noteworthy
In each issue, the editors choose a writer whom they would like to bring
to our readers' attention.In this issue, poet James Valvis is highlighted.
When James Valvis tells you no two snowflakes are alike, you better get ready for what comes next: twisted knives, hopes and lines that are riveting, revelatory and exquisite. With all the world as a stage, Valvis “… clutches the world’s only match.”
After the Blizzard
Trying
Grindstone
The Golden Age
Flattery and Criticism
For the Skull
Poem Composed Entirely with Last Lines in John Allman Poems
Poem Compsed Entirely with Last Lines from Molly Tenenbaum Poems
A Love that Doesn't Last Like Our Love
In My Fortieth Year
Dirty
Final Act in Autumn
When Your Moon Comes
Now that we know no two snowflakes are alike
and the fact of broken New Year's resignations,
maybe we should have savored that blizzard
instead of digging our graves by dropping
and making snow angels,
signing our epitaphs by pissing on snow.
How much better if we plowed our fallen promises,
pushed them into a pile, dissolved them
with rock salt and Rock & Roll.
How much better if it was announced on the radio:
our love is frozen, no work today.
Take the week off.
Spend it any way that you'd like!
We could have held each other, like we meant to.
Imagine the ice we could have saved.
A lifetime's worth, and then some.
We didn't have to let that blizzard turn us to slush,
didn't have to let ourselves become snowed in.
We could have stolen the chains of vows
to wrap them around our tires.
Got some traction.
Then drove the hell out of that frostbitten town.
they're killing each other
and I'm still walking cars passing
headlights reaching forward
like fingers of light
could just walk right into one
that would teach them
no it wouldn't no it wouldn't
and I go over my colors again
orange mauve magenta wintergreen
I would like to die having learned something
and I'm trying to like myself trying
so I walk the air is a dirty rag
thrown into my face keep walking
peach indigo navyblue did I say
they're killing each other and for what?
silver and gold silver and gold
I'm afraid of turning into one of them
one of them one of them oh god one of them
the lights blink red yellow green
I'm scared of everyone I see black
copper white flesh and
I'm walking down the street at 2 am
in need of a job or possibly
in need of not needing a job
to like myself to like myself
I look at people working and wonder
how do they know how to do
what they know how to do pink
maroon still walking I like to walk
and I'm good at it too one time I walked
all the way to Princeton then I walked back
you see I'm not lazy I'm not not
one of them no not one of them
but it seems you can't go anywhere
without turning around amber cobalt
people stop me and ask if I need a ride
no no I don't need a ride thank you
I like how the road bends like a banana
brown beige rust I like that but
I'm afraid of people lavender violet
it seems a man can get away with too much
when he has too much when distance
doesn't take time so I walk walk
red and blue makes purple
a car passes every twenty seconds
the faces inside them scare me
going by so fast no color gray
the English write grey with the "e"
their faces as I walk going nowhere
but learning my colors one day
I'll teach them teach them what?
vermillion
I'm trying here really trying here
meanwhile I study colors olive
mahogany and walk
one time I walked all the way to Princeton
one of them no not one of them
then I walked back
They say you should keep your nose
to the grindstone, but as a young man,
recently married, I was a grinder-chipper
in a factory in dusty Yale, Michigan,
and I can tell you if you put your nose
to the grindstone you’ll grind flesh,
then cartilage, shredding the nose,
the sinus cavities, reaching the forehead
as blood spurts like red paint shooting
from a sprayer, then the head and mouth
will grind, the stone spinning, its rocks
splintering bone, sanding down the lips,
the chin, eyes popping like watery grapes,
teeth chipping away like spinning moons,
until the grindstone, sparks flying,
reaches soft gray brain, and when this
rock rips through your lobes all thought
stops forever, and there’s nothing left
but grab the next motor part and sand off
eternity’s jagged edges-- and no thank you,
I said even as a young man, you can shove
that horror show, I’ll instead be over here,
starving and looking trim and watching
my wife walk away with a friend of mine
who worked with me at the Yale factory,
because, my wife said, he was industrious,
and I should have been angrier at him but
I figured we each got something in the deal:
he got my wife, apartment, and a chance
to keep his nose to the grindstone--
and me, well, I got to keep my nose.
As every Greek knows,
we were the original
terrorists, dirty fighters,
pushing that horse into
the gates of Troy. Meanwhile,
back at the tents, the rest
of the army was getting it on,
bonding in the special way
only old men and boys bond--
as Socrates sucks hemlock
for corrupting the youth.
At home, the women cook up
their kids, served to guests.
Someone kills his father, marries
his mother, cuts out his eyes,
while the gods go on raping
every half-attractive youth.
Plato calls for philosophical
tyranny, and Aristotle flees
screaming into Macedonia
to train Alexander in the art
of bravery. Always a monster
hanging around the gates,
and Minotaur stumbles around
the labyrinth, chewing kids for snacks.
The boy who stole the wolf believes
death more honorable than truth.
And Heracles, the greatest hero,
slaughters his family, claiming divine
interference, temporary insanity.
All the while there are wars
between the city states, as they
struggle to hold off the barbarians
who are always out there, waiting,
knowing Golden Ages are golden
only to outsiders and historians,
and civilization too often ends
when the blushing girl says no.
