FRYING POTATOES AND ONIONS

I woke up and coughed my disease into the sink
And then I pissed and brushed my teeth.

It was when I started frying potatoes and onions,
Potatoes I cubed and an onion I sliced in this same room
Where I now sit and type,
That I began to think about you again,
For the third time that morning.
We were in my old apartment and it was after one A.M.
You were hungry and I made you a bacon and egg sandwich
The way my grandmother used to make one for me on Sunday morning
When I stayed at her house as a teenager.
You were so grateful, so filled with happiness
That I was doing something that is really so small
Compared to what I would be willing to do for you
And you kept saying how delicious it was,
Us warm and still vibrating from our hours
Going back and forth in bed.

Every object in the room brings a memory,
Every toss and turn in bed brings flames of fetid anger
Simmering in my stomach.
Now the rain has stopped and the fog is rolling in
But never enough that I cannot still see you
Delighting in every moment with me and steeling yourself
For when time would suspend our moments for another week
Or two.

It feels as if you are as dead as my grandmother
Or my mother
Instead of just gone from me and me alone
And when I think of you all that exists is mourning
Because it is still so new.
The potatoes, the onions, the spices
Clench themselves at the pit of my stomach
And all my eyes can see are things that are not here
And all my heart can feel
Is a phantom pain for the love we had
That you let suffer and die
All for the sake of the congruity
Of a false and moldy
Paradigm.

So I went back to bed,
Coughing again,
And wishing
For another night
Where you were still alive in my life,
Oblivious to your secrets, your artifice,
And the fraud of your extended silence

~

find John Tustin here

After War

Lingering weight
sneaks up
late at night,

lingering weight
lost years ago
awakening
in midnight rain–

tickling,
prickling
as it crawls
through time,
sprawling
across the sheets–

the evening ache
that fills my empty pant leg,
that fills his wife’s empty bed,

the evening ache
that fills hearts and heads,

pain wedded
to lost loves
and lost limbs
and lost lives.

I found you in America

it’s Methodism
A religion
A thousand years of hate
and love
and middling piano notes

it’s your own philosophy
it’s Jesus
and all of his child rape
it’s the Moon
it’s God

it’s a day in America
with everything that comes with it
it’s your boss
and his dick
it’s the road
and it’s Frisbee

it’s Jesus again!
and it’s more Jesus.

It’s where you live.
Underneath Jesus.
Underneath love.

It’s a ludicrous paradigm of revelations
it’s bad porn.

it’s a long drive
with country relatives

it’s a long whiskey
and a long night

give me the long night
and the long whiskey

and tell me everything’s gonna be fine
Hunter S Thompson fine
heavily armed
and heavily medicated
and beautiful

perkily titted
and innocent
and dancing
under the influence of drugs
one of the dances your ancestors might have done

wearing a chiffon tutu
and making your lips into a delicate “O”

it’s rambunctious
it’s mysterious
it’s Methadone
and Method Acting
it’s love
it’s mine

I give you mine
and you give me yours
on the playground
after the fiesta
after all the suns have set
and all the televisions have been turned off
and the movie theaters have shut down
and New York has been turned off
and Washington is only a rumor

where wolves
and vagrants
and small burger joints
coalesce into beautiful oil paintings
where beggars nod philosophy
and beat poets
scream into the wilderness about their mothers

and I found you.

I found you in America
where I lost you too, the next day

I found you with a gun
and then, I found you with another gun
and then, I found you with my gun.

this is my gun
and this is my gun
and this is my gun, again

holy
mediocre
nearby

the visage of a saint
wearing mushrooms
in Slovakia
or Slovenia
a Sorb
with a locket
and a woman’s voice
and a god’s eyes

language is my gun
a thousand fields
and a thousand nights
Arabian and otherwise
Czechoslovakian
Albanian
Zulu

Give me the Zulu
and give me the House of Saud
Give me all of China
Give me Japan
I’m big in Japan.

