#18 - the Bicycle Review

The Bicycle Review

Issue #18

Poetry and prose by Christopher Barnes, Paul Corman-Roberts, Neeli Cherkovski, Carl Foster, Stephen Kopel, Eric Lawson, Lyn Lifshin, S.P. Mackin, Jay Passer, A. Razor, Barry Spacks, and Gerald Yelle.

Photography by Erin Stone.

Original Artworks by Henry Avignon III.

All works are the intellectual property of the artists and authors, and may not be duplicated without permission.

Bicycle Review # 18

Howdy, cyclists. "Say it ain't so, J..." Alas, it is so. It is soooo so. We're going pro: Incorporation, ISBN's, checkbooks, the whole thing. I even have an office now if you can believe that, tho --in true BR fashion-- no desk in it, yet. O well, one thing at a time.

...but yes, as some of you may have heard, "The Pedestrian Press" (our new print and ebook venture) is launching early next year. We're shooting for the ebook launch in January, with print to follow some time in March. You can find out all about that by clicking that conveniently placed button up there, second from the left, at the top of your screen.

...but not right now, of course. What can I say about issue 18? Neeli Cherkovski's faux-erotic remake of Gone With the Wind; extracts from Lyn Lifshin's new Tango Poems; Jay Passer's outtakes from the SF International Poetry Festival; Paul Corman-Roberts' poetic economics; A. Razor's one man gang injunction; I'm humbled to have it all here in one place. As always, we present to you a range of writers: the known and promiscuous, the unknown and agoraphobic, the nationally distributed, and the locally grown, at no expense to the reader. This is one thing that will not be changing: the magazine. It will still be free, and we will still read your work, no matter who you are, and we will still not write rejection letters, so stop asking. Do you really crave rejection so badly? If so, please consult the proper professionals, medical or otherwise. Ok...

We're also pleased to welcome Henry Avignon back to these pages. Henry's new series "Stations of the Double Cross" is...well, what would you call it Henry? "... metal, canvas, and the oxidation medium, coupled with photographic documentation..." The foregoing is excerpted from a full length essay by Avignon about this new series, which can be read here:

http://jdesalvofiction.weebly.com/avignonessay.html.

We encourage you to do so, tho you can certainly enjoy the artworks simply by looking at them. Henry is one of our favorite abstract artists working today, and we're always excited to work with him. It also seems fair to mention that this series is a dialogue with fellow artist Barnett Newman. For those who seek further context and understanding, Newman's work may be viewed here:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_5bVN3kXOxFc/TE6d41wp0EI/AAAAAAAABjw/92wvsHFMEXY/s1600/707newman_show.jpg.

Finally: the photography of Erin Stone. Erin's work has a level of composition rarely achieved in this medium. She is not a photographer who takes an endless series of snaps, then digs through the crates to see what happened. She meticulously creates her images before, during, and after capture, as is evident to anyone who views her work critically. We're pleased to feature her series: "Returning", along with a couple of examples of her excellent model portraiture, including this issue's cover image: "Crippled".

Enjoy the smorgasbord.

Share the Road,

J de Salvo

stop

I was
raised up
like this

I neva
hate
a hustle,
I jus' hate
bein' hustl'd

do what
you gotta do
but,
don’t be
surprised
when I
feel the need
to stop you

Copyright 2012 by A. Razor

GONE WITH THE WIND 2012

you must shift into high gear, do you
understand? on a planet gone mad
with nuclear reactors and rectal exams
it comes clear, you no longer follow
the barge downstream, why bother?

it’s all going south, going north,
going nowhere. . . Burger King
in the Arctic, I don’t want anymore
low-class tickets to the high-class opera,
I don’t want you to shove us around
with an archaic notion of right and wrong

in the movies Big Sam rescues Charlotte
on the flight from Atlanta, Oh big sam
Oh big sam suddenly out of the fright
heeding struggle leaping the mind
in a garden of thorns, playmate
of the beneficent leader, this is useless
to call on your plaster-of-Paris mythos
where the ghost of Ha Ha is unscrewed

