The best way to brighten your week with love #poetry #MondayBlogs

Illustration: Émile Friant "Study for Les Amoureux / Soir d'automne" (Lovers / Autumn evening) 1888

Polemics by Jim McGarrah

Here’s a mistake I frequently make,

I say poems are made from words. 

But that is to say killing is an ordinary

task in war or all the tools for every job

come from Sears. Tonight, my poem

works as a bartender who, like an acrobat, 

leaps on a narrow shelf. Steadied

by one leg and a waitress 

with arms covered in pagan tattoos, 

he retrieves a bottle high

above the bar’s mirror breaking

neither neck nor sweat. Tonight

my poem is love as these two people

brush against each other and hesitate

till all that needs said is said in silence.

Leaves fall from trees constantly

without fearing death. The bartender

doesn’t know this. That’s why, 

drying glasses with a damp towel, he looks

away each time she returns for an order.

 Jim McGarrah's poems, essays, and stories have appeared in many literary magazines over the past decade. His play, Split Second Timing, received a Kennedy Center ACTF Award in 2001. He is the author of four books of poetry, Running the Voodoo Down (2003), When the Stars Go Dark (2009), Breakfast at Denny's (2013), and The Truth About Mangoes (2016), a critically acclaimed memoir of the Vietnam War entitled A Temporary Sort of Peace that won the 2010 Legacy Nonfiction Award from the Eric Hoffer Foundation and the sequel entitled The End of an Era. His nonfiction books, Off Track and Misdemeanor Outlaw, were published by Blue Heron Book Works of Allentown, PA. Jim is also co-editor of Home Again: Essays and Memoirs from Indiana and a founding editor of RopeWalk Press, as well as the former managing editor of Southern Indiana Review. 

Connect with Jim online: https://www.facebook.com/JimMcGarrah.author/

Look behind the mind's eye #Poetry #ThursdayThoughts

Illustration: Wem Town Hall Ghost, public domain

Butter and Bread

by Vincent Francone

Capping a night of long conversation

I said: It’s a certainty that you’ll live 

well after I’m dead.

In an effort at levity, you replied 

that if I died you’d immediately 

join a nunnery 

as if I were Hamlet imploring 

and making reference to 

imaginary whoring.

But why would you want to sacrifice your life

because I had the bad taste to die?

You smiled, said you’d be well taken care of— 

God would be your butter and bread

more than I gave you living or dead.

Vincent Francone was born in 1971.  A veteran of the legendary Aspidistra Bookshop, he spent years as an autodidact before earning a BA from Roosevelt University, where he now teaches first year composition and the occasional literature class, and an MA from Northwestern University.  His work has been published in Rhino, New City, Akashic, and The Oklahoma Review among other journals, and he won first place in the 2009 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition.  He lives in Chicago with his wife and his Chihuahua, Haruki.  

Connect with Vince online: http://www.vincentfrancone.com

What #value does #music have in the Outlaw Life? @jmcgarra

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The music of the sixties, especially protest music, has ruined all other rock music for me. The era was a time of innovation unlike any other in rock & roll history and I was an impressionable teenager then, overwhelmed by the unique and powerful sounds. It was as if gods tied lightning bolts together and wrestled them apart through thunderous clouds. It was the magic of coming alive once and for always. So much so that everything I hear now seems derivative, either language-wise, thematically, or melody-wise. The only other time in music that I can compare it to as a touchstone is the bebop jazz era that preceded it by a decade or so. Interestingly, both groups of musicians working in both genres rose to fame considered as outlaws in the music world by their contemporaries. It was almost impossible to hear the music on or in conventional venues during their perspective eras.

Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Carlos Santana, John Mayhall, Roger McGuin, Keith Emerson, Rick Wakefield, Leslie West, Keith Richards, Duane Allman, Johnny and Edgar Winters, not to mention the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, were doing things with guitars and keyboards and the new synthisizers that the great jazz innovators of the fifties had attempted with horns and pianos (i.e. Coltrane, Monk, Davis, Parker, Mingus, etc.). I still listen to the unprecedented and iconic riffs, finding something I missed every time. It’s almost like reading great poetry over and over again. The same thing is true of Dylan’s imagistic lyrics and the vocal harmonies of the Beatles and Crosby, Still, & Nash.

Along with that is the emotional resonance created by some of the great songs. I can hear the opening notes of Street Fighting Man, Master of War, Eight Miles High, Fortunate Son, or a dozen other songs and be transported instantaneously to a march or a sit in where I was making some anti-war speech and the crowd was roaring. At a time when sex was as casual as shaking hands—just a way to say hello—I can hear Guinevere or Suite Judy Blue Eyes, Girl from the North Country, Spanish Harlem Incident, A Case of You, and be making love to Mary O'Donnell on a blanket at Bear Creek in upstate New York, or Black Magic Woman and be slipping off Roceria’s black lace panties in Mazalan, Mexico. I can hear Strawberry Fields Forever and suddenly be coming down off my first acid trip at 3am over a plate of half-cooked scrambled eggs in a booth at the Big O all-night diner in Owensboro, Kentucky. I can’t listen to Reflections by the Supremes or Paint It Black by the Stones or Magic Carpet Ride by Steppenwolf without finding my way through a maze of jungle somewhere near the DMZ in Vietnam. I can’t hear Whipping Post without remembering Cathy leaving me over for a mediocre musician who had an unlimited supply of good dope and forgiving her because I might have done the same thing.

