FLEUR DE SEL

I

his mother has died
alone on the kitchen floor
choked to death
on her own vomit

she laid there
for six days
nobody missed her

and it’s his problem
because the police
find his name
in her address book

he wants
to give her a funeral
then he’ll bury her

II

he is divorced with
two children
a boy and a girl
I don’t
know their names

maybe he’s an English
professor
likes to forget
the gritty details of life
once in a while

or maybe he’s an actor
but his
true passion is writing
he spends all his
free time at
community theater

he was already divorced
when you knew him
or maybe he was a Russian colonel
who fell in
love with a Cuban girl

she defected and moved
to Chicago
and he followed her there
but she was mad as hell
pretended she
didn’tknow him

so he teaches Spanish at
DePaul University
and he hates
every minute of it

he wants to give her a funeral
and a wake
a big fucking celebration
throw a fucking party

he’ll grieve for that woman
then he’ll bury her

III

he needs to tell this story
in the first person
doesn’t
want to cast
the narrator as a hero

that will draw the audience in
then he will
show her
unclaimed body on a
slab in the morgue

he will throw
a party
a big fucking celebration
throw open the doors

and bury her

IV

I tried to forget that
Bloomington
was home once

it became a look out
the window

a rest stop on
the way to anywhere
else

V

because it isn’t the place
that matters
it is her lifeless face
laying on a slab that matters

the autopsy has already
been done
the medical examiner doesn’t
want him to see the body

he doesn’t know that he is an
unreliable narrator
misleading and
confusing his readers

it’s up to the readers
to fill in details
and it’s his problem
because the police find his
name in
her address book

V

maybe his father
comes from a solid reputable family
she is
from the country

but they still have to
meet somewhere
like
St. Louis University

in the College of Pharmacology

or maybe they are
high school sweethearts
he saves some
money and buys a store
joins the Elks

or maybe he runs for
political office
and loses
in a landslide

buries her underneath
the rubble

VI

he knows a good haircut
brushes his shoes
wears an
undershirt and a belt

knows that pants always
have pleats
lapels are always notched
dress shirts don’t have button
down collars

but they always have
starch

he keeps a rubbing stone
in his pocket
that smells like after shave

a mother of pearl button
reminds him
of his first haircut
his first pair of dress shoes
pancake breakfasts

a green felt baseball cap with
an embroidered logo
almost
completely worn away

someone bought him a
chocolate malt
he sucked on the wooden
stick
chewed it to splinters

wore a pair of white canvas
tennis shoes and
grey dungarees
because
blue jeans are uncouth

never pulled the flaps down
on his hunting cap
even when his ears were
bright red

always be ready with new
shoe laces
and saddle soap
don’t let other people
shine your shoes

don’t iron your own shirts
sew your own buttons
wear your club pins

fly the flag on holidays
and never
let it stay out in the rain
or after dark

take your hat off indoors
when you say the Lord’s Prayer
ask the Lord
to forgive our trespasses
not our debts

don’t bite your fingernails
never look messy
don’t wear
shoes with holes in them

keep your baseball mitt well oiled
don’t leave it
outside in the rain

they built a tree house
and a fort
in the
loft above the garage

learned to ride a shaky
old bicycle
before he got a real three speed
with a fat rear tire

he didn’t like the color
so they
sanded it down
painted it shiny blue

bought fruit flavored
tootsie rolls

wanted very much
to hold
a fifty cent piece
with President John F. Kennedy’s
face on it but he
never asked

he doesn’t know he is an
unreliable narrator
misleading and confusing
the readers
will have
to fill in the details

VII

he stopped tucking in
his shirt tails
started wearing blue jeans
and worn out t-shirts

breaks into a run
a desperate
frantic dash to nowhere
in particular

and it’s his problem
because the police find his
name in
her address book

or maybe he packed up
a van and drove
to Brazil
opened a Mercedes dealership

and buried her under
the floorboards

© 2012 Matthew S. Barton

COME OUT, VIRGINIA

Title: Come out, Virginia

Author: Donna Vorreyer

Publisher: Naked Mannekin

Format: 7.5 x 5" Chapbook

ISBN: 978-1-61584-283-4

List Price: $10.00

Inquiries: djvorreyer@gmail.com

ROCKETMAN, THE NASH RAMBLER OF LOVE

Title: Rocketman, The Nash Ramble of Love

Author: Bruce Matteson

Publisher: Naked Mannekin

Format: 7.5 x 5" Chapbook

ISBN: N/A

List Price: $37.50

Inquiries: nakedmannekin@gmail.com




R O C K E T M A N S E Z :

If you get raised stupid
It can take years to undo
That kind of intense training
And if you do finally manage
To pop your head out of your ass
You’ll be lucky to have time
For a little fresh air
But you never really get the stink off
And may well be known to your peers
As a shit head
Your entire life

FOURTEEN, BY BILL YARROW

Title: Fourteen

Author: Bill Yarrow

Publisher: Naked Mannekin

Format: 7.5 x 5" Chapbook

ISBN: 978-1-60584-282-7

List Price: $10.00

Inquiries: nakedmannekin@gmail.com


EYES OFF THE ROAD

One by one I lost my desires.
Dirty ambition left first.
Knowledge raged but then it cooled.
Riches never had the hook very deep.
Achievement uncoupled from success seemed pointless.
Friendship became recursive.
Appetite lost its urgency.
Form declined into artifice.
Love stopped feeding me so I stopped feeding it.
Insight evaporated when memory left.
Lust lingered longest.