I could talk to you as if
you were a honey male, a bear,
my skinny dipping lithe youth, but
so what? he’s a monster in heat
oh God oh Sam oh come rescue
the truth from the lying scribes

oh this is a forehead, the floorboard
chugging uphill racing down
to the jagged zero of a number series
that hurts, deliberately, hail to the lord
of muck, a planter in the mind
of a dead French poet, oh Sam, Sam
deliver me from evil, I would quickly die
in your eyes, Sam Am I I Am, and maybe
this is nowhere, maybe this is where
the film goes heavy in the air

Copyright 2012 by Neeli Cherkovski

IN THE SHADOW OF THE GLITTERATI

Flies living off my influence
I will never know their names
Who names flies?
Somebody is happy with the haiku of their morning ablution
I am upset at the loose hairs on my laptop
It is early in the morning
It is early in the morning

Pillow behind the back
An old man enjoying a young mind
Watermelon in springtime
Crows in the background
Vultures
Yellow like Van Gogh
Blue like Picasso
t.s. eliot like a garbage pit

I got my heroes
None of them are yours
My niece for instance
Drew on a plastic plate when she was 5
It sits in my brother’s dishwasher
Waiting to be washed
As she waits to rule the world
With her hard chagrin
Incomparable smile
And how she knows I’m joking
When I tell her to get the hell
Out of the way
In the kitchen

I am a cook by trade
This poetry stuff pays for nothing
But you all know that

By the way
Is anybody listening?

Excuse me
I just attended a reading of poetry, and was personally
Rather distracted

All the cute girls walking by
The birds in the sky
The trees swaying
The drunk guy asking me what
Was going on
Before stealing the organizer’s
Backpack

I took a couple photos of the proceedings
On the sly
Because I am privy to obtuse manifestations of guilt
When faced with benign
Superiority

Like an ant walking the line
Between a bread crumb
And icing on a
Wedding cake

Now it is 6 in the morning and I
Like many aficionados of the beatnik past
Am listening to jazz

And I wish I were addicted to opiates or conviction
Because the reality is
The nameless flies rule, and the cockroaches
Stirring in the walls

Never mind the politics
We are outnumbered and outweighed
Call it what you want on the Civic Center Square
Applauded by cool chicks and grandmas
Impervious to federal grants or a pension in the end

The Festival of International Poetry ends
With pigeons pecking at the
Cold stones.

Copyright 2012 by Jay Passer

WHAT WE SURVIVE

Tell me silver tongued
Overlord of the 1990’s
How you wound up
Living in your car

And I will tell you
Where we can find
Atlantis

Because this simplest explanation
Will bear the closest impression
Of the Truth

No matter what your mythology
We all wind up telling
The same story

Once a corporate officer
In the midst of a city
That never left 1986

And as a result
Found itself abandoned
By 2008.

The ruins of the 20th century
Can be reached by the casual tourist
Through East Bay Charter
Tours of Hayward.

There you will see the predecessors
Of Big Box stores

Instead of housing consumer goods
They housed the royal houses
Of a lost civilization:

Manufacturing
Acquisition
Operations
Logistics
Marketing
Advertising

Packaging
Distribution
Retail
Customer Service
A single chain of production contained under one imperial roof.
A single chain
Utterly snapped
Broken apart
And scattered to the seas of capitalism
By an invisible tsunami.

Silver Tongued Devil
You used to ply your trade
As an IT sharpshooter

At Mervyns Corporate Corral
Just down the street
From an abandoned Roller Rink
And an out of business
bowling alley-nightclub

I used to work the skies of the Mojave
Searching for our ancestors
And looking to blow a whistle
On black ops mirages that knew
Only too well
The value of cosmic fluidity

You and I wound up here
In the same time
In the same place
Looking for each other’s story
And finding them
To be the same
Worthy of being human
In the face of defeat
Somehow

Copyright 2012 by Paul Corman-Roberts

The Sea (From the suite: "The Thin Line Between the City and the Sea")

I.

The Sea! The Sea!
Thalatta! Thalatta!
The molten sea
The sizzling sea
Thalatta! Thalatta!

A Summer afternoon
The Sun light slant
Dashed across liquid
So white I cannot look
Without I will go blind

Thalatta! Thalatta!
Hiss inside my ears
Thalatta! Thalatta!
Beat the World Drum
The Sea! The Sea!

II.

The tiniest bone from the tiniest guppy
surrounded a shadow of unknown capacity.

And this bone lay hid in a fisherman's jaw
until one bright day he passed it to the boy.

