at the sparsely moving traffic on the street. A young woman led the horse by its bridle in high-hipped jeans, sneakers and blond hair to her ass. Stray bitches lurched from fleets of street-cleaning Humvees, their half-dozen tits as rubbery as baby bottle areolae. I walked past the McDonald’s, past the Coca-Cola sign, past the restaurant with the black guy decked out like a pirate all hours of the day. I didn’t know my address, but I recognized my place by the green Lada stranded in front of the building where in the courtyard, litters of kittens glommed on to garbage containers, mewing and flicking their tails in the dusty beams of dawn’s mid-morning light. I unlocked the twelve bolts on my door, showered under a dribble of rusty-urine-stinking water in a fuchsia showerstall with a radio option and lay down between sheets printed with astrological signs on a plush pull-out sofa. A dream-catcher hung from the ceiling fixture. When I took off my glasses it fuzzed out of focus and its plastic beads swung shapelessly in the breeze of the open window.




*


Bull works in Montreal as a writer, editor and translator. "Nevsky Prospekt" was first published in the Université de Montréal's Festival du homard: A fresh catch of Montréal writing (2009).

KURT COBAIN
by David Bradford

Man think about that,
poor old
soupy-eyed James Dean.
Founding father
of the Breakfast Club.

I bet if that puppy killing kid
in the police department
waiting room
had just taken his goddamn coat,
Jimmy would still be alive.

Imagine James Dean
like Peter Faulk.
That fucks me up, man.
James Dean like
Colombo. All grime
and sterling earnest
when introduced,
cock-eyed TV star
of yesteryear
when featured.

Don’t get me wrong, I mean
I like Colombo. Pete Faulk too.
But James Dean
getting a lifetime
achievement
award
at the Emmys—

That’s too fucking much.

James Dean. Now there’s a young fucker
that mattered,
young or not.

Fuck Kurt Kobain.
Just another chump
in a Salvation Army sweater
from the J Peterman catalogue.



*
David Bradford is a graduate of Concordia's creative writing program. He is the author of Little Death, published by WithWords in 2008. Bradford lives in a Berlin hipster commune. They don't even have to say irony.