Inside a muted room of Hotel Inspiration
Flattery idles on the bed with his feet up
not far from the frozen unlit hearth
complimenting you for the tepid breath
you use to warm his heels
while outside in the ice and rain
just beyond the hotel’s window
alone and unwanted and forgotten
Criticism clutches the world’s only match.
Relative to the egg, the skull
could be a small lampshade,
a bicycle seat, the floating white ball
inside a toilet when you flush.
But no, it’s the face behind your face,
your lasting face, the one
you’ll wear for generations in the grave
after this fake face falls off.
Maybe once you were beautiful,
or memorably ugly, now
you’re a busted bowling ball for a god
with fat fingers and no strength.
Maybe once you thought lofty thoughts,
learned Xenophon’s Greek, studied history,
believed in the tragedy of the moment,
marched for war, or for peace,
considered yourself a serious soul,
but all these jokes you told yourself
now reside in that hollow rock
and whistle like wind under a toothy grin
that works as a final comment on everything.
Poem Composed Entirely with Last Lines in John Allman Poems
You can hardly name this day. The world is yours
to survive. This is how it is. This is the poem
who still cannot see your face.
Trying to breathe
into her open mouth beginning to close.
Morning is so near
the city giving up its shadows and the clutter of lives in collision.
History forgives
revelers. As the past keeps rushing by
into an odorous surface with no further life
to speak
to your feverish lips.
Poem Composed Entirely with Last Lines from Molly Tenenbaum Poems
It’s very dark inside the can:
a billow of particles, wild and white.
It was bluer and bluer,
like hurtled sleep in the valley’s deeper hum.
In soft cloth as I set out
for the house where I was born,
as if to belong,
blind at the doors of the rooms
and lands. A lot of dark
shining with dust.
A Love that Doesn’t Last Like Our Love
We were in love and yet
I don’t remember much about you.
I know what you looked like, but so what?
A million women look the same.
Why waste a metaphor on description?
Instead I try to tell what we did,
how love passed from fire to frost.
I believe it is important.
A love that doesn’t last like our love
fades in the mind to nothingness
like snow on a river melts into the river.
In time, what’s left are just images:
a sudden shifting in bed, a scream,
the way you smelled after the abortion.
From these I cobble together a judgment.
In the present even a dullest day sizzles
while the most torrid past grays like old fruit.
Poetry alone keeps the dead upright
until even this fails, becomes merely language,
flaking paint coating the bones of a cadaver.
Or maybe it’s like those Good Humor rocket ships
we loved as kids before they melted away,
left us holding the bare, stained stick,
the taste of faded flavor and wood.
Because I yearned for something new to do
today fully dressed I walked into a creek
and sat where the water was deepest
though it reached only my thighs
water so cold at first it felt like the wet wind
that hides around the corner of a building
the current pushing against my back
flowing over my pants the bottom of my shirt
slapping against my feet and shoes
as if they were river stones rising from the mud
how quickly the creek accepted me as part of itself
I could be just a log that had fallen
or a bird’s nest dropped from a branch
if I laid down I was given to understand
it would bit by bit and bone by bone subsume me
carry me off to the lake where it longed to lay
frightened I stood and walked to the creek bank
thinking I don’t belong here not yet anyway
as I stepped away my teeth chattering
my clothes bloated with muddy water
bleeding from every known and unknown wound
Father, even after a decade
I hardly believe you’re dead.
Whole weeks go by
when I can see you rise
with that wire brush to scrub
the grime behind my ears.
I was dirty, you said,
and you couldn’t stand it.
I was there for your funeral,
but still it’s impossible to fathom
that you’ll never yell again,
never lift your belt and slap it
against my thin, naked back
for soiling my underwear.
Father, I shower every day,
wash my hands with Ajax,
gargle Listerine like
a desperate alcoholic,
and still you’re everywhere.
Surely you, of all people,
could make a clean getaway.
Who can imagine you
with those useless lungs
so filthy with disease?
Who can imagine you,
planted like an ingrown hair,
festering under a skin of dirt?
This is the end of our play,
and here comes the fall rain
to tap the roof, assault
drainpipes, fill all
tomato plant containers
with inches of maudlin mud.
Days I look out the window
at my porch, a stage
that swallowed its actors,
before putting on my jacket
with the hood to walk
around the slick streets,
moon-soaked rain like meteors
in my eyes. I turn my cheek
against everything we were,
stand a long time listening
to rain slime into gutters,
an anemic applause,
while the trees wave
a windy so long
and toss their leaves
like unwanted programs.
ask not her height in the sky
worry instead the cold nimbus
always surrounding her
will overwhelm all before
she turns her lucent face
fully toward you
James Valvis lives in Issaquah, Washington. His work has recently appeared in Atlanta Review, Confrontation, Eclipse, Hanging Loose, Nimrod, Pank, Rattle, Southern Indiana Review, and is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Crab Creek Review, Gargoyle, H_NGM_N, LA Review, Midwest Quarterly, New York Quarterly, River Styx, South Carolina Review, and others. A book-length collection of his poems, HOW TO SAY GOODBYE, is due in 2011.