It was green and slimy and smelled like pee,
so the boy tossed the bone far out onto the sea.

“Hold on!” howled the old man, clinging to a spar
for a storm with a greatness as never seen before
fell upon them with all the quickness of light.
"What happened?” the boy sobbed, jelly with fright.

"That little green bone, it contained a great jinn,
and you've tossed this old spirit back to the ocean."

Then face to the waves the boy cried, "Do with me!"
and boy, bone and storm disappeared out to sea.

III.

Meanwhile Eidothea had left the shore
and, after plunging down, came back with four
sealskins; she drew them up out of the sea,
four skins from the broad bosom of the deep,
all freshly flayed - prepared - to snare her father.
The Odyssey, Book Four (trans. R. Fagle)

Begin with an invocation, Zalophus arsestic bellows,
upon visitation to the pitching piers,
undulating continuum of yoked quays, ceded docks,
shit slick slats full of fine fishy fetidness.
Each dock is habitat to great pulpy seals,
sleek, slumping sacks, lumbering or languorous.
Limp all luxuriate in the sublime of the solar steep.
And one, lifting its lazy head, spews the sea
from out snout upraised, blasts a great salty mist
and then its tenny pelt melts, like butter behind
a warm window, onto the bobbing berth.

A supple shaft springs from the surging sea-face,
from the sea explodes! Expels! Extends! Shatters!
The sea becomes a molten theft of the sun.
A fan of a thousand sea spawned opals
for an instant hangs suspended, containing worlds.
The sleek shape saunters then settles like a slug,
a shining brown ooze among other tawny loaves;
from a bristling erect tension, a furry potent fury,
to slack soft sag, to a downy gelatinous bag.

The little ones loll and look, flip a flap,
then close their moist bovine eyes.
But a big bad bull, an old sea god,
lording all he sees, fifteen by five of bobbing quay,
is the monument of swagger,
and with thrust chest, arched neck, head crest,
belligerent barks iambic peals of provocation.

The ancient briny the intruder storms.
Bulls butting ram. Roll and hoist, erect and tense,
with the heave and pour of their blubbery chests,
they boom, thump, quiver, send fluid flecks flying,
until the old bull washes the intruder into the churning
green tin dazzle. Swimming! Rippling! Jet and whirl!
With liquid muscularity, a flexible blade slicing all ways.

Then I hear a mermaid's honeyed anapests,
a protean incantation from a woman wearing seashells,
and with eyes like the sea. She has eyes like the sea,
bottomless and stirring, silver-green twinkling. She says,
“I am from the Marine Mammal Center.
Would you like to finger their fur and their skin?”
I turn to consider the idle, swollen balloons,
how their wet pelts shine, so rich and glistening,
and their dry fur seems so soft and luxurious.

She then offers me a swatch of skin,
tawed and tough and very thin. Surprise!
Lacking life lustrous it is nary luxurious,
and sans the sheen of sport
it is coarse and stiff and very short.
She says, “This was flesh, was portion of
a two year old patient who did not make it.”
And a perfect brown arc cleaves the water,
snout then spine then slap of tail.
My eyes wide with wonder, “Oh,” I murmur,
“I have questions, so very many questions.”

Copyright 2012 by S.P. Mackin

Small Claims

The bed was a wetter's dream:
sheets, a cyclone of sweaty creases,
blanket, cloud cover that threatened
to suffocate summer's humid breath

The windowless wall
wailed through a vent
bent on scaring awake all snorers

I slipped on my boots,
stood again,
one hand holding my balls,
the other, a racket

and rode the ceiling fan
into every attic where
static was heard in a
number of pillow cases that
decided to settle out of court

Copyright 2012 by Stephen Kopel

Journey to the Monkey Built City

I had always wanted to see the town built by monkeys. Along the way we met some strange
looking birds building nests out of some crazy broken branches. We tried to tell them that we had
better ways of building nests, but they wouldn’t listen. We stopped at the water city to recharge
our batteries. But the place smelled terrible, and the water didn’t taste good. I think there was
sewage in it –but don’t quote me on that. I wouldn’t want to get in trouble.

Crossing the mountains proved something of a challenge, as we didn’t have that much energy.
The sun was in our eyes. The zip lines cut our hands and the sliding chutes hurt the backs of our
thighs. Octopuses crawled out of the slime and the tar pits and asked for directions to the water
city.

