New Poetry From Richard Cronshey

Between Hank Williams and John Donne The Shadow Falls
And I Am The Shadow

Today I past you on the street
and my heart whose matter is soon spent
in you shall burn
the world. I can’t help it, I
am still not good, not bad, my heart
belonging
to no one does not belong to me.
If my life got wasted by you
smoked up
in your life, that would be
a kind of victory for me,
a birthing into my own petrified
destiny or burning essence.
In this world I’m left to wander
Wondering through this world alone
When blossoms unfold
A plaything
Alone and forsaken
With sad madness and gimpy legs
Poor as dirt through slow motion years
On property that had been mine
If I hadn’t fathered that bastard
Doppelganger
Illegally with a bunch of outlaw
Metaphors upon virgin earth
And thereby jinxed shitless me..
The venom of all stepdames, gamsters gall
That I may know, and see your milky bright
Sillouette, but you send back my eyeballs
And celestial pump, No Longer at
This Address and this is the midnight
Of my life’s embarrassing year.
Oh where has it gone to, my leg,
My life smiling on me?

A hound in the distance is starting to bey.
Now a pair of chaoses and a lot of absence
Frequent me, an abysmall distillation
Looks me up and down. The world’s
Whole sap is sunk., Bayou Pon Pon.
O Sweet Marie she’ll dance. The hydroptique
Earth has drunk, and everybody’s having fun
But me. Lord I don’t know how
To lose all others, from all things
For I am every dead thing.
To make the doubt clear I tried
And I tried to make her satisfied.
I’m nobody’s sugar daddy now.
There you are folks.
If the good lord’s willing and the creeks don’t rise
The heavens get off on moving.
Pleasure’s not pleasure
If you don’t spread it around.
The sun in its radiant chair
Isn’t greedy with the heat and lordy neither
Will I be, sister subjection think these things cheerfully
Restless on the farm. Don’t take your guns to town
Son and make a spirit feare .
These stars are so many beads strung
On a single speeding string as is the pith
Whose quick succession makes it still
One thing. To pass an age
In her in whose body
This low world gets up and runs.
So hep your brother along the road, Terese,
Anette and Jole Blon. They have a good time,
O yes, oui, oui. But what good would it do.
I know I’d still want you.

The hogs took the cholera.
This must, my soul, be the long and short of it
To go on overthinking the thing and remembering
Her body that was the opposite of jail to me. I’m dirt
And you’re the ocean of loss
Invironning all and gnawing and breaking
My banks. Thanks a lot. Nothing but me
Of all invenom’d things
Blackmailed by my appetites
Am a decoy recanting death. I take up porcelain
Where they buried clay and usurpe
The body as the sea which
When it gets also sheds you numerlesse
Infinities tis late to ask abundance
Of your grace. See how the sun’s
Headlong conflagration begets
Strange creatures in Bayou Pon Pon?
In me your fatherly yet annoying ryme
Has wrought the same contamination.
Why don’t you spark me
Like you used to do?


Richard Cronshey was born in Los Angeles in 1966. He is the author of five collections of poetry, including most recently The Snow and The Snow. Cronshey's poems have appeared previously in Zone.

Raymond Federman

15 May 1928 - 6 October 2009

Jim Carroll

1 August 1950 - 11 September 2009

Five Poems From Michael Graber

Instructions for Making Love to a Goddess

Prepare for months before entering her
chamber: fast, do body work, drink pure
fruit juices. This is an altar, so be humble
or be humiliated by her shriveling pranks.
She knows what takes you to your knees.
Wait until she unties her hair before you
unbutton her blouse. Did you remember
to consecrate the encounter with a gift?
Listen with your hands. Scan her body for
parts too long untouched. Stay in the space
between total surrender and discipline.
Don’t be scared to ask her what feels good.
When she laughs, you will stagger, drunk.
The music her body makes sounds like
the world’s oldest hatreds and freshest
healings, waking the dead from trance.
As for speed, interpret your instructions
from the river. Be as intimate as food
in fire. With the ache of birthing, repeat
her name aloud as a mantra. If you’ve
gotten this far, your life has changed
shape and you awake in a country
where judges, sheiks and rabbis, even
dollars have no authority. The poem
you write must stand on its own. Yet,
you cannot sit for long after light breaks
your being. Here, you master patience.
Like a boat tethered to a pier, you are
tied to this dance the length
of her infinite satisfaction.


