Win On Diagonals

We will both take a drag
From the breakthroughs that I’ve had

You’re the blonde hash
On antique hot knives
You’re the spill proof
Bottled midwife

Roiling fine print ejecta
Into illegible streets
that drive themselves into sense
I want to be how I did those things again
When I did those things
And how they did it to me
I know I still am
but it’s the room that’s knocking
And though I’m deeply silver panned
soup-bone staid
I still remain
Itinerant
in dirty plates
quick Rumble knocks, dating Lady Ring and Run
Plumes of prognosticating Japes to duck

All those smoke breaks
Led to a breakthrough
Still have that lighter
From my honeymoon
But no wife to serve piping cold as solace
As a pen knife for a thicket
of an unruly forward-past
Armistice wink, armistice gaff

Rubber Juggernaut
Feel the play of my lancet
In your derma
Scraping you’re bowl of doxy
Dipped in 86 proof of Very Old Barton
Very old fighting
bullet proof housekeeper hides her pack of OGs
watching her change
not looking at me
Something impenetrable with no fixity
When I’m an old woman another time
Cleaning my steps, not dragging my polish
We will both take a drag
From the breakthroughs that I’ve had

My favorite Tuesday shirt has been lost forever. It was a Morris the Cat 25th anniversary long sleeve Henley, featuring the well known TV feline subtly placed below the five button placket as if dawdling into oblivion. It was a quality shirt; one would not believe was the end result of collecting with steadfast pride, proofs of purchases from the back of a certain cat food (Fancy Feast?) while working at ‘Cheap Johns’ candy and smoke discount store. My body trembled when the postman hand delivered a package that read ‘From Fancy Feast’ on it. The shirt had a luxuriously soft hand, as soft as a Queen’s tongue. It had suffered quite a bit of damage when a smoldering joint cherry went bomb’s away on Morris’s head, singing it badly as I was driving with friends in a truck somewhere through Albany, NY.

This shirt was worn almost every Tuesday by me for quite a stretch. It was so admired that I feared for its being snatched by a drunken friend pretending to slip away to my restroom during get together. Ultimately it was my decision to cook a homemade marinara sauce without my lucky apron that did it in. The splotches of pork infused tomato perfection had perverted its appeal forever. I searched high and low for another 25th anniversary Morris the Cat item that would mitigate the loss. I ended up with a non-functioning cheap watch. It still had Morris’s handsome face centered in a circle with two rings…one a dark red and the other black. Long live proof of purchase garments, long live my Fancy Feast friend’s memory.

Domenic Maltempi

White America is never more vividly and comically racist than when trying to excuse impromptu racist utterance or deny the racism of American society , which is manifest in every number, every graph and scatterplot in the annual Statistical Abstract of the United States. It was a former governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, regarded as an impeccable progressive in matters of race, who denied any racist motive for launching his final presidential drive in 1988 by appearing at the Neshoba county fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in the 1960s and where Reagan wooed the white south in 1980.The great and courageous black attorney, J.L. Chestnut, one of two black people in the huge audience, recalled Reagan crying that “ ‘ the South will rise again and this time remain master of everybody and everything within its dominion.’ The square came to life, the Klu Kluxers were shouting, jeering and in obvious ecstasy. God bless America.”