Jules Nyquist

Gun Crazy

            Gun Crazy is a film noir movie from 1950 directed by Joseph H. Lewis.

Does it start with boys and bb guns

Aiming at anything that moves

Including the dog?

Movie theater madness

Bonnie & Clyde

The Judge asks the boy

Why did you do it?

I don’t know, he says.

My sister says shooting is the only thing I’m good at.

It’s what I want to do

When I grow up.

I feel good when I shoot

Like I’m somebody.


Jules Nyquist

Haiku

white yucca flowers

irreversible time

at Trinity Site

Jules Nyquist is the founder of Jules Poetry Playhouse, LLC in Albuquerque, NM where she teaches poetry classes and invites visiting poets to read.

Mitch Rayes

I've been working on writing my Chiapas years, and I got a manuscript under consideration . . . . Here's a new poem for Chiapas poet Joaquin Vasquez Aguilar.

Joaquin

in a forest in the clouds far above your adopted city
zapatistas emerge from the shadows
to answer their time to fight

alone in a room
you retreat forever from the battles of the living

waves pound the sands of your birthplace
there is a flash in the water
your brother abandons his nets
hurries to catch the last bus to tuxtla
only to find you already lifeless

the swallows ask about you
and I offer them a morsel of Whitman
to carry back to their secret chambers
to see if it finds you
in the most stubborn droplet of the deepest calcium

and I trace my regrets in a saucer of salt
on the flimsiest table of our favorite cantina
to see if you might join me again
after one more drink

and I place a thank you
into the longest pause of our final handshake

for the words you have gifted us
for the years
as they carry us closer to the darkness that shines

closer to you


Mitch Rayes

Margaret Randall

I cannot speak for the gun

I cannot speak for the gun
doing its ugly job
in George Zimmerman’s overeager hands.
I cannot speak for those eighteen ounces
easily concealed in any pocket.

Easy to guess what George’s intention was,
too easy to imagine the terror
in Trayvon’s eyes,
the grief his mother holds
four years beyond her loss.

The Law never found Zimmerman guilty
or condemned his crime.
And Martin could not know
his death would bring a nation
into the streets

or that hundreds of other black youth
would have to die, gunned down
by white policemen
or self-styled protectors
of an order that runs by exception

in this country where Law protects
the men who write it, works
for white, fails for black, rich
or poor, genders
that matter or don’t.

Now George Zimmerman auctions
the gun that murdered
Trayvon Martin. He’s asking
$5,000, promises some of the money
will go to fight Black Lives Matter

because, simply put, they don’t matter
to him. Will this gun’s new home
turn its barrel around
or lure another trigger finger
in wait?

I cannot speak for the gun or the men
who love caressing its fever.
My job is finding the words
that describe the weapon’s threat
exactly.


Dear Larry:
Here's a new unpublished poem for you.
About Naropa, I'm about to go up to Boulder to teach in week 3 of Naropa University's Summer Writing Program (SWP). I've been doing this almost every year for the past decade. It's always thrilling: long days and hard work with serious students, plus the thrill of hearing the other visiting poets and writers read and lecture. Naropa . . . Started by Chögyam Trugpa Rinpoche and Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman took it over after their deaths, and her special gift for imbuing it with energy and creative exuberance permeates every part of the experience. I hear there are still openings for those interested in attending Week 3 (beginning June 26th) and Week 4 (beginning July 3rd). Week 3 features Tisa Bryant, Julie Carr, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Colin Frazer, Gloria Frym, Renee Gladman, Laird Hunt, Steven Taylor, Danielle Vogel and myself, with special guest Richard Tuttle. Week 4 features Charles Alexander, Junior Burke, CA Conrad, Christian Hawkey, Valentina Desideri, Thomas Sayers, Ellis and Janice Lowe, Thurston Moore, Eileen Myles, Julie Ezelle Patton, Paul Van Curen, TC Tolbert, and Anne Waldman . . . .  I'll be there, teaching and learning . . .

Love, Margaret.

Georgia Santa Maria

Photograph by Georgia Santa Maria

Hi, Larry—

I cheated—this was from the Balloon Fiesta last year, but it’s kind of fun for the 4th. Given the World’s political climate, I’m not feeling terribly gung-ho patriotic right now. More, a little depressed and wishing, as they used to say about children in school, that “we were living up to our potential (for good.)” Curious that we celebrate our country’s history by blowing shit up. The dogs have it right—hiding under the bed and waiting for it all to be over. Some fun news was that I was First Runner-up for the Lummox Poetry Contest, and my buddy Jane Lipman was 2nd. RD Armstrong came out from LA last week to visit and see what kind of magic JuJu our Sunday night writing group has. Here is a short poem for you, (from when Merimee & I were in Berlin and were awakened one night to an astonishing performance event.)

A Little Night Music

A little night music lends itself

to thoughts metaphysical:

the orgasm, publicly shared

throughout the public breezeway,

like cats, like coyotes, like dinosaurs,

growl and roar and scream

their delight, their joy, their pain.

Everybody wake up!

Observe the moon in its starry wake.

Hear the entire city shake.

The sleep-deprived observer smiles,

contemplates the variables

going toward the improbable

ten minute orgasm without a break!

Sexual eclectic, always profound—

an art installation in fury and sound,

we all want to know the sacred key,

(but, the heretic in me says fakery.)