Longing

I.          When you see the wet hair and swimming-
toned torso the way of water no longer
makes sense. One glance and sailors
moan for shipwreck. Most desire drowning,
yet I would live to discover a new land
on my native shore.
                                     When the fever beads
dried I could not explain how a mermaid
blew the grace of breath into me, how she
lulled me to sleep with her underwater laugh.
I blinked. She lay in my bed. Her shapely,
human legs wrapped around my body
like a wave. She laughed the same laugh,
explained “I survived the molting by licking
dried saltwater off your beard.” I was shaved
clean.

II.                                This legend. This acorn. This story—
a seed in a hard shell. One nibble on the neck
and the shell cracks open. A kiss and a single
green sprout announces its birth. Another
nibble and rings grow inside the oak.

III.           I wake up walking an old growth forest trail.
I pause to get grounded. I know this place,
its idioms and shapes know me. If this is the land
of love, may I learn its language and taste
homecoming in its tongue? If this is the land
of the living, I could die almost satisfied.


Leave Your Longing Open

My children, here is a secret
that cannot sit still. Your father
is a collection of ecstatic particles
held with great gobs of glue, called

love. One foot dances in another
stream of conversation that travels
faster than light. I have been alone
so long in the televised world,

breaking acorn shells so oak roots
can sabotage the satellites’ signals
and leaves can grow through the
slight crack of your smart phone

to remind you how to listen. Slow
down and leave your longing open.


Shadows on the Cave Wall

When they took off the blindfold I saw
all I would embrace years from then. Fear
engenders fantasy, and stories get told for
lesser purposes of help or healing, so I noticed
only the darker ones twirling. A door that really
wasn’t there was locked with lead. The dark robes
danced and their masks looked like my neighbors—
lawyers, merger-and-acquisition matchmakers, ex
in-laws, smirks of those seduced and those who seduced,
falling faces caught in compromises that cost almost as much as
peak performance, future mistakes I could not learn from
before kissing you. Shaking at the mouth of the cave, all
the lies I ever told paraded in the shadow the fire casts. My life
followed this snake of sound where the flute chased the strings
around the meandering drum beats. Dark from five days rain,
I did not know what I might back into, but it was better
than stammering at a threshold I was not ready
to cross. I backed into a brook and drowned.
Reborn by mouth-to-mouth breath,
so little separates us from living.


Let’s Go Say Hi to the River

Our footprints may take the wind
a few days to mend. The mud slows
down our pace because life takes off
faster here and you must trudge to soak
it in. O lover, spread our blanket. Let me
fall before I slide down the bank. If you
listen, you can hear the waterlogged souls
who drowned nearby and the warbled,
falsetto howls of the teenager hanging
from the old train bridge by one arm.
Behind us two people married, but not
to each another, grope in frenzy as if
speed enhances bliss. Here, by the oak
with a face in its bark, you and I move
with the understanding the river has
with the land that cradles it; its soil
enriched by the same flowing waters.
Life abounds where the Mississippi bends.
The sun turns our flesh pink, another lesson
where a little heals but too much might
be dangerous. We kiss and the river responds.
Its current pours through us. In the rush
the earth asks us to exchange vows.
We accept. The river melds our names,
our blood, our tribes. To pay creation’s
priest for the ceremony, we offer our lives.
Deal, echoes the woods, now abandon your plans,
risk everything to sing the song you just heard.


Michael Graber is the author of The Last Real Medicine Show. Since September 11th, 2001 he has chosen to write only love poetry. Graber runs the Southern Growth Studio, lives in Oxford, MS, and plays mandolin with the Memphis band, the Bluff City Backsliders.

Carol Gunther

2 June 1954 - 4 July 2009

New Poetry From Andrew Baron

Zone, Happy Anniversary

Not of marriage, because what’s that?
There’s a new space         (this one, ours)
born of new age.     So happy

here,

together.

The managers would have us earn it,
nurse us on their image then
chain us to a corner of their freedom.

Fuck them.     The only
image is a pulse
keeps this in motion,
beats our distances
into days around no vein.          May

this stay
a city with no center

and happy spread the plague up to the gates.



Andrew Baron's poems have appeared previously in Zone. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Mario Benedetti

14 September 1920 - 17 May 2009

Idea Vilariño

18 August 1920 - 28 April 2009

Craig Arnold

16 November 1967 - 27 April 2009

Three Poems From George Moore

Survivor Gene

The islands we create are enemies

we reach
breech perhaps

our mitochondrial rate
mutations of mutations

in what we hate
then love

then hate again

sub-Saharan beauty rests
in its place

the tip of the extreme
inflection, reflection

but language morphs
or mutates

depending
even as a gene survives

we live in polymorphisms
so does speech

breeched by the child developing
fewer ways of seeing

what islands mean by separation


Running

Not always the same
universe, the same spacetime
continuum, some

warp in the way bodies
regenerate, or refuse to,
and ankles knees

bones of the brain
constantly fight
the seasons, for they are not

the same, not the same
spring in the step uphill
at heaven, nor in

the long distance miles
along trails that seem
rockier, more

personal, and weather
harsher than
forever.

