ISSN 1529-0832  Vol 2 No 1 – December 2004
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FOREWORD


This is the first issue of Volume 2, and a new volume is always like a new day dawning. But it shouldn’t be seen as a clean break at all. As the mag has put on some new clothes, a new literary listing was inevitable. The change from “black” to “white” doesn’t hide any mystic symbolism, and Locust’s old heart is always beating underneath. To tell the truth, the editor will soon start working on a New Manifesto, which won’t be ready until summer 2005. The main plan would be to move towards a more radical outlook, away from what is fashionable or common sense. The words experimental and avant-garde could be used here–if only they still had some subversive meaning!

This issue has been put off so many times, and appears at least a month later than scheduled. Sometimes it seems that even the two-issues-a-year policy is too hard to carry out. The editor’s job doesn’t get on well with the poet’s or the writer’s. A magazine–either online or printed–is a very demanding creature. A hungry baby. A leech… Whenever Locust is late, please forgive the editor for breaking his promises. He is only trying to keep his creative self alive.

December 2004

 

SCOTT TWILIGHT
A Poem by Michael Internicola


Scott is 27 and an alcoholic. He drinks
ten plus kettle rocks a night and is a
shitty tipper. He sits alone and makes
strange noises. Gets so drunk he calls
me an asshole and laughs. Sometimes
he falls off the chair and i pick him up,
it eases the pain, he tells me. Last night
he fell asleep on the bar and I had to wake
him up. I got the money out of his wallet
and paid the bill. Gave myself a twenty
dollar tip. I walked him to the door and
he fell again next to a dog taking a shit.
I picked him up and brushed him off best
I could. He stood against the window for
ten minutes. He said he was miserable. I told
him he was what he was and I locked the
door behind me. Scott wound up at the wrong
apartment banging on the door. The guy who
lived there opened it up, punched him in the face
and called the cops. Scotty Twilight spent the
night at St. Vincent’s. I only serve him light
beer from now on.

 

DIDN’T EVERY THING IN THE WORLD NEED ITS POET?
A Poem by Ace Boggess


[Question from Stephen Dunns poem, The Resurrection.]

I’d devote my life to the sea cucumber
if Simic hadn’t got the jump on me,
writing of salads for Helen.
Or, profess my dedication to smallmouth bass
cutting a subway under conduits that bridge
their freshwater world, but surely someone…
Someone, too, called dibs on the hermit crab &
fleshy blushing cactus the pink
as lipstick & the candied orange.
Every THING has its poet: shade trees, lanterns,
collected cocktail napkins of the universe.
But does every poet have a thing the beehive hairdo
for Basho, Neruda & the unicycle bear? Was Ginsburg
the poet of the prairie dog? Plath of piranhas,
or could that be Robert Lowell? For me,
tonight: same barroom crowd; blues singer grinding
licks, growling laughter; women circling tables,
their faces acrylics of desire; & vodka on ice
with juice aglow beneath a neon sign, &
I am not the poet of these things.

 

TIME UNTANGLED
A Poem by Julio Peralta-Paulino


Bitter lakes of time untangled, as incense lit dissolves.
Escaping smoke as this from the yellow candle green,
Cautiously reflamed to some other taste.
Open to the homeless wind’s humming…
Mother Isis Lakshmi Mary,
Everywhere a rattle.

On the road and off the beaten pathway.
Nuance. Metaphysical as the nature of the deity,
Even the ashes reflect a silver-gray light so blue.

Angels in the wax they work the wick and flame another wish.
Great Osiris Vishnu God recounting trees at dawn,
And here, we are east of it all still…
Infants weeping for the breast,
Narrow streams uncradled.

 

HIDDEN PENTACLES
A Poem by Rosemarie Crisafi


Mother looks.
Hubble captures a black circle and a star.
Footsteps approach in the hall.

A cosmic clock ticks in an arch.
Membranes tear from the stare
of a horned god.
Mother glances.
In a dark hole
a red eyed ghost waits.
Father fills the doorframe.
On a remote world,
a clock tossed; a face spins.
Mother turns.
A bulb flashes.
An inset stair creaks.
Only gods use that long step.

A obelisk needle points the way.
Chemicals release as she waits.
The door shuts.
Mother walks away.

 

FOUR MORE YEARS UNDER THE INFLUENCE
A Poem by Gabriel Ricard


It doesn’t matter
what they’re eating.

The father,
he only looks up and speaks
when he wants to compliment the mother
on acceptable potatoes and the like.

The daughter,
elbows jutted out and face drawn in,
she doesn’t speak at all.

The son,
he glances around arrogantly.

The table really shouldn’t be able
to support their weight anymore.

Somehow, it does.

And the rats are polite tonight.

Odd, odd, relentlessly peculiar.

Candles mutter, scream, announce,
dictate, confirm, suspect, cry out
all around this dinner time scene.

At least half of our cast
has never seen electricity before.

As the mother waits, her fingers
trying to tap on her knuckles,
for the father to ask that the dishes
be taken away from the table,
a wrecking ball takes care of the
living room and the family dog’s skeleton.

None of them seem to notice.
Even when the sound starts up again,
and the weapon takes up a brand new aim.