We never did get to that place the monkeys built. I’ve seen pictures of it though. All they really
did was rebuild an old town humans had given up when they no longer needed cows.

Copyright 2012 by Gerald Yelle

LITTLE HAIKU

there he
goes
again

self-love
stinking up the place

a kid
in man’s
clothes

Copyright 2012 by Barry Spacks

RAGE

a flower that
explodes, something
you once thought
you wanted to
curl near,
stroke, becomes
a porcupine
in your throat,
nail bomb
breaking apart in
your throat
so even your last
words bleed

Copyright 2012 by Lyn Lifshin

Broker

A neutralization tag in the contract,
Side-issues the frame-work.
Bare knuckle pits
Confine the nose – once an all-front arch.
Now yawning.

His bear-pit, faithless, loving cup life
Is fag-ended.
Rub your glasses,
Can’t leer anything,
Cold-shouldered without a vanishing point of credit.

Copyright 2012 by Christopher Barnes

TO THE CROW ON THE WIRE

I've seen your people before
my family lived there and yes,
Have been found guilty of
reaching for the shimmering
solar skyline framing
A neon eternity
with visible vibrations

infiltrating our teeth
scattered on the cliffs
below the proscenium
of a mass consensual spectacle
and you there on the wire
always watching always keeping
a sweetly timed black bleat
to our affront upon the galaxy

Copyright 2012 by Paul Corman-Roberts

The Loopy Chiquita Banana Lady Won’t Let Me Take Free Samples at Costco Anymore

Like Zeus and Hera, we have circled each other for years
Entwined with the brashest love and the vilest of hate
I being the lowly college-aged stock boy at CostCo
and she being the Chiquita Banana free sample lady
Oh, such a torrid romance we wrangled
Oh, such lovers quarrels were unleashed
Oh, and the free samples were to die for
Every banana-related food item known to man were
on display for the masses to taste test whilst shopping
Mondays were dried banana chips
Tuesdays were banana nut muffins
Wednesdays were banana smoothies
Thursdays were banana pudding
Fridays were actual whole bananas
Saturdays and Sundays were the Banana Bonanza;
A little bit of everything was on sale for the asking
I tried everything every day that I possibly could
Until one day I decided that I fucking hate bananas
I'm not sure if I developed an allergy, but it was bad
The site of them made me nauseous
The smell of them made me cranky
The taste of them made me see blood
So our hidden love affair of secret touches and samples
had to come to an abrupt and banana-free conclusion
I told her, "You are Hera to my Zeus, but it is finished"
She blinked at me, adjusted her massive fake fruit
headdress, and responded with her customary "Que?'
"It's not to be, Chiquita Banana Lady. Love is dead!"
The customers shied away
The Chiquita Banana Lady tried to do some weird ass
Hawaiian hula dance to woo them back to no avail
I went in for the free sample
She slapped away my hand
"Without love, no sample for you"
I asked if she was kidding
She responded with "Que?"
I had been cast out of paradise
Security ushered me outside

I decided to try my luck down the street with the newly
employed, cardboard-crowned, Dairy Queen sample lady
who supposedly
spoke English

Copyright 2012 by Eric Lawson

This Is the Water City

Nobody came here after the floods, but water is so scarce these days. The aliens say it’s what we
get for polluting our environment. They never tell us what they did to their planet. Maybe blew it
up. Why else would they come here?

We come for the water but we have to watch out for eaters. And it’s not just meat eaters.
Herbivores see us as plantlike enough to satisfy their plant lust. They say we’ll have a new
government soon –that’ll protect us, but nobody believes it.
Anyway the streets are like canals. There used to be a place called Venice. People went there
on vacation. A guy called the pope lived near there. He had this thing called Holy Water. Wow.
What would he say about the water here? We have to drink it –raw sewage and all. It helps us get
the nitrogen we need for

good old photosynthesis. Holy water from the water city. Used to be Old New Orleans. Under
water now, but hey –that’s okay –we don’t come here for Mardi Gras. Jazz went out with
Buffalo wings. We still sleep on the upper stories. Most of us sleep in boats.

Copyright 2012 by Gerald Yelle

Fortune Telling

A gate swerves, whines.
Wasted sourwood mutates, grander each day.

