January 1, 2025 — Henbit
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[with 3 poems from Main Street Rag]
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The Morning of the Unfinished Coffee
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Lightning, thunder, righteous
downpour clatters on the roof.
I fetch in the newspaper,
heavy as a sack of dough.
Good Morning BLues on the radio.
I brew the coffee and go to settle
on the sofa when my wife,
she of the new hip replacement,
thumps in on her walker,
trailing unslept pain.
The fridge we just had repaired,
on the fritz again, 60̊.
Dry ice kept the cooler
cool but froze her half and half.
“Pop, the sugar bowl is empty.”
No amends can suffice.
8:15. She stirs her coffee,
I get on the horn to the repair guy.
She slide-bumps her walker
past the unmade bed,
the blinking leg-pump machine,
the warm ice packs.
I stare out the kitchen window.
Will the repair guy never call?
Her PT is due at 9:00,
so I don’t walk to the corner store
for dry news of Gaza’s wounds.
I imagine the waterlogged blood.
The paper won’t tell this truth,
that her second cup
chills on the counter, or that
I cry as I empty it in the sink.
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Ricks Carson, Atlanta GA
from The Main Street Rag, Vol 29 Nr 4, Fall 2024, Edinboro PA; © 2024 The Main Street Rag Publishing Company
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New Year’s Day – I park at the Rec Center to take a walk on the Elkin Nature Trail. Sun’s out but the air temp is just a few degrees above freezing and last night it dipped into the teens. These are the days when one feels the North in North Carolina. Bare trees, frosted fields, uninterrupted carpet of brown beside the woodland trail, this is all the nature you are permitted on a winter nature walk.
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But what’s this? In an unkempt bed surrounded by concrete curb, in backfill from last summer’s paving project and scarcely qualifying as “earth,” here is a low dust-hugging froth of green waving in the biting breeze. And not only green but specks of pink and purple. I squat. Blossoms smaller than a peanut, little mouths of dotted mauve, they sing some perverse love song to the slant sunlight. Flowers in January.
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My God, Henbit, is there a month when you don’t bloom? Colonizer from Europe since colonial days, non-native naturalized citizen, lure for early pollinators and considered tasty by chickens, even I have made a salad of you though you’re not my favorite. So here’s your chlorophyll chugging away, frost warning be damned. Here are pink pinhead buds lining up to yawn wide for the hardiest bee-ling. My nose is dripping and my fingertips are blue but you just look way, way too happy.
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O Henbit, Lamia amplexicaule, Mint Family, I can see I need a warmer coat and a couple ounces of your tenacity.
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January 1, 2025 — Spiny Sow Thistle
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Frank Dribble a Tennis Ball
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I’ve never seen the old man playing,
only complaining about the neighbors,
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immigrants, taxes, traffic, and the dogs
that piss on his pink peonies.
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The tennis ball gets away from him,
bounces downhill toward his basement door.
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He chases it five yards and stops,
as if he suddenly remembers his age.
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I wave. Frank doesn’t remember me,
but he waves back at strangers now.
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I see him often without his toupee,
wearing the same red flannel pajamas,
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checking his mailbox ten times a day
like a twelve-year-old looking for a gift.
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His wife opens the front door, shouts to Frank,
Stay near the house where I can see you.
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Frank waves. I not to his ghostly universe:
Forgotten ball, empty mailbox, strangers.
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Terry Huff, Brentwood TN
from The Main Street Rag, Vol 29 Nr 4, Fall 2024, Edinboro PA; © 2024 The Main Street Rag Publishing Company
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Before I write this I head to the basement where I know I’ve stashed a big plastic bin. Ah, here it is, Vol 4 Nr 4 1999, the first issue of Main Street Rag Poetry Journal I ever bought. Five bucks, 72 pages, saddle stapled. I lay it beside my latest copy, Vol 29 Nr 4, 126 pages, perfect bound and hefty. Nine dollars, discounted to subscribers. If I took a book-finding expedition throughout the house, all these groaning shelves and random piles, if I look behind and under, I imagine I could find every issue spanning that twenty-five years. Oh yeah, and I read them all, too.
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Tenacity, from the proto-Indo-European root ten-, which produces the Latin verbs tenere “to hold, grasp,” and tendere “to stretch:” sometimes you just have to do both. I open my dictionary to tenacity and find a photo of M. Scott Douglass. The average lifespan of a small press poetry journal is probably somewhere between Mayfly and Pet Hamster. How does founder, editor, designer, and chief mailroom clerk Scott Douglass do it? I flip the Wayback to 1999 and flip the little book to page 63, Ralph Earle’s Beirut Holiday Inn, 67 AD, and Taste Our Simple Pleasures, and damn, they’re just as good as when I circled their titles in the table of contents 25 years ago.
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Poetry for the regulars on Main Street. What you’ll discover in these pages every three months is mostly everything that makes us human: family and crisis; love and sex; society and politics; satire, some snark, and a few decent chuckles; clear mornings and long sleepless nights. What you won’t find is Hallmark, and you definitely won’t find incomprehensible wordsplats that don’t have the sense they were born with.
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I’ve been trying to learn to write poetry for twenty-five years, and still learning. The only thing I’m sure about after all that travail is that to write it you’ve got to read it. So now see here, M. Scott, I’ve got just one more thing to say to you – thanks.
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Scott and Jill have pulled up stakes in Charlotte NC and moved back to Pennsylvania to be closer to family. End of an era. Who is going to hold all of our feet to the fire? The Main Street Rag will live on, however, reincorporated and with a business address of Edinboro, PA. Last week I was scanning weather maps to see how Linda’s family in Pittsburgh and Cleveland were going to fare during the big winter storm. The graphic of inches of expected snow showed 4 here, 6 there, and smack dab over Edinboro a big fat 8. Someone who’s grown up in western Pennsylvania will scoff and say, Eight inches, pshaw, let me tell you about the time . . . Nevertheless, Scott, please get the teenagers to shovel the drive.
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And you can read back issues and subscribe right HERE:
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January 1, 2025 — Common Groundsel
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Beirut Holiday Inn, 67 AD
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You find yourself in the lounge
drinking a Brandy Alexander
trying to stay calm. At your elbow
a kid with red hair stares at this fingers,
a Swiss flag sewed to his
army jacket back.
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He is into prophecies, like you,
reads a lot of Jesus, likes Habakkuk
and Jonah, too. When he says something sharp
about the end of Jack the Baptist, you relax
and with a few fast facts show
that Jeremiah foresaw
the current catastrophe
and though old Nero
is sharp as a Philistine’s eye tooth
it was noble Augustus
really had the moves.
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The kid’s attention drifts
to the TV hanging in darkness:
bread and circuses
live
from the Coliseum.
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Ralph Earle, Durham NC
from Main Street Rag Poetry Journal, Vol 4 Nr 4, Winter 1999, Charlotte NC; © 1999 Main Street Rag Poetry Journal
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[AFTERWORD: This morning (Wed. Jan. 8) I finished editing Tenacity, added the photos and captions, and put it to bed until Friday Jan. 10 for posting. This afternoon I reached for the next book in my stack and opened Ralph Earle’s new collection, Everything You Love is New. There on page 15 is Beirut Holiday Inn, 67 AD. Total serendipity and cosmic congruence. The only change is that old Nero is now Caligula. Thanks, Ralph! Now to start choosing poems for Jan. 17! — Bill G]
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