Not the same but sweeter
maybe, legs like
Kau Cim sticks

tossed out
on landscapes,
bones picking up speed,

grown strong by simply
being out, thrust & parry
in air & earth,

singing against the end,
runner’s mantra,
next hill,

the next curve,
life strung out
a tensile thread

between coming and going,
and into the next
whatever

it can be,
long as it
moves this fast.


Tattoo for God

I got the boy on the right arm
out of the army, about the time I met

my wife, who wanted to know if
this was permanent, or just a passing

faith fancy, something she did not
herself believe in, either way,

and I said it was a drunken night
in Bangkok when the moon was full,

an eye on the Asian continent
and I felt like the Buddha in love

with all the cosmos. She said
get it removed. It’s my turn.

It took the skin right off, one
god less, one goddess more.

George Moore's poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, North American Review, Orion, Colorado Review, Nimrod, Meridian, Chelsea, Southern Poetry Review, Southwest Review, Chariton Review, and have been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize. Moore was a finalist for the 2007 Richard Snyder Memorial Prize, from Ashland Poetry Press, and earlier for The National Poetry Series, The Brittingham Poetry Award, and the Anhinga Poetry Prize. His recent collections are Headhunting (Edwin Mellen, 2002), poems exploring the ritual practices of love and possession, and an e-Books, All Night Card Game in the Back Room of Time (Pulpbits, 2007).

The poems appearing in Zone are part of a collaborative installation with award-winning Scandinavian textile artist, Hrafnhildur Sigurðardóttir, scheduled to appear at an exhibition in Iceland later this year. The installation will be cite specific to Nes galleries, in Skagaströnd, on the northern coast. A previous collaborative work, with French-Canadian visual artist Mireille Perron, appeared in Can Serrat, Spain in 2007. Titled Complicatio/Explicatio (Folding and Unfolding): A Collaborative Artist Project on The Materiality of Textual Experimentation, the installation featured Moore's poetry and Perron's conceptualizations of the "book." Several shape poems from the Can Serrat installation have been published in Bathhouse.

JG Ballard

15 November 1930 - 19 April 2009

An Interview With Horton Foote

Horton Foote, who passed away today, was perhaps the most under-appreciated playwright of the American stage. Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for his play The Young Man From Atlanta, Foote was best known as the Oscar-winning screenwriter of 1962's To Kill a Mockingbird. His screenplay for Tender Mercies won the Best Original Screenplay award the following year. While Foote was the author of nearly 50 plays, several of them adapted for film, his truest work was the nine-play Orphans' Home Cycle, which chronicled rural Texas in the early part of the 20th century.

Longtime contributor Andrew Haley interviewed Horton Foote in 1995.

AH: It has been said that there are three plays in every play – the play that is written, the play that is interpreted, and the play that is performed. You work personally with all three of these areas of your plays. Where does the writer stand in the production of his script?

HORTON FOOTE: It depends on the writer. Some writers are not very interested in the process. Having been an actor and director, I find it extremely interesting and am there as much as possible.

AH: With the increased convenience to find entertainment in the living room, via cable, satellite dishes, the internet; and an anti-aesthetical Congress in power, the outlook of the future of theatre is hazy. Do you foresee the decline of the state of American theatre in the next century?

HORTON FOOTE: I think all obstacles you mention are just new challenges. In theatre it seems there are always things impossible to overcome. Somehow, we stick to it and get the work done and I trust and hope this will always be so.

AH: You write your first drafts by hand. Hemingway wrote by hand as well, with the exception of his dialogue, which he wrote by typewriter. Are there identifiable characteristics in dialogue written by hand, by typewriter, and by computer?

HORTON FOOTE: I write by hand because it makes me feel that much closer to my work. I feel that a typewriter is impersonal and the computer horrifies me!

AH: Poets, short story writers, and novelists all have dozens of magazines and publishing houses to print their work. For playwrights, the venues are not as clear. As a major figure in the present world of theatre and film, what is your advice to young playwrights on how to climb the ladder of stage writing success?

HORTON FOOTE: This has to be the most difficult question to answer. It has never been easy for a playwright to get established. I wish I could answer this with some measure of sense. All I can say is if one has to write plays one will and somehow persevere.

Horton Foote

14 March 1916 - 4 March 2009