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Tenacity

Posted in Imagery, tagged Bill Griffin, imagery, M. Scott Douglass, Main Steet Rag, nature photography, NC Poets, New Years Day, poetry, Ralph Earle, Southern writing on January 10, 2025| 7 Comments »

January 1, 2025 — Henbit

[with 3 poems from Main Street Rag]

The Morning of the Unfinished Coffee

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.

Ricks Carson, Atlanta GA

❦ ❦ ❦

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.

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.

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.

O Henbit, Lamia amplexicaule, Mint Family, I can see I need a warmer coat and a couple ounces of your tenacity.

January 1, 2025 — Spiny Sow Thistle

❦ ❦ ❦

Frank Dribble a Tennis Ball

I’ve never seen the old man playing,

only complaining about the neighbors,

immigrants, taxes, traffic, and the dogs

that piss on his pink peonies.

The tennis ball gets away from him,

bounces downhill toward his basement door.

He chases it five yards and stops,

as if he suddenly remembers his age.

I wave. Frank doesn’t remember me,

but he waves back at strangers now.

I see him often without his toupee,

wearing the same red flannel pajamas,

checking his mailbox ten times a day

like a twelve-year-old looking for a gift.

His wife opens the front door, shouts to Frank,

Stay near the house where I can see you.

Frank waves. I not to his ghostly universe:

Forgotten ball, empty mailbox, strangers.

Terry Huff, Brentwood TN

❦ ❦ ❦

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.

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.

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.

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.

❦

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.

And you can read back issues and subscribe right HERE:

January 1, 2025 — Common Groundsel

❦ ❦ ❦

Beirut Holiday Inn, 67 AD

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.

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.

The kid’s attention drifts

to the TV hanging in darkness:

bread and circuses

live

from the Coliseum.

Ralph Earle, Durham NC

❦ ❦ ❦

[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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Meat

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, M. Scott Douglass, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing, vegetarianism on August 12, 2022| 14 Comments »

[with 3 poems by M. Scott Douglass]

I don’t eat meat. Just a decision ten years ago, my choice. It has nothing to do with you; I don’t think you’re “bad” if you eat meat. I has nothing to do with Bambi; I don’t think oysters are especially cute but I refrain from eating them as well. It has nothing to do with personal health; my cholesterol readings were already to (not) die for. And it certainly has nothing to do with ought or should; hominids evolved eating meat (and lots of insects) – perhaps all that protein made possible these brains we think are so big.

All it has to do with is my personal effort to make somewhat less of an impact on this planet. Leave it in a little better shape for my grandkids. Per pound of protein, how much acreage . . . water . . . diesel fuel . . . nitrates & phosphates . . . methane & CO2? Beans and beets will always beat out beef and poultry. How many billions of people can this planet sustain? Not nearly all the billions we have right now if we all want meat every day.

But what baffles me is how “vegetarian” has become a fighting word to some people. If I order plant-based sausage at Cracker Barrel will it make the guy at the next table choke on his chicken-fried steak? Simmer down, Dude. If nine billion people eating meat is going to hurry up and toast Mother Earth to a crispy golden caramelized finish, isn’t it kind of cool that a few people opt for rabbit food? Think of the choice this way – consider it my gift to you.

❦ ❦ ❦

A Tinderbox of Unsubtle Discourse
++++ It is the law: as a civilization dies and goes down
++++ to eat ashes along with all other dead civilizations
++++ – it is the law all dirty wild dreamers die first –
++++ gag ‘em, lock ‘em up, get ‘em bumped off.
++++ And since at the gates of tombs silence is a gift,
++++ be silent about it, yes, be silent – forget it.
+++++++++++ ~ Carl Sandburg, from At the Gates of the Tombs

There are those who prefer silence
to the sound of the wind in the trees.
For them, my voice rustles their peace
like a harsh unwelcome breeze.

I am the ghost of a storm they
would rather forget, as if they
believe a wave of their hand could
disperse an approaching hurricane.

There’s a red sky this morning,
red as the hot California hills,
and they think they can wish it
away with happy thoughts.

The wind has had its day, they say.
They want to muffle it, muzzle
the barking dog that wakes them,
shakes them from their comfort zone.

I am an inconvenient dog,
a crusty leaf skittering down the road,
a spark dropped in a dry forest:
Pretending won’t make me go away.

❦ ❦ ❦

In the forward to his poetry collection Living in a Red State Blues, Scott Douglass wonders about attracting readers. The people on the reading end may have been burned out by it. Perhaps they were eager to move on from this period in our history or tired of hearing angry voices – . . . I prefer to think of it as exhaustion. Yep, I’d say that about sums it up. Exhaustion. Probably explains why the book’s cover stared at me from my desk for months before I finally cracked it open. I just get bone tired sometimes. Many’s the day I haven’t even opened my news feeds because I figure I already know all the headlines.

Also probably because I know Scott Douglass does not suffer fools gladly. Or quietly. But which of us has never been the fool? OK, I know this book will include at least one (high decibel) rant about all the bullshit of our current epoch, but it has been born from the pen and heart of a human being. One whose voice I respect. And hey, I’m a human being, too. Scott and I have something in common. Oh yes, we do.

❦ ❦ ❦

Reunion in an Airport Restroom

What do you do when
the man at the adjacent urinal
starts a conversation as if
resuming a thought left hanging
with a long-lost relative at
a wedding or picnic. You,
having held silent the business
at hand, the business for which
you have waited for hours stuffed
into a flying steel barrel, your
plumbing aching to be drained
for so long now that, amid this
scintillating discussion, it
sputters to a slow rebellious
drip, but wait, did he ask
a question; try to divert you
from your primary purpose
in this porcelain concourse,
where all the gates are full
and line runs from the door
to the tarmac; try to draw you
out of your self-conscious state,
shake off antisocial incivility,
embrace your fellow man?