Georgia Santa Maria

Anne Lynn MacNaughton

General Relativity: to Osaka Bay

we fly west

to go east

passing the moon

Anne MacNaughton

Anne is the silken voice of history illuminating the present and bringing us in to a deeper sense of the now, now-now, the now of all time that includes the past and is evidence of the future.

a little collage in appreciation of Peter Rabbit Max Finstein
Anne MacNaughton and the Taos Poetry Circus Renaissance

Donald Levering

 Larry, "I attended an artist residency in Willapa Bay, Washington during April and have been doing readings from my newest book, Coltrane's God, since I returned.

The attached poem was written after hearing Bill Nevins speak about the Trump rally in Albuquerque he attended (as an observer) in May" - Donald

No Compass

Now that our stars are aligned
over our watchtowers,
no compass is needed

to go with the press of the throng,
rushing through streets headlong
toward the miracle

that will banish fear
and make us millionaires,
drawn to the spectacle

morphed to pop-up carnival—
smells of caramel corn and elephants,
shrieks from the Tilt o’ Whirl & Wall of Death

the demagogue’s cant blasted from speakers
and old rock hits everybody bobs to
falling in with the torch-lit mob

that swells into a rip-tide
pulling me through the park
past bonfires his partisans fan

into phantoms and sparks
and I bump my head on the feet
of hanged scapegoats and feel sick

with the way they swing on their ropes
bouncing from one blind head to the next
without words of reproach



Donald Levering

D.R. Wagner

ABOVE THE WORDS

Already the poem no longer belongs to me.

Its road of miracles shows wondrous horses

Shining with brilliance even in the darkest of nights.

My voice shakes above the words.

It is no longer witness

To the weather, or the moon,

Or this silent scratching upon

Whatever beach this is, catching

Waves like tears, voices

Heard only in sleep.

Still, I can see you.

Even without time collected

Around you.  You are more

Than breath to me now.

We are as intimate as lovers

In a carriage, in an unknown city,

Plying the streets all of the night.

The clatter of our horses hard

Against the cobblestones as we

Make love to one another, again and again.

Street lights flashing past, falling

On our naked flesh.

D. R. Wagner

Douglas Blazek & D.R. Wagner (photo courtesy of D.R.)

Jim Fish

THE GOOD LIFE

The early morning meditation
Picking wild cherries
In the orchard
In the upper reaches
Of the historic village of Placitas
Qualifies
As part of the good life
Of making wild cherry wine

Some years ago
Later in my dad’s life
He and I were riding
At the ranch
Where I grew up
And
Where he lived the better part of his life
We rode thru the landscape
Looking
Listening
Talking
At the top of a ridge
He stopped his horse
And turned to me

            You know
            I never got rich
            But I have always been surrounded
            By wide open spaces


My brother calls it
The Church of the Original Creation
He attends the sermons
As both the pastor
And the audience of one
Often times
The sermons take place
At the Milton Puckett Ranch
Ten miles south of Fort Stockton
On Wednesday afternoons
After he closes his veterinarian clinic at noon
For the day
Sometimes
He holds a weekend retreat
With himself
Thirty miles southwest of Marfa
On the W. E. Love Ranch

Sometimes
He leans back in his recliner
On a Sunday morning
With a cup of coffee
To watch some game he recorded the night before

Late June
Early July
Finds me

Picking wild cherries

Jim Fish

Jim is the generous fruit wine vintner and owner of Anasazi Fields Winery in Placitas. His hand-built place, mostly adobe structure, has a PA, seats, and welcoming atmosphere for poets, musicians, artists . . . it was the home of the Duende Poetry Series of 11 + years. Bravo to Jim! (photo is from both of us)

Brendan Douthit

"I'm Brendan Douthit, Anne MacNaughton's son. She suggested I send a few poems of mine  . . . "

Thank you Brendan.

New Strings of Silk

new strings of silk
between me and my morning chair
bright light
sunrise tethered
optic fiber
back and forth
back and forth
on air
I walk the long way

Raised by Old People

Mowgli was raised
by wolves

Tarzan was raised
by apes

I was raised
by old people

RASQUACHE

I was gonna tape
the tape
but realized the tape
hadta be retaped


Brendan Douthit

Michael Boughn

larry . . . here from a book I am working on -- it's called Hermetic Divagations.

thanks Michael - I love "contracted//loss of laundry day vulval/extasis somehow ends up/with electromagnetizing Freemasons" - and that's not all . . .


[2-15]

Where you go is part
deflection, part memory
of water. Then she is there

terrified but splendent. War
raged, a word of incandescent
complications in later contexts

she would ignore, it rends
earth and sky, the shock announces
strange opening alive

with electrical energy
of the Celestial Bed. In thrall
to the Whore of Babylon electrifies

sex beyond acceptable
sociological standards of simply
explicable agony and contracted

loss of laundry day vulval
extasis somehow ends up
with electromagnetizing Freemasons

dancing politely while exact
intellectual components, olive
green, suggest distant mist

wreathed lake, embrace her in other
harmonious analogies as some
one who knows what was lost

Michael Boughn

Poet and teacher Robin Blaser on the left, Michael on the right,
Notable among other notable items: The H.D. Book by Robert Duncan
edited by Boughn and Victor Coleman, UC Press.