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Desire Street 601a
Desire Street
January, 1996
cyberspace chapbook of
The New Orleans Poetry Forum
established 1971
Desire, Cemeteries, Elysium
Listserv: DESIRE-Request@Sstar.Com
Email: Robert Menuet, Publisher
robmenuet@aol.com
Mail: Andrea S. Gereighty, President
New Orleans Poetry Forum
257 Bonnabel Blvd.
Metairie, La 70005
Programmer: Kevin R. Johnson
Copyright 1996, The New Orleans Poety Forum
(12 poems for January, 1996)
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Contents:
Picking Apricots
Stretched out in a hole
The End of the Day (I)
Lesson plan
Adieu
Another Way
Nature
Notre Dame - Another View
Pause
Love Poem Translated
Steel Guitar
Wife's Complaint
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Picking Apricots
by Athena O. Kildegaard
I like to think of you
standing beneath the spindly
branches of an apricot
flies at your feet tipsy
from the rotted juices
your mouth open in concentration
your sisters too
filling paper bags
and not a word spoken
just the hot silence
conjured by your gathering
apricots in a mown yard.
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Stretched out in a hole
by kevin R. johnson
Row by row you cut, then lay down tip to tip wooden poles tall as a
man-sized woman, using pointed metal caps, stalks greener than
money are speared one atop another. These bundles are laid out
like a new deck of cards down the row. When a field is done, a
truck goes out, you climb on the back smiling in the wind, to help
pick up the bundles. Each run fills the truck; everyone except the
driver and the boss must walk to the barn and climb like spiders to
the top and hang the stalks like crowded slabs of beef. In a few
weeks after they're cured, the tobacco will be sold at the market.
Tobacco's clear juice runs down the machete, greasing the handle
with every whack. My hands are soft, never callous; bits of skin
curl up in the dirt just like worms.
The sun is an angry father, everything weeps. When the clouds come,
the sky turns fat and grey; light pours through as if we are on the
underside of a lake, drowning.
At mid-day, we abandon the patch-work fields like leaving an old
mule that won't move no matter how hard you beat it. Each is on his
own walking up the road or through paths in the woods. I eat half a
sandwich of not too stale bread and meat you can almost taste with
a squirt of mustard that looks like an egg yolk if you stare too
long. A glass of Crazy Berry Cherry Kool-Aid washes down the food
and grit. I like the last cup because its tart.
Night-time, and the sky if full of constellations that all the kids
at school can name. Now that the earth is clear, the soil is loose
and ditches are easily dug. But still, you have to go deep, or the
smoke from the brown, wrinkled tobacco leaves will give you away.
Keeping watch is important.
Working for food, to help with medical bills, for car parts, for a
red bandanna to wrap around my head, I learn the pain of discrete
contortions. From figures in the dirt the shapes of angels and
corpses, from eating with flies and emaciated cats, I know not to
trust my wishes to the stars. I think of new comic-book
characters. I wonder, should you try to kiss a fist into dust or
do you bide your time until its dark and let the moist, carpeted
air of the barn soak up the screams? I wonder if the tomatoes will
be ripe tomorrow. They taste best with salt, chapped lips or not.
--------------------------------------------
The End of the Day (I)
by Joshua Corey
Another work day done, God,
thank God. It has been hard
resisting the sky, the pelicans
wheeling and flocking over I-10.
Hard to understand the rhetoric
of women's legs, crossing
and recrossing beneath transparent
summer dresses. I love
my new shoe smell, the moist earth,
Louisiana turf, and every face
in every streetcar window, peeling by
like pages of newspaper in the wind:
white and black, popcorn and coffee beans.
These fertile smells have hard shells:
bite and ruin your teeth. Better to idle
in traffic, sunlight painting your left
arm, breathing bus fumes, the cars
fitful and asthmatic. Then home by God,
where last night's conversation hangs
in ellipsis, like a dropped stitch.
You pick through the images, wondering
where to begin. The sun. Her hair.
The endless evening. The low
clutch of clouds, black band of sky, New Orleans.
--------------------------------------------
Lesson plan
by Robert Menuet
Quit hanging on your teacher
trying to be a good catholic.
Second grade
can be a fresh start
for you. If he calls you Fat,
don't cry until you get
home. You're the biggest
in your class, and
he'll try to
take you down
again this year.
Hit him
while the teacher
isn't looking.
Punch him in the
stomach.
If you don't fight
you make yourself
ridiculous.
Make sure
you draw blood,
sock him in the nose.
It's worth a suspension.
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Adieu
by Cedelas Hall
Rick taught me
to make sauerkraut
with pork roast,
German potato salad.
How not to make
red beans and rice.
How cold, distant
a German man can be.
Bill taught me
Orion has a belt,
a sword,
is a winter constellation,
to laugh
canoeing in the rain.
