Just Write Poems

just write poems, just sings songs

just be happy you're not dead yet

like those people you met in Little Italy;

the old handsome men you sought to be like,

their Italian leather shoes and beautifully kept shirts,

clean, pressed, sitting, legs crossed smoking pipes,

sipping coffee, reading the paper

and all alone. Their shirts will become shabby

with no wives to iron the pleats.

just know, your mustache is not so full and not so well kept

and cannot be so nice as theirs.

it isn't in your genes.

handsome, handsome

San Diego says,

"Go home now,

the ocean has washed you enough."

BY ALEX KARPICKE

Building a Man

The summer I turned eight,

Grandpa informed me that I needed a tree house:

A man needs a place to work.

I was just excited by the idea

of having some place to play with my friends.

In a whisper, Mom told me

that Grandpa was getting too old

to climb up and down that tree.

He overheard and pounded his fist on the table,

Young lady, mind your own business, Goddamn it.

It was decided I would have a tree house.

While Grandpa repeatedly sketched the blueprints

at his workbench, I hunched next to him,

scribbling pictures of the fort in pink crayon.

Grandpa noticed the color,

snapped that crayon in half,

and then handed me a blue one.

Up in the branches Grandpa noticed my thin arms,

and urged me, Nail harder. Pound with force

and Push firmly, you sissy,

so I wouldn’t strip the heads off the screws,

so I would build some muscle.

Once the floor was completed, we would break

for him to have a beer

and eat the black jellybeans

that Grandma saved for him.

In a family of girls, I’m the only one

who can stomach these.

I learned to construct walls

around the punch lines of his dirty jokes.

I didn’t understand why nuts were funny,

but I memorized his words

because he had stood glaring when I told him

my favorite knock-knock joke.

By the time we were adding the roof

I was already carrying a jackknife and wearing a tool belt,

even when we weren’t working,

because Grandpa forgot to take his off most of the time.

As the final touch, Grandpa built me a workbench

and after he had climbed down from the tree

I sat there forcing down a bowl of black jellybeans.

That evening, my friend, Matt, hoisted himself up.

We colored pictures of ourselves.

I stood on white paper, scrawny and holding a hammer.

Matt urged me to add pink to my drawing.

Then, I told him about the nuts but neither of us laughed.

When he left, I looked at the picture,

pink lying next to those black jellybeans,

and I pounded my fist onto Grandpa’s workbench,

crying, Goddamn it.

BY JAKE BAUER

Audrey Hepburn's Lonely Hearts Club Band

today i am an ivory tooth hidden

off and off white

i have been chewing everything

only to find - it all breaks down.

today i am the only member of

Audrey Hepburn's Lonely Hearts Club Band

and what's the point of being 21 years old

if you aren't the best version of yourself

if you aren't raising hell

kicking shit

shaking up the dead

shaking up the whole old world

today i need luke's coolhand

everything's too hot to touch

it's worse because it is a bruising secret

and today

i'm Dying in the Wrong Way

and that's the Worst Thing you can do.

BY MAREN HOOPFER

Hit Your Shins on the Chandelier

pale on the stairs, she's scared, she's scary, and she sure is swaying,

saying something like, " don't save me if it will take you too"

the children keep leaving in the middle of the night

and the world writhes a little

in a way that everyone can kind of feel, it's delicate,

you can't see it unless you have a chandelier

even then, the shiver is so long and soft

you might mistake it but

there's something wrong it's been wrong for so many years

elliott smith is anyone awake too long

everything feels silly when it's pretty

and things like cinnamon and things like ships

and things like lanterns and things like cedars

are night gowns

for ghost towns

BY MAREN HOOPFER

Insomnia

Every night I lie in bed and practice my posture.  

Every day I hope I die before dark.

 

Marilyn hangs over my headboard.

It is not because I, like everyone else, fantasize about her

 

as I struggle for sleep,

my body rigid next to yours.

 

You do not understand

why I lay with my eyes wide after sex;

 

you do not understand

why I kick in my sleep, screeching shards of glass in the dark—

 

call it a nightmare;

you can’t understand.

 

Everyone dubbed her a sex goddess

but that’s too simple.

 

She understands how it feels to jolt awake

in the midst of your own monstrous screams.

 

She understands how it feels

to stare bleary-eyed through a mental institution’s safety glass

 

at the one person who could never quite love you

because he couldn’t understand.

 

Only I ever noticed

that she was distant, that she was alive, that she wanted to die.

 

I see her understanding

in her frozen lip, mid quiver and in her destroyed pupils.

 

She understands because

her hand shakes when she drops sleeping pills into her whiskey sour,

 

but she does it anyway,

because how else would she survive the night?

 

·        

 

I write Ask Marilyn on a pad of paper

and set the pill bottle over her name.

 

When you come, I will be, same as always,

straight-backed and stiff in bed

 

but now, eyes delicately closed

and finally peacefully silent.

 

You will try

but you will never understand.

BY JAKE BAUER