The very fact that this music was interwoven with the social and cultural revolution that was my history, the time in my life when I worked hardest at finding my own identity, makes it iconic to me. Unlike classical music, or jazz, when I hear this music I remember who I am and why I am and how I got to be this person I am, a Misdemeanor Oulaw. And as I approach my seventh decade of life I’m finally getting to the point that I like who I am…consequently, I will continue to despise Clear Channel radio and the banal imitators that pollute the airwaves pretending the noise they make is somehow original. I’ll climb into my time machine constructed from vinyl and fueled with Rye whiskey (my doctor lets me have one drink every now and then). Once settled behind the wheel, Van Morrison and I may travel Into the Mystic or maybe I’ll Take the Highway with the Marshall Tucker Band. Regardless, my journey will be as free and joyful as it was forty years ago. I guess that’s why they call this music “classic.” And, why I write so often about that time with respect.

Jim McGarrah's poems, essays, and stories have appeared in many literary magazines over the past decade. His play, Split Second Timing, received a Kennedy Center ACTF Award in 2001. He is the author of four books of poetry, Running the Voodoo Down (2003), When the Stars Go Dark (2009), Breakfast at Denny's (2013), and The Truth About Mangoes (2016), a critically acclaimed memoir of the Vietnam War entitled A Temporary Sort of Peace that won the 2010 Legacy Nonfiction Award from the Eric Hoffer Foundation and the sequel entitled The End of an Era. His nonfiction books, Off Track and Misdemeanor Outlaw, were published by Blue Heron Book Works of Allentown, PA. Jim is also co-editor of Home Again: Essays and Memoirs from Indiana and a founding editor of RopeWalk Press, as well as the former managing editor of Southern Indiana Review.

The best response to the request for a #love #poem #MondayBlogs

Response to a Request for a Love Poem

by Vincent Francone 

My wife wears her gold earrings in the summer nights

going to dance wearing black looking like the small hours 

her skin the cinnamon of angry skies.

Her eyes match her clothing 

which she wears like fog combing over the skyline.

Her fingers are peninsulas 

her back is a map with rivers from my fingers

her feet hold her to the earth 

her toes are painted like beach-washed stones

her hair falls like empires 

or is coiled like the center of a sunflower.

She wears her hair off her shoulders

and I never fail to lock onto what little memory remains 

of our first careless ardor

while she meanders through our conflict 

taking her time to make up her mind

as assiduously as she works on her make up.

Vincent Francone is a writer from Chicago whose memoir, Like a Dog, was published in the fall of 2015. He won first place in the 2009 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition (Gwendolyn Brooks Award) and is at work on a collection of poems and stories. Visit www.vincentfrancone.com to read his work or say hi.

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Read a review for Like a Dog: 

A Chicago critic once asked Nelson Algren," Why can't we ever read about happy marriages?" Algren replied, "Because there are none."
Like a Dog shows us the same can be said of the average job. Francone leads us from a purgatorial mail sorting job on the South Side to a rat-infested North Side bookstore (where a budding writer can find a kind of happiness), and finally into academia, where so many writers are forced to labor. Well-told stories, original characters, lots of laughs.

VINCENT FRANCONE: a voice to reckon with #review #memoir

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Review for LIKE A DOG:

Vincent’s colorful escapades in Chicago’s workplace offer the reader witty, dark humor that provides the perfect balance of genuine suspense and Gen-X satire. The book starts out in the Southwest Suburbs with Vincent toiling in dead-end mail sorting job that provides several memorable moments and characters that keep the pages turning. The middle part of the book finds Vincent moving to the North Side and encountering a serious of hilarious encounters with eccentric roommates and questionable residences. Vincent’s time at the storied Aspidstra Book store is where the book really takes off. The various employees and patrons of the book store felt both familiar and timeless. The final portion of the book finds Vincent traversing the world of academia. Rich storytelling combined with razor sharp dialogue painted against the backdrop of 1990's Chicago make this an excellent read, and more importantly, Vincent, a voice to reckon with.

LIKE A DOG:

 

Vincent Francone’s “Like a Dog,” as in “Work like a dog,” is a great read. A working class guy who comes up on the South Side of Chicago and moves north in a quest a better life, Francone takes us on a dazzling tour of minimum wage America over the last couple of decades. He’s has done it all; “I’ve tried telemarketing, copy writing, editing; I managed a courier center, I conducted background checks on potential healthcare employees, and worked in a stock room. . . .” And that’s before he goes to university and winds up, like so many other academics today, as a part-time instructor in a string of economically stressed public colleges. Francone’s descriptions of boring and soul-destroying work, the places where it’s done, and the people who do it are beautifully written, wildl entertaining, deeply poignant, and mysteriously inspiring. This is what it’s like to be alive in these times, “Like a Dog” insists, this is the battlefield of everyday life. These are your adversaries: mindless repetitive work, bored and boring co-workers, feckless bosses, plus your own inclination to work as little as possible, spend every penny you earn right away, and escape from bad job to bad job, without ever climbing any ladder that might lead to better paid if equally meaningless work. Best of all, this post-industrial odyssey down mean streets and corridors to mean offices and classrooms, dingy apartments, and dead end bars is full of gritty life. Francone is a gifted story- teller with a great, street smart voice. His protagonists and characters are brilliantly drawn.. And in their bafflement and self-destructive resistance to the work regieme that claims them they press back in an utterly realistic way against our recession-bred equation of employment, almost any employment, with salvation. Studs Terkel would have loved this book--John McClure, Phd

Vincent Francone is a writer from Chicago whose memoir, Like a Dog, was published in the fall of 2015. He won first place in the 2009 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition (Gwendolyn Brooks Award) and is at work on a collection of poems and stories. Visit www.vincentfrancone.com to read his work or say hi.