INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
Deji Adesoye
Changming Yuan
Violeta Allmuca
Beppe Costa
Engjell I. Berisha
Narendra Kumar Arya
Akwu Sunday Victor
Michelle Bailat-Jones
Laszlo Slomovits
Stefania Battistella
Agron Shele
Lana Bella
Fahredin Shehu
Alan Britt
Silvia Scheibli
Shutta Crum
Running Cub
Alex Ferde
Irsa Ruci
Jennifer Burd
Paul B. Roth
Richard Gartee
Elisavietta Ritchie
Peycho Kanev
Helen Gyigya
Amit Parmessur
Sneha Subramanian Kanta
Robert Nisbet
Jeton Kelmendi
Duane Locke
Richard Lynch
Jean McNerney
Fred Wolven
Ann Arbor Review
is an independent
International Journal & ezine
Copyright (c) 2017
Francis Ferde
All rights revert back to each poet.
--editor / Southeastern Florida
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AAR history note: in print 1967 - 1980. Irregular publications 1980 - 2004. As ezine 2004 - present. Most of 47 years all together....
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staff:
Francis Ferde
Silver Grey Fox
Running Cub
Fred Wolven
Submissions via e-mail:
THE MAD GIRL READS THE OBIT OF THE MAN WHO FOUND JANET COOKE’S PULITZER PRIZE STORY OF AN 8 YEAR OLD HEROIN ADDICT WAS FAKE
it
throws her back to the eighties
when her hair was so thick it wouldn’t
fit in a barrette and a man invited her to
Midwest
to read poems and move in
to his bed. Those days she was slim
but not skinny like now and she was up for
anything. When her boyfriend picked
her up and brought her to his house,
she had a weird sense about her boy-
friend’s gorgeous African American baby
sitter. She felt like there was more than
baby sitting going on. Then at the
reading that night, the young girl, Janet
Cooke, broke into the mad girl’s reading
with the special announcement that
she couldn’t wait to share. How
wonderful she said, “I’ve just won the
Yale Younger Poets Award.” The
mad girl thought it had already been
given but when she told her boyfriend
that he said , You’re jealous.” And
the mad girl was, until a few years later
it was announced in every paper
that the Pulitizer Prize won by a Janet
Cooke was fraudulent. Today the mad girl
reads that Bill Green, the Post ombudsman
who discovered, despite the vivid details in
Janet Cooke’s story, she, a rising star at
The Washington Post, made it all up as she did
all the prizes, her resume, her fluency in
several languages and even tho it matters
so little, the mad girl feels a twinge of
satisfaction in reading that when Cooke
was driven thru South East Washington, she
appeared unfamiliar with the area’s
gritty street life and of course there was
no Yale Younger Poets Award
THE MAD GIRL WATCHES THE HILLS GO FROM BLUE TO MAROON THEN LAVENDER
the
cat nuzzling her
closer than a lover
How
did the time
since Barcelona go,
leaving pale tracks
like the young woman
who
boards a ship
in the Baltic, just
wheeling a valise
with a change of
clothes. No passport,
no map, no ID
THE MAD GIRL’S ANOTHER SPRING OF LOSS
with
cherry petals a
sign of what can’t stay.
She thinks of the ones
who moved thru her
life, hardly left a touch.
She’s not sure she didn’t
imagine it. Tulips bloom
where a motor cyclist
died. The mad girl would
stop time, keep April
under a globe of plastic
so no doves would be
dinner for hawks and all
she fears losing is held
safe as a couple in
a plastic globe snow falls
on but leaves them
whole again
THE MAD GIRL FEELS LIKE CINDERELLA AT MIDNIGHT WHEN HER PAIN PILLS RUN OUT
She
would have stayed curled under
quilts in a cocoon of pain, sleep thru
day break to afternoon light the
trilliums start to open in. Just knowing
in hours she’d shower and pull on
fawn lace and dancing shoes has been
enough. She is never only one person invisible
in her worn out yoga pants and ragged
sweats but alluring in leather pants.
But that was before pain became her
main lover. Even before she slipped
codeine under her tongue, lip gloss and
glitter pulled her from darkness, let
her glide as she couldn’t all day
on to the dance floor, the pain numbed,
like terror with its ebony branches
poking her from within. Only dancing
makes her feel alive, only waltz
and bolero keep her from slitting her
wrists, so tiny the Navaho saved a
child’s bracelet for her. But as narcotics
fade she is Cinderella rushing past
the witching hour, her legs already
turning to wood she prays a
match could turn her to ash
ALMOST APRIL
tulips where the
motor cyclist died.
Daffodils, pears
Cherry blossoms
in a heart beat
becoming pink
snow. Black ducks,
hawks, kite in the
highest branches.
Trilliums poke up.
They’ll never not
remind me of
digging huge white
trillium in Battell
Woods the Mother’s
Day weeks before
I transplanted them
in New York. A
few that weren’t
burned or mowed
down hang on
as I wish I wanted
to, want to feel
ahead is like a
sentence you never
want to end
THE SADNESS, THE BEAUTY OF WHITE TRILLIUM
In
spite of days in the
trunk of my Mustang,
jounced from VT to
Niskayuna
the flowers
kept blossoming. Dug
up weeks after my
grandmother died on
my Mother’s first
motherless Mother
Day. We traipsed thru
soggy woods for the
white jewels. Each
spring they brought
back my mother’s laughter
at our treasure. Seven
or eight beauties
spread to almost a
hundred with a blood ruby
trillium tangling with
pachysandra, columbine,
hepatica, may flowers
until the snow plower
ruined half the plot and a
year later left his van
burning to wipe out the
rest. For years I tried
to replace the plants,
ordered white trillium, my
knees ached trying to
plant then, hundreds but
nothing took. It was
as if somehow they needed
the magic of that sad but
beautiful afternoon
in VT to flourish
THE MAD GIRL DREAMS OF PUERTO VIORTA
of
the black goddess
who predicted her pain.
Or was it fame she
tries to remember
curled in a quilt of vines.
Last years leaves
tangling with new ones,
holding her like a rocket
module, about to take
off for never explored
galaxies. The jade
leaves turn the mad
girl’s skin emerald. She
aches to see the world
in that shade, not
ashen, gray as those
she carries in a locket
banging her heart,
the losses of what
mattered most
and now isn’t
Lyn
Lifshin,
Vienna, Virginia
Niskayuna, New York