6 Poems

GO EASY OTHER ISLANDS

Clouds bumble to their stews
Wives
And green bottles surge
the sea
and Indonesian pirates wash
Their evening prayer

*

steady
plane
your comet
stopped
3 birds
in twos

THE 1906 SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE AND FIRE (AN EPISODE)

From here accounts conflict, but 4
Chinese valets
remember Barrymore leaving
the hotel alone
to drink. But Caruso was driven mad
there, and clutched his portrait
of Roosevelt “close
to tears”
surrounded by Caruso
“close to tears”
the portrait in his hand.
And Barrymore
drinking alone, parting the flames
anything to repair…any excuse…
while an undertaker
blazed in his storefront, meticulously
polishing coffin handles
and a flamingo
flagged through
the smoke hardly noted
by the mad tenor, who mumbled
just then (I’m guessing)
“I want my sketchpad”

THE MAGICIAN

showed me his harp
past

in the basement
like a glass
webs
the bricks
offshoots
broken
the leaping

tiger probably stuffed

*

at home
I sleep
in furs
I hunt
myself

LOUIS ARMSTRONG

Louis Armstrong, best trumpet ever
ate at Louis Cairo’s
with Humphrey Bogart
Detroit Oysters
the Sebastian Bachs (“fuck
this lousy inferior grub”) and hauled out
across the great American road
dead serious
an affront to historians
the followers of St. Francis
whose kits may lapse
but who are never off the spring
you can smell it on them
cocktail sauce
double whiskeys halfprice
their eyes shock you, it’s a real shock
even if you know
lip split in two
on soft brass
copper harpoon in a solution
of creeping pink
otherworldly ash
ebbing on the seafloor

POEM FOR OLD POEMS

don’t you remember Scranton and
what tough moss in the cemetery
wall we camped on? then

playing Strange in the bend bar
stealing drops of talk now
lost from the patrons
Hank Williams, you were lyrical
poorly raised and lost but

I wept to brag of you and dreamt
I was ashamed, seeing this
your old home
touching your dented styrofoam flyer, gone

and failed in the monkey sense
I’ve lost it

in the land you discovered
as you must have insisted
I do, so bad the map
and what promise

OLD POEM

“I have no business”
writing about death
the quick service cab
of flowers
as close as I get
being alive,

and not pretending one day
he
or she just disappeared
I write about it
to fill sugartanks
to strap it with my embossed seal
Death
the Mistery Endearing
deeper than the velvet grabbag
of caves
embedded
in weeds that cast
footprints where
no feet have fallen
oh, it’s useless
like a mortuary organ
in July
every day is a festival
for everyone who’s died

Julien Poirier comes from Berkeley, California, and lives in New York City where he teaches poetry and literacy in the public schools. He is a member of the Ugly Duckling Presse--his job is fishy at times (he also edits New York Nights newspaper). Published works include "Ours, Yours," from Loudmouth Collective, "Living! Go and Dream" (UDP), and two forthcoming chapbooks called "Key Doors" (Old Gold) and "Absurd Good News" (Insert Press). His favorite roller coaster is The Cyclone at Coney Island.