Life and the Movies

Bogie and Belmondo
Both known for a butt
In their lips, smoke
Curling from corner
Of mouth making them
He-men.

How come when I
Tried it, the smoke
Burned my eyes
And made me gag
So hard the butt
Fell on

My peacoat and burned
A friggin’ hole
In it and my dad
Kicked my ass
For being for being
So dumb?



by George Held

George Held gave up smoking when his doctor said it would inflame his asthma and kill him. Previously, he’d been too stupid to figure that out.

Tobacco in Cuba

Giant Alice-in-Wonderland
rabbit-ear-leaves
Cuban tobacco plants
low and full
stand one behind the other
orderly and lush
praying hands repeating
ad infinitum into the horizon
neat lines in soft mounds
of dirt, my feet sink into clay
Alongside plants
under a drooping canopy
spider webs wrap over inside
a 1953 Rambler sunk
in silty soil
like Dalí’s rainstorm in a taxi
a desert inside a Rambler
petrified like the people of Pompeii
in the relentless Cuban sun.


by Maria Lisella

Maria Lisella is Program Coordinator for the IAWA readings at the Cornelia St. Café, and is co-editing an anthology based on those readings. She lives in Long Island City and was a finalist in the competition for Poet Laureate of Queens in 2007. A longtime travel writer, she currently edits a national travel trade magazine and is a member of the New York Travel Writers Association.

[Photo Credit: Stillman Rogers]

Death by Sea Bright

This sunny backyard's a concentration camp for drunks.
Free to dress well, live in clean houses,
free to come and go.
Free to turn themselves into projectiles,
meat to shoe the surgeon's feet.
Free to bear
a 3 lb. boy whose beer-fed brain
forever scrambles words,
(letters jumble and collide.)

Celebrate this boozeless wake.
Move enormous finger joints.
Do not cry for your weeping liver,
say you count your drinks.

Two boxes of ash
strewn by hand in
sand and little Joan
comes back a slash
of mother ash on her
black pants, maybe sister ash,
both politely dead of drink.

Cigarettes drowned in paper cups
outside. Couches strewn with people's mid-day sleep.


by Susan Maurer

Susan Maurer’s By the Blue Light of the Morning Glory was published by Linear Arts, in2, with Mark Sonnenfeld by Marymark Press, and Dream Addict by Backwood Broadsides. Raptor Rhapsody was published in ’07 by Poets Wear Prada, Maerchen in ’08 by Maverick Duck. Raw Poems was published by Gold Wake Press as e-book in '08. Letterpress broadsides were done by Clamshell Press and The Center for Book Arts. Her poetry has been nominated three times for Pushcart.

Visit her home page:
poetswearprada.home.att.net/SusanMaurer.html

"Death by Sea Bright" is from her first full-length collection, perfect dark, available from ungoverable press as a free to read and download e-book: http://ungovernablepress.weebly.com/uploads/2/1/2/2/2122174/perfect_dark.pdf