Give me Jerusalem
and Palestine
and all places which have two names
or three

give me the cheeseburger
and take me to Turtle Island
where I have Wind in My Hair
And Dances With AssWipes
and all of the Lakota Wisdom
Shining over my Jalopy
With Jake and Fred
and Elmer Fudd
high as kites in a cheap motel
wondering when the sun will set
so we can go skiing

give me the moonlight
and give me the deliverance
I am the deliverance of the moonlight
no longer American, or white
no longer strictly conscious
but subject to the interference of an ancestral voice

speaking from the darkness

the shaman speaks in the ridiculous darkness
a ridiculous darkness which is both real and unreal
humorous and terrifying
where all lovers come to die
and all movies come to be born
in the caveman Saturn of the dawn
around your arms

Grants, NM

I remember coming home in the evening
to a pregnant wife carrying our first.
Worked in the Uranium mines
at the time, about all there was to do
other than pump gas
and paid twice as much,
a no brainer—
made $6 an hour
with a daughter on the way.
Plus, at the gas station,
no one ever told you
you’re an American hero,
you’re helping the Cold War effort,
you’re a patriot.

No one ever told us anything
about the dangers of standing knee high
in water containing uranium run-off,
wearing paper masks among the yellow dust
filling the exhaust fan air, cleaning
the uranium off hopeless air filters—
masks around our necks
because they’d been clogged.

The inspectors from the government
never got out of their trucks, and supervisors
had us barricade the unsafe areas, go back in
when the inspectors went back home
to their wives and kids in clean shirts.

I went home everyday in a yellow-caked shirt.
My wife threw it in with the rest of the laundry.
Our daughter came out with no hips…

And it’s 50 years later, and we won the Cold War,
but my wife and I both have tumors on our lungs.
That’s just the price we pay for National Security.
And it’s no consolation that the Navajos had it worst.

I almost felt what it was like to be Indian
when all my friends died
and the town became a wasteland.
One buddy of mine shot himself—
poor guy said he didn’t wanna be in a diaper.

The biggest tumor of them all is the stockpile
of 4,760 nuclear warheads, the national monument
to injustice, death, cancer, Depends, and terror—
the price we pay for National Security.

Nighttime in the ICU

In the arcadian night

she murmurs faintly for juice,

mustering all her energy,

fluttering fingers like

a preflight angel.

Dozing nearby,

her heavyhearted guardian

hears and is instantly there

with juice and tender whispers

amid soft beeps and tiny lights.

~

Find Jason Brightwell online.

Lord Byron Resents The Demands Of Cyberpets

Then the mortal coldness   spewsome, thumbsucking or bright-eyed

It cannot feel                       a devo rapport of foofy pixels

That heavy chill                   buzz-crushes temper, all scrinchy

And tho’ the eye                  cotches, these mutts are dead meat soon

~

Glossary: Devo – Robotic; Foofy – Prissy,  Buzz-crush – A Downer;  Scrinchy – Grumpy;  Cotches – Relaxes.

From The Cabin

Inside the cabin, the piano music plays.
Lamp light supplements the early morning glowing.
Walls and windows and places to sit,
eat, or sleep. And someone
is inside the cabin whose job, he feels,
is to notice, to be aware;
otherwise, all of this might disappear,
and then what?
No bears might come out of the woods at night
to forage.
No deer to stand as if hypnotized
under a street light.
No flow of time ever leading to
snowfall or blossoms.
No waking up to what might
always have been there,
but hidden
under layers of unconcern, denial, self-pity, inertia.

~

Find Joseph Somoza online.

Chasm
  —for Simon Ortiz

Are there Indians living in Las Cruces?
You don’t see them much, not like
you do in Albuquerque.
Once at the Dairy Queen in Flagstaff,
a young Indian asked me to buy him
an ice cream cone.
He seemed like a nice kid.
His drunkenness seemed to give him
a confident swagger,
but he staggered,
and his eyes
weren’t seeing clearly,
you could see.
So there was no real way
to talk and find out what
it was like
in a place like Flagstaff for him—
so near to the Navajo and Hopi
reservations,
but with all those white college kids
taking classes at Northern,
and the European tourists spending
nights in motels
on their way through
to the Grand Canyon.

~

Come back to Cacti Fur this Wednesday at 4:21 PM (Mountain Time) for another NEW Joseph Somoza poem!

Find Joseph Somoza online.

~

Photo by Katie Goetz.

The Cloud Hung

like a leaf in a branchless sky.
Too blue to fall,
it drifted on its own
breathless image of silence. Its background
melting into perfect
frame for transient peace.