That a short Frenchman
can have a Napoleon complex.
Sam taught me
that a poem can express
feelings too painful
to say out loud.
How to make maelstrom love
amid dust and clutter.
How timid a shielded
Irish heart can be.
Phillip taught me
to love Myers' dark rum
with tonic.
How to move to marimba,
to feed cat food
to sea gulls in mid air.
How a British ego can fill
a room and suffocate you.
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Another Way
by Rhonda Manolis
Then:
I drank your
voice...poetry...smile
enticing, caressing me,
being in being.
Waited, wanting you
and when I came to you...
I gave my
eyes...mouth...flesh
feeling, breathing you.
You took my
heart...love...trust
crushing, forsaking me.
There was no other way.
Now:
Our way has ended,
new love's on the horizon.
I will drink anew...
life, energy, spirit.
There is another way.
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Nature
by Bob Rainer
Rebellion is my nature,
Anger my fuel,
Love but a fleeting fancy, prone to be cruel,
Fear a companion,
Hunger a friend,
Curious always, never to end.
Such am I of mortal stock
Not rare nor pure,
No human rock of eternal infallibility.
Simply a rebellious, angry, lonely, scared, hungry seeker
Awaiting my time of glory
When my fate will be sealed and stamped:
My ticket to the Glories; My sentence for the Time.
And whether that fate is wonderful or not
At least it will be mine.
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Notre Dame - Another View
by Andrea Saunders Gareighty
From the visitor's parking lot
I watch leaves in the adjacent cemetery
Pursue each other like
Players in this sport passed on
From fifth century Greece.
Other leaves huddle in a horseshoe
In golds, mauves, in reds and magentas
Like frozen players.
"You see leaves from a slanted perspective,"
I hear my sister's husband's words.
These leaves and words
Glass and smoke
Geese and memories
Whirl like flurries of snow
And drift toward us
From the lake for three days.
One leaf,
a solitary maple dancer
dizzys the way to earth
In a pirouette
In early morning
Late autumn, in Indiana.
For Dennis in memory of his birthday
November 8, 1995
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Pause
by kevin R. johnson
The sun is cut by the edge of a serrated horizon, again
bleeding, darkness spreads like the smell of pick-pockets
somewhere a naked butcher washes off his legs in the shower;
a doctor gives her husband a sterile kiss;
an addict gives up the habit, again;
&the every day world is stuffed like Frankenstein with acts of poetry
& we do everything all the time remembering the loss of a moment.
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Love Poem Translated
by Bob Rainer
Your breasts tantalize me.
They make me long to snuggle my nose
in their soft fullness.
(Those bags of fat hanging pertly from
your upper torso seem surprisingly
conspicuous, in view of their limited
function.)
Your eyes are starry pools of night.
My dreams reflect from them back to me
They beckon me to find them.
(Receptors for electromagnetic radiation
imbedded in your upper segment serve
both decorative and functional uses.)
My thoughts wander over your form.
Desire brings them to the place where
your passion awaits release, again and
again.
(Your major bifurcation houses potent
pheromones, and they are very
distracting. You emit them frequently,
indicating an unending need for
stimulation.)
Your silken hair flows the color of God's
breath.
It plummets, wrapping you in shimmery
sheath.
(Stringy proteins protrude and dangle.)
Your laughing robs my senses.
I will die wondering if it tells me I am the
object of your affection,
or a buffoon for your fun.
(The way you convey amusement is
distracting, too.)
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Steel Guitar
by Cedelas Hall
Fear inside,
strung tighter
than a steel guitar.
Pluck my strings.
They sing
a twangy song.
Faithful
as a St. Bernard.
Would have stayed
with one mate,
mourned his death
like the swan.
Betrayed,
life script shredded.
New blank page
set before me,
ending unclear.
Try to re-write
with fits and starts.
Discordant song plays.
Country novice
on a bad practice day.
Hope the strings
will hold me together.
Broken strings
are hard to repair,
the music suffers.
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Wife's Complaint
by Robert Menuet
It was my birthday, yes,
but it was Mardi Gras Party.
Anyhow, Tibor brought
a huge birthday cake from Maurice's,
larger than my wedding cake, yes,
and because my husband loves cake so
much, he made shame of me.
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THE POETS OF DESIRE STREET
Joshua Corey is from New Jersey.
Andrea Saunders Gereighty owns and manages New Orleans Field Services Associates,
a public opinion polls business and is
currently the president of the New Orleans Poetry Forum. Her poetry has appeared in
many journals, as well as in her book, ILLUSIONS AND OTHER REALITIES.
Cedelas Hall has returned to poetry writing after a 20 year hiatus. Her works range in
subject matter from nostalgia to sex.
Kevin Johnson, Piscean, enjoys Tequila under the stars and writes about the
physiology of nothingness.
Athena O. Kildegaard is a freelancer writer and mother and
makes time between for writing poetry.