❦ ❦ ❦

March 13

Today is the anniversary of my
father’s death, or was it the day before
when his eyes last opened ore the week before
when he froze in mid-sentence, rigid fingers
reaching up to still air for stray words
that never returned to him again.

His words find me at odd times.

It’s only the last two minutes
of the game that matter.

But it’s unspoken moments
that haunt me most, moments
that echo throughout my day: the way

he turned a cereal spoon upside down
on the table when he was finished eating,
peanut butter spread to the edge
of a Ritz, a dab of Smucker’s
black raspberry jelly in the middle.

knowledge is the only thing that’s truly ours,
the only thing they can never take away.

On a shelf above my head he sits,
an eight-year-old on a black and white pony,
tall and proud, fists full of reigns. Sometimes
I look up to that pony boy and chuckle knowing
his parents paid a nickel to have it taken at
a carnival, how it was the closest he ever got
to riding a real horse, city boy that he was.

if you’re going to do something,
don’t do it half-assed

I though of my father every day
of the week leading up to this date,
but morning found me immersed in work,
the work he taught me, a job he envied.
When my nephew texted a photo of
his grandfather in a 1940’s Navy uniform,
shame swept a chill through me, realizing
I’d almost let the day slip by neglected.

do unto others as you would have them
do unto you

I look up at the pony boy on the shelf
and remember why, of all the photos
I have of him, I choose to display this one.
It’s because it frames him as someone
I know he never was, but reminds me
of his most cherished gift to me:
a sense of wonder, imagination,
the foresight to perceive the possible.

face the music, even when
you don’t like the tune

I am my father’s dreamer son,
the one who sometimes loses track
of time, the one who’s been tossed
from numerous horses, landed hard,
but always found a nickel to climb back on
because that’s what he expects of me.
While I may forget days and dates,
I will never forget that. Not that.

❦ ❦ ❦

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Hard to Love — M. Scott Douglass

Posted in Imagery, tagged M. Scott Douglass, main street rag, NC Poets on February 26, 2012| 2 Comments »

Forty years ago when I was a sophomore in college I messed up. I failed a friend. While I was getting out of bed on dark Ohio mornings to head down to the chemistry lab, I let my roommate Mike sleep through all his classes. While I was wearing out a carrell in the libe, I left him in the frat house getting stoned again. When his assigned stack of Hermann Hesse lay untouched on the desk, I picked them up one by one and read them all without ever trying to engage him in discussion. And when his German Lit. prof called me in to ask, “What’s going on with Mike? Can’t you help?” my reply still humiliates me forty years later. “I am not my brother’s keeper.”

Mike flunked out and I’ve never heard from him since. What was wrong with me that I didn’t at least once try to kick his ass into gear? A twenty-year old’s lack of empathy? I’d define that kind of spiritual void not as lack of caring but as something far worse — lack of imagination. I couldn’t see myself in his place. If I was congenitally and utterly self-motivated and compulsive, why couldn’t anyone else become just like me if they wanted to? And I confess to something even more base and perverse. Maybe I wanted him to fail. His failure affirmed my success. For one guy to win another has to lose; when one falls another rises. Damned selfish and mean-spirited, that. Anyone who’d known such about me would surely have found me pretty hard to love.

I’m sorry, Mike. I hope you got your act together and have found your heart’s desire. Sorry I didn’t give you a leg up when you needed it. I thought of you when I read Hard to Love by Scott Douglass.

. . . . .

Characters like Mike and about a hundred other equally earthbound human creatures populate the poems of Scott’s new full-length collection. Gesticulating poets whose words are air. A guy with a big head. New mimes. Those Ryan boys. Some are hapless, some redeemed, and a few get skewered. (Caveat: you might not want to read this book if you’re a cryptofascist airhead zombie.) Yes, they’re hard to love, but here’s the secret Scott doesn’t want you to know: he pretty much loves them anyway.

Read every poem. You and I live in those lines. We can’t escape what they reveal within us: impatience, ignorance, jealousy, self-righteousness, all the follies we’ve got shuffled in our hearts like a deck of cards — what’ll be next? deal it! — every one of those things that have “caught me leaning too hard / into dangerous curves.” You’ve got me this time, Officer. I’ll pay the ticket.

. . . . .

Bobby McMullen Died Last Night

Or the night before,
or last week,
or maybe it was years ago
when his wife left him
or his only son succumbed
to leukemia

A lifetime of reasons
to cuddle a bottle of Jim Beam.

We could forecast the workday
by the way he walked through the door:

quiet and sullen meant hungover,
hungover meant irritable, outright mean,
loud and talkative meant still drunk,
hangover to follow at eleven.

Even drunk he was a better
finisher than most, and after
some lunchtime refueling, he
was good for the rest of the day.

But it caught up with him.

First he totaled his car,
then the state revoked his license,
liver failing, emphysema and
tuberculosis choking him —
two years ago he retired.

Paper said they found him
face-down in his double-wide.
He’d been dead awhile.
But he went the way he wanted,
the way we always knew he would.

from Hard to Love by M. Scott Douglass

. . . . .

M. Scott Douglass is the editor of the quarterly journal Main Street Rag and the notorious czar of Main Street Rag Publishing Company. Don’t get me started. Hard to Love was released during an ice storm on February 19, 2012.

Scott has done more to promote poetry at the grass roots, both in NC and around the US, than a dozen MFA programs. Stephen E. Smith calls him “a poet in the spirit of Charles Bukowski — but better, more controlled.” I consider it an honor and a privilege to have had him kick my ass. Told you not to get me started.

Sample other poetry by M. Scott Douglass:

Auditioning for Heaven
Balancing on Two Wheels
Steel Womb Revisited

. . . . .