My desires, gaily arrayed, bolted to a
lapis slab, await me in Heaven.
With any luck I’ll go to Hell.


I'm proud to say I am the owner of one of these beautiful little books. I love everything about it. The look, the layout and especially Bill's poems. It's everything a book of poems should be. Get one today!

Darryl Price

FINAL NOTES, BY JP REESE

Title: Final Notes

Author: JP Reese

Publisher: Naked Mannekin

Format: 7.5 x 5" Chapbook

ISBN: 1-933126-09-4

List Price: $10.00

Inquiries: FinalNotes16@gmail.com






Praise for JP Reese's Final Notes from poet Sam Pereira, whose books include The Marriage of the Portuguese (L'Epervier Press, 1978), Brittle Water (Abattoir Editions/Penumbra Press, University of Nebraska at Omaha, 1987), and A Cafe in Boca (Tebot Bach, 2007):

Too many times, the idea of a “chapbook” substantiates the claim that poetry has little, if anything, left to say. In JP Reese’s Final Notes, nothing could be farther from the truth. We get snuck up on with lines like “Danger rests in believing the honest blue of the sky.” Remarkably understated, it becomes a sort of poetic fortune cookie, not to be tossed aside, but held on to as our journeys progress.

Another example is the stunning poem “Evanescence,” where we come away feeling the addictive nature of commingling in darkness. There is joy in this knowledge that warmth, however it is made aware to us, is momentary in its dynamic, but worth taking. The poem “2008, What I Wanted” offers wisdom beyond anything that might be stated here about it. This is a manifesto to the world on how not to treat those left breathing.

JP Reese has the skill of an artist and the soul of a survivor. The proof is compiled in a perfectly lean volume that needs to be read with admiration for years to come. Those looking to find that most rarified of beings, a genuine poet, need look no further.

© 2012 Sam Pereira


Susan Tepper, author of From the Umberplatzen: A Love Story, Deer and Other Stories, and What Might Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock & Dori G:

It isn't often one reads a book of poetry that is both immediate and visionary. Such is the case with "Final Notes," a searing new collection by JP Reese. These poems float, they gut-punch, they bleed, they cry out for more space in a shrinking world.

Marc Vincenz, author of Upholding Half the Sky, The Propaganda Factory and the forthcoming Pull of the Gravitons:

The poems in JP Reese's Final Notes are deeply personal: letters, sketches, faded photographs, white noise emerging from dreams. Late at night, a cold calm permeates the house, a great sigh emanates from the bones. In precisely that moment clarity arrives. But clarity is not always revelation; it may be realization rather than resolution. Perhaps it is that instant you stop searching for meaning that change occurs and renewal begins. In these wrought iron imagistic poems, Reese invites us inside her four fissured walls. Here man and woman lose their desire yet somehow fall together in grace, a father repairs a chair in the company of bees, a parent’s aspirations for her son remain unfulfilled, even the self becomes invisible in its own reflection. Thirst may never be quenched, for as our children dance, gravity waits patiently in “the clay beneath our feet.” And in the night-silence of corridors, still the unspeakable speaks.

Poet Shara McCallum’s books of poetry include This Strange Land (Alice James Books, 2011), Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003) and The Water Between Us (1999), winner of the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Her poems have won a college prize from The Academy of American Poets. McCallum’s poems have been anthologized in The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology (ed. Michael Collier, 2000). McCallum teaches and directs the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. Shara McCallum says:

These poems are resoundingly of our time. JP Reese’s collection, Final Notes, offers personal lyric-narratives about various subjects: love and desire, a marriage strained by alcohol abuse, a mother’s love for her child, a daughter’s devotion to her aging and declining father. They also speak to public narratives that inscribe our contemporary American lives: 9-11, the war in Iraq, the collapse of the economy and Wall Street’s complicity and corruption. Often, as in “2008, What I Wanted,” the personal and public intersects, naturally and to moving effect. Whatever this poet addresses, her poems reveal the poet-speaker’s desire to speak with complexity and honesty to the totality of what it is to be human. They succeed in doing this largely through the persona she constructs (one that the striking poem addressing Sexton and Plath suggests is the inheritance of Confessionalism). The poems also move us through the sheer force of their images; and Reese’s deft capturing of an unexpected detail frequently reveals the underbelly of what, at first glance, seems ordinary. The title of one of her poems, “It is What It is,” is a catch-phrase in American idiom that highlights one of the primary tensions in this collection. Like that phrase, Final Notes is resigned to looking at ‘what is’—though not to embrace a cynical view of the world but, rather, to find a balance between denial and hopelessness. The “bright razors” with which Reese speaks, then, dissect difficult experience but, also, become a healing.