Rhonda Manolis, mother of Chris and Andy, loves horeseback riding, Tai Chi Chaun,
bicycling, hiking, and fishing. She reads Jungian psychology, existential philosophy, and
holistic medicine.
Robert Menuet is a psychotherapist, marital therapist, and
clinical supervisor. Previously he was a social planner.
Bob Rainer is an Alabama redneck who lives in Metairie, Louisiana.
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ABOUT THE NEW ORLEANS POETRY FORUM
The New Orleans Poetry Forum, a non-profit organization, was founded in 1971 to
provide a structure for organized readings and workshops. Poets meet weekly in a
pleasant atmosphere to critique works presented for the purpose of improving the writing
skills of the presenters. From its inception, the Forum has sponsored public readings,
guest teaching in local schools, and poetry workshops in prisons. For many years the
Forum sponsored the publication of the New Laurel Review, underwritten by foundation
and government grants. The New Orleans Poetry Forum receives and administers grant
funds for its activities and the activities of individual poets.
Meetings are open to the public, and guest presenters are welcome. The meetings
generally average ten to 15 participants, with a core of regulars. A format is followed
which assures support for what is good in each poem, as well as suggestions for
improvement. In many cases it is possible to trace a poet's developing skill from works
presented over time. The group is varied in age ranges, ethnic and cultural background,
and styles of writing and experience levels of participants. This diversity provides a
continuing liveliness and energy in each workshop session.
Many current and past participants are published poets and experienced readers at
universities and coffeehouses worldwide. One member, Yusef Komunyakaa, was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for 1994. Members have won other distinguished
prizes and have taken advanced degrees in creative writing at local and national
universities.
Beginning in 1995, The New Orleans Poetry Forum will publish a monthly electronic
magazine, Desire Street, for distribution on the Internet and computer bulletin boards. It
is believed that Desire Street will be the first e-zine published by an established group of
poets. Our cyberspace chapbook will contain poems
that have been presented at the weekly workshop meetings, and
submitted by members for publication. Publication will be in both message and file
formats in various locations in cyberspace.
Workshops are held every Wednesday from 8:00 PM until 10:30 at the Broadmoor
Branch of the New Orleans Public Library, 4300 South Broad, at Napoleon. Annual
dues of $10.00 include admission to Forum events and a one-year subscription to the
Forum newsletter, Lend Us An Ear. To present, contact us for details and bring 15
copies of your poem to the workshop.
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Copyright Notice
Desire Street, January,1996 © 1996, The New Orleans Poetry Forum. 12 poems for January, 1996. Message format: 16 messages for January, 1996. Various file formats.
Desire Street is a monthly electronic publication of the New Orleans Poetry Forum. All
poems published have been presented at weekly meetings of the New Orleans Poetry
Forum by members of the Forum.
The New Orleans Poetry Forum encourages widespread electronic reproduction and
distribution of its monthly magazine
without cost, subject to the few limitations described below. A request is made to
electronic publishers and bulletin board system operators that they notify us by email
when the publication is converted to executable, text, or compressed file formats, or
otherwise stored for retrieval and download. This is not a requirement for publication,
but we would like to know who is reading us and where we are being distributed. Email:
robmenuet@aol.com (Robert Menuet). We also publish this magazine in various file
formats and in several locations in cyberspace.
Copyright of individual poems is owned by the writer of each poem. In addition, the
monthly edition of Desire Street is copyright by the New Orleans Poetry Forum.
Individual copyright owners and the New Orleans Poetry Forum hereby permit the
reproduction of this publication subject to the following limitations:
The entire monthly edition, consisting of the number of poems and/or messages stated
above for the current month, also shown above, may be reproduced electronically in
either message or file format for distribution by computer bulletin boards, file transfer
protocol, other methods of file transfer, and in public conferences and newsgroups. The
entire monthly edition may be converted to executable, text, or compressed file formats,
and from one file format to another, for the purpose of distribution. Reproduction of this
publication must be whole and intact, including this notice, the masthead, table of
contents, and other parts as originally published. Portions (i.e., individual poems) of this edition
may not be excerpted and reproduced except for the personal use of an individual.
Individual poems may be reproduced electronically only by express paper-written
permission of the author(s). To obtain express permission, contact the publisher for
details. Neither
Desire Street nor the individual poems may be reproduced on
CD-ROM without the express permission of The New Orleans Poetry Forum and the
individual copyright owners. Email robmenuet@aol.com (Robert Menuet) for details.
Hardcopy printouts are permitted for the personal use of a single individual.
Distribution of hardcopy printouts will be permitted for educational purposes only, by
express permission of the publisher; such distribution must be of the entire contents of
the edition in question of Desire Street. This publication may not be sold in either
hardcopy or electronic forms without the express paper-written permission of the
copyright owners.
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