 

REFLECTIONS IN APRIL: 21
A Poem by Duane Locke


At his funeral, a quasi-stranger to me, very few came,
Among the few were those who never knew
The man who died, never knew his
Carnival barker ceased face,
His twisted Wall Street lips,
His eyes, a platform brown surrounded
By broken bleached shells.
But now he had a rice-powder dusted face,
His skin resembled painted smoke,
And his lips were copied from a Magritte.
A man who when alive had the appearance
Of Everyman and was considered quotidian,
Now after the undertaker
Appeared mystic and someone never seen before.
His wife did not recognize him,
Shed tears, for she regretted
He did not look this mystic when alive,
As she thought her life
Would have been exciting
Living with an otherworldly
Bohemian attic and aria type.

I surmised these unknowns who cried
Are among those
Who find aesthetic pleasure in expressing grief,
As an actor does in a drama.
Those unknowns gave the appearance
Of being the saddest among the mourners.
Their grief so well expressed was abstract,
A purity as sought by Kandinsky
And abstract expressionists.
These unknown mourners
Did not know not anything about
The embalmed, transformed thing
Before it was in an a funeral parlor open casket.
So their grief was without object,
Thus grief was autotelic and ardent.

I thought I heard Time’s Winged Chariot
Hurrying near, but at this funeral,
Death could not be conceived as riding in
Such exotic, mythic transportation, for today
Death rides in a Volkswagen or Honda.

When I am engaged in a Bingo game,
And suddenly realize during the game
I have become a few more minutes nearer death,
And due to my despair I mishear the called number,
I see death coming towards me as a hitchhiker,
But every car stops to offer him a ride.
Death waves his thumb in a charming manner.

 

SOME PURGATORY BETWEEN
A Poem by Spencer Dew


Flames, embroidered, or ironed-on, in vinyl
And a bra that seemed, via the overflow, a cup too small

Everything had a scriptural corollary
She told me, wiping the sides of her mouth

It was that sort of party: rinse, repeat
We went back to the living room and mingled

I met an Egyptologist of sorts, a scholar of pictographs
The origins of written language

A collector, as well, of pocketknives and related contraptions
He had a wristwatch with a built-in memory drive

I had a jacket with an ink stain under the inside pocket
And she, across the room, her breasts engulfed in stylized flames
Had traces of my seed, crusting silver, in her bangs

 

ROSA XXXII: JACK FROST
A Poem by Jnana Hodson


Lacewing chaste and safe
weightless and comely
distance

introducing differences of color
and Pentecostal
desert skin youth

in one part safety.
Another facet transgressed.
A third far too opulent.

 

HAULING STONES
A Poem by Mark Kanak


salvia
      whory le / aved
            big sag / ebrush
narrowboa / ted chop

            when tea roo / m or merchant
      sold you fo / r less
you wand / ered fir+st street
              [a rail and a half]
      wat / ched tha / t car
cross and come rou / nd
     that watchtow /er colum / n
                            cress near / by
              long the tr / ack
           [now trail]

ele+men / tal stuff
             she thoug / ht
             “the ultimate red-eyed insult”
        to you / r narr \ ow guage
                     lined idea / s

        sla \ ck rope bigh / ead
                                 a/ massed sil / ver and blu+e
           when all w /as sa / id an+d
                                    [done]
     you came roun / d
             to her bludg / eon / ed tripe
         that da / y

 

TWO POEMS by John Bryan

 

CITY TRILOGY MAPPING MARJETA VIOLETA PUCONJA’S EROS


I. BYZANTIUM merchants slide into your port on sea based lubricants. love’s language for eleven centuries. i develop my own alphabet for you to recite your piece at leisure. statuesque in fanaticisms that make my armour rub against. trading objects two bodies inexactly mixed within solemn room made of flesh on bed. religious golem.

II. CONSTANTINOPLE repulse. hordes of scruffy barbarians horrendous dig their grimy nails into your holy walls and attempt to mount. repulse. you hide your two faced enkolpion behind the lack of pupils in the eyes of Constantine’s bust. repulse. encouraging the creation of encyclopedic works and historical tomes which i always reply a heart shaped seal. two crossed scimitars’ cyrillic kiss. captured. an emperor orders all effigies to be destroyed except his own. taken.

III. ISTANBUL treaties arranged. a golden age in compromising circumstance is always high maintenance. your sight is bazaar. the tangled streets of your veins bustle at the thought of invasion down to your much maligned carpet shop. intriguing alleyways. forever pondering a thousand mosques at once. earthquakes & fires. could these force me to safer havens?

IV. MARJETA queen of cities. icon

 

SORORICIDE


motives for blood poems
bring on
the subscriber’s period
a week early

intentions for blood poems
compel the
subscriber to quaff
menstrual

implications for blood poems
alter the title’s essence drawing your
instinct toward a female campus
instead of the sister

ramifications for blood poems
regard the murder
as not over until
I say so

 

THREE POEMS by Devin Davis

 

RETARDED PAJAMAS


the young, republican americans,
can’t get laid; their women were
seduced by foreign affairs. and

a pagan, collegiate,
erection wasn’t hot;
flaming, or on.

 

YELLOW & WHITE


why do i feel an urge
to save a grenade from eggs?

how softly laid
this heavy thing
must have been…

did calcium form ’round its metal casing?
was the bomb dumb? or just rotten
at assimilation?

biggest fear, amid little chickens,
is teenage pranks; well-trained.
our hens are in
that easter basket.

 

TENURE


pussyfight, shushed,
below my bedroom window;
2 hours before the bars let out.

clawsharp,
on a neighbor’s porch,
this battle–for territory,

& that black housecat between them; with
their tails held up, spraying musk at everything

–is met. a magnificent japanese tiger,
defending his, against an irish scrapper.

Locust Two - December 2005▶