A racketeer searchlighting desire,
Drags a chain, cowers,
Ruffling the leg
Of a flinching ghost
As you hour-glass your eyes, doze…

Copyright 2012 by Christopher Barnes

We Were Going to Ecuador

Someone said they had this enormous chlorophyll station that we just had to see. It was a long
walk. We had to cross the Panama Canal. There was no bridge –though supposedly there had
been one at one time. Supposedly there had been no need for a bridge at one time. Then they dug
a canal about a thousand years ago so boats could get places without going all the way around.
So now people can’t walk from the north side of Panama to the south. You have to take a little
raft.

“Why don’t they rebuild the bridge?” I asked.

“With what?” a voice said. “They cut down all the wood.”

“What about steel?” I said.

“Steel schmeel” was all the answer I got.

I gave up then. I think this speaker didn’t want there to be a bridge because he makes too much
money taking people back and forth on the raft.

“Do people ever try to fill the canal? Throw rocks and dirt and such?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Maybe they’ll finish in about a million years. A canal like this is one of
those things you just can’t un-build. Once you get it you’re stuck with it for life.”

“Kind of like a tattoo,” I said.

“Exactly.” There was a lot of walking after that.

Copyright 2012 by Gerald Yelle

I Walk Down the Street (A Superfluous Narrative)

I walk down the street using both my legs. Today it seems like they are stirring something, spinning the globe beneath me while my top half sits still in space. I call for someone to come help me, to come out here and move me, or to walk the other way and counteract my effect on the Earth; but that would draw them into the same trap I have fallen into, so I stop pleading after a few minutes. Everyone seems to be at work.

Their houses look like spots on a cat. They look like complicated fences strategically keeping me out of carpeted rooms where I might steal the warmth drawn from friction in the carpet as if it were the breath of a living thing. The houses also look like private carnivals, or mythological plants in a vast, theoretical garden.

But now that I have decided on a garden, what lies outside of it? Probably actual fences with little gardens growing up the sides of them, with their own private gravity that keeps them held fast even though they are totally sideways. I laugh and toss my keys in the air, catching them. The lonely jingle perishes without echo.

I walk down the street and there are so many houses that I become suspicious. Surely there can't be so many of them. I jog around a corner and take hold of a stop sign with one hand. The other holds my bottle. The sun is so bright, it feels like the only living thing on this Earth. But it is neither of those things, living nor here; and even though I always knew that, it seems unpleasant to contemplate.

I look at another sign across the street, pretending I no longer recognize the alphabet. It works for a second, but as the undeniable meaning seeps through the delicate barrier of my imagination I have to return to my reasonings. My pockets ring with change.

Now I know some things, and there are some things I know so well you could say I know them twice. For everything else I must wait until the results are in. And I think I have plenty of things in both categories.

In grade school I learned about a period during the Dark Ages when four or five years were not recorded at all. Not even a specific number: four or five.

Hearing this news, I was struck by a number of observations. Not just that our present date was approximated, and therefore meaningless, but that everyone was using the wrong date in a worldwide coordination of wrongness. Humanity was incorrect and past the point of caring, because the monks in charge of the calendar had stopped caring. And their indifference has to resonate forever.

Perhaps they knew their gesture would never end. As our inventions became more complicated, as our lives became measurable in every way, those in the fiefdom had given us the privilege of understanding that the whole system was flawed. See, they said, we messed it up for good a thousand years before newspapers. They took that time, wandered through whatever towns they could find. They rested. They stopped hating their enemies, spent months at a stretch talking about wild and impossible things.

I loved those little Medieval people once I learned what they did to themselves, and by extension, to us. It is true, time could stop for a while, and everything would be fine anyway. As it stands, every school paper, every check, every gravestone is already wrong.

A consequence, beyond love, was that I lost faith in all timekeeping and forms of measurement in general [takes immeasurably long drink from bottle]. There you go, man.

Copyright 2012 by Carl Foster

IT WAS ALL UPSIDE DOWN

like a bird, dead
roses

dropping heads

one something
anyone would desire

as I was
past tense

unkissable dead blooms

when I knocked
myself to numbness,

my hands blood

still trying to
get in as if it was

happy hour

Copyright 2012 by Lyn Lifshin

The Bicycle Review #18 was edited and curated by J de Salvo, Jeff Kappel, and Rhea Adri