Mipo: A Community Chapbook

MiPO

a community of sorts...

Featuring Melissa McEwen Edward Nudelman Amy George Michelle McEwen Terry Lucas Coleen Shin Adam Fieled Art by Jeff Filipski Laura Orem Didi Menendez March 2009

Dark t Thought s Tha Thoughts That Illumine These are the ways they move: in waves and particles, comingled in barely recognizable quanta, bursting or battering through thin sheens and tough coats, each little blinking photon making its wispy way through what’s left of cohesiveness, through what used to be the way it was, coming in on boats and busloads into your blockhead brain, bending neurons like Beckham. After months of distraction in the moment’s stasis or decades ruminating on something tough- you’ve got to admit, it’s a welcomed exchange for this your blessed ennui, for all this fritter in front of Idol and Network Dancing. So gear up and fight the flow. Status quo only works if you’ve got nowhere to go. Open your gills and take a dunk. Here they come on wheels and winds through open windows or backdoor breaches snakelike on paths or trampling through bushes green-eyed with bushy tails on springs and flexors or floating in as gossamer as your half-witted feather brain. Inexhaustible, incomprehensible, on half a wing, under radar, dodging bullets, sprawling through pores,

EDW AR D EDWAR ARD NUDELMAN tripping switches, riding the wake on their own slick waves: angel, demon, cloud, birdsong. Let the retro’s fire and park your rocket in your own backyard right under the shocking firmament. You’ll thank your lucky stars for your sacred second messengers: white hot, razor sharp, cutting open your sutured eyes.

EDWARD

_____’s Girl MELISSA MCEWEN In Junior High School, I wanted to be owned by a possessive noun, owned by a noun—proper, the correct way: a hickey on the face so the whole school could see that you were his baby, like a wedding ring, like a tattoo of his name on your left breast, like having his baby and giving it his last name or whole name if it were a boy, like the girl who had all of the above by the time she finished high school. I remember in chemistry class how the hickey on her cheek shined under the classroom’s light like she was stung or bitten and we all knew who did it. I couldn’t look away, wanted to possess it, peel it off and stick it on me, study it at home in front of the mirror in the bathroom with the lamp with no shade.

feline friends in field of red

Jeff FIlipski

Red Velvet I always caught the gleam of worry in your mother-eye when I would run, unwashed/half-dressed, through the kitchen and out the door instead of pulling up a chair to watch, to take in the leveling of baking powder, the separating of eggs, the pounding of meat. Aunt Minnie’s girls were there already— taking turns making whole dinners. But you needn’t have worried, I was always aware of the oven’s heat, quick and warm on the back of my legs as I ran by it. No heat has ever come close to matching that heat except maybe the heat of lovin’ and it’s this remembrance that has finally dragged me into the kitchen for keeps, unafraid— even with the recollection of daddy demanding his breakfast

Cake be ready by the time he set foot on the bottom step. I have yet to master that art: the art of turning big pots & cast iron skillets into a dinner for four, but I can bake my ass off: red velvet cake, golden harvest muffins, banana nut bread. Your mother-eye says men need real food. But you don’t know my men— they skip meals, prefer dessert.

Michelle McEwen

the habits of prey and carnivore We long for a diversity, engendered with the feminine sweet the masculine urge to eat what falls from the sky, lands at our feet, an alien angel. How long does it take to flip it over, make an inquiry- are you human, friend, meat? Swallow? How hollow a homograph, the smile, a wreath the tender trace of velvet sheath along the wing where the sun has melted the wax and yet it begs an answer, a brave peep. To often, silent and shining the speak. It is there in the eyes, embattled beneath I am your love, devour me.

COLEEN SHIN

Portrait of Blake

Pastel on paper Didi Menendez Front cover portrait of Sina also by D. Menendez

LAURA OREM

At Night, All Cats Are Gray

Adam Fieled

Redness Beyond objectification is an object of maleness that admits to frailness. I have this weird feeling like I'm a xylophone being struck repeatedly, all some weird minor scale, or a whipped cat... a dreamer of pictures could never have made you redder. Or as much of grass in your eyes as there is. Or poignancy of words meant to hurt. All this is a way to flirt. Yet your redness tells a story of consummation, becomes the sine qua non riveting me to black coffee.

Some Days I Find Myself Terry Lucas Some days I find myself sitting at my desk for fifteen minutes without thinking about dying. Or about the sun, the feverish sun hoisting itself up the back-lit eucalyptus trees outside my window, how its malignancy even now is forming a swilling tsunami, how one day it will engulf the entire family of squirrels racing along the wrinkled bark, the dolphins, elephants, bees—every violin will scream as music melts,

along with all the crumbled roads, the massive missives written from sagging motel beds, golden Gideon Bibles, packages of Trojans, buzzing neon signs, naked candles dancing behind brown luminarias’ parchment, Mona Lisa’s smile, curled-up toes of shoes in Salvation Army stores.

But tonight I watch the moon’s thin shadow the way a child watches an abused mother sitting at the kitchen table, half-lit pock-marked scars shining like coins, like runes, waiting for the father’s eclipse.

And now it is sleeting in the streetlights, ice particles sighing through spaces in the spaces, before the white noise hits cement like tongues against teeth, or fists

Some Days I Find Myself against a whorled-grained desk, and I find myself again thinking not so much about death, but rather listening for the sound of claws skittering up the eucalyptus trees, fellow fugitives from the enormous fire that gave us birth, even now flexing flaring arms to embrace us.

Terry Lucas

The Poem That Nobody Wants I am writing the poem that nobody wants... the sentimental, mushy one about the boy who had a dog and who lost his birthday balloon and whose mean sister pointed and laughed while cartoon horns sprouted out of her head.

AMY GEORGE

No editor cares that it floated over a wheat field in Kansas above lowing cattle beside junked out cars with rusting skeletons, burning in the echo of the sunset, that two lovers watched while holding onto each other. They don't want to know how it drifted like a cloud bathed in moonlight as soft as a kiss or how the trees reached out with arm-like branches and snagged it. It will hover for a while, like a lost spirit, then burst sometime during the night, just like my bubble when I open the rejection letter.

MiPO

a community of sorts...

mipoesias.ning.com This publication is an online community chapbook. Listen to the poems while you flip through the pages. © 2009 Created by Didi Menendez © 2009 MiPO Contributors www.mipoesias.com www.miporadio.com