EXACT CHANGE ONLY

This issue of ECO contains some of the finest work we have ever published. Our editorial staff spent days sequestered away in a Motel 6. Hours and hours of arguing raged like the Poetry Battle of Gettysburg. In the end only 12 poems were left standing.

Esteban Colón took a short leave of absence after Thanksgiving to de-stress from this ordeal.

The task then fell to Matt and me to produce an issue that looked as artistically cool as its content. We thought about being all fancy and shiny and bright and new. We thought about making the book sing when you opened the cover. We spent hours talking about fonts and layouts. At one point, Matt tried to kill me with a printer.

Some of this may be true. Honestly speaking, we felt a need to get back to our roots on this issue. To remind ourselves that among the goofy and weird that we project, we really try to be artists. I hesitate to use that word. What I will say is that we like this thing we’ve made, and we hope you do too.

David Buddha 309 Hargarten
Managing Editor, ECO

THINGS TO COME . . .

MIST

In his groundbreaking obra Niebla, Miguel de Unamuno gives us that apocalyptic moment when his protagonist Augusto Perez stumbles across his Lord Creator at work at his desk. No pillars of salt, no burning bushes. Just pen and Ink. I never liked the ending, so I changed it. By what right? Unamuno provides the answer himself: it is my prerogative.

--Matt Barton

Seeing and hearing something happen doesn't guarantee knowing what happened any more than knowing what happened guarantees understanding what happened. Matt Barton's "Mist," for example. The story is not complex. The characters tell you what they want you to know in language that is strict and not at all tricky. No cheap games are played to the wool over your eyes. Oh, there are games played, they're just not cheap. A good thing, because if it were walk-in-the-park simple it would be boring. And this piece of work is anything but boring. In other words, think of Matt Barton's "Mist" as a parable written by Eugene Ionesco, adapted by Gary Shandling, and directed by David Lynch. Enjoy.

--Charlie Newman

DRAMATIC READING

MORE PRAISE FOR "POSTCARDS"

Terse imagery, tightly expressed, and tautologically complete. DeGenova weaves his poetic language into poems that are tough. They express what the world needs to hear form the dark shadows and raw alleys of 21st Century America. Haibun. Fresh haibun like the off-tune remark getting swiftly punctuated by the soft, warm open palm slap from a scorned woman. Yes, his haibun and short poems are fresh. Expertly wrought and forged from the authentic iron of experience. Postcards to Jack is wonderful. Kerouac would have been jazzed to read them.

--Jeffrey Winke

POSTCARDS TO JACK

These poems are bright islands in the black of the back-wood highways that still criss-cross our country. They are the thin blue notes of jazz that circulate under the neon signs of all-night diners. And, yes, they are postcard messages across time and space to a simpler and more vital period of American life when a young man might follow his hopes and sensuality forever into a younger country lost in the promise of its destiny. Jack Kerouac put an American landscape of the post Eisenhower years into his own words, making that landscape his own for generations to come—a long scroll into the passions, loves, and loss of our poor small bones. That landscape has now departed and fallen beneath the bulldozers of the most powerful nation in human history…the two lane, three lane, four lane interstate highways scattered in the rubble of superhighways of indifference. But there is a time and space still for postcards to that inner world that Jack wrote of, and our survival as a civil and progressive society may well depend on our ability to write and read those postcards. Albert DeGenova has found the right notes to sing in this volume of the open road.

--Jared Smith.

Terse imagery, tightly expressed, and tautologically complete . . . DeGenova weaves his poetic language into poems that are tough. They express what the world needs to hear form the dark shadows and raw alleys of 21st century America. Haibun. Fresh haibun like the off-tune remark getting swiftly punctuated by the soft, warm open palm slap from a scorned woman. Yes, his haibun and short poems are fresh. Expertly wrought and forged form the authentic iron of experience. Postcards to Jack is wonderful. Kerouac would have been jazzed to read them.

--Jeffrey Winke.

ROSE COUPLETTE

This

kiss

of

love:

a

gay

sin

in

our

half—

powerful—

dull,

savage

age.

My

shy

Rose

rose

from

some

shit,

it

grew

through

this

piss

and

sand,

smiles

piled

on

wan,

base

faces

escaped

(caped

like

kites

on

drawn,

low

bowstring

stems)

from

numb

earth

–mirthless

nest—

to

bloom

‘mong

strungout

louts,

ape

shapes,

crime

time

T

V

and

bands

of

love-starved

dwarves;

I

tried,

too,

to

plant

phantom

mums)

more

poor,

thin

sins)

but

cut

them

when

my

shy

Rose

froze.

© 2010 Duane Vorhees

NO COMMENT

HAUNTED BY THE RENAISSANCE MAN

Title: N/A

Author: N/A

Publisher: Naked Mannekin

Format: 7.5 x 5" Chapbook

ISBN: N/A

List Price: N/A

Inquiries: tcurry55@gmail.com



So what has Tom Curry been up to during months of self-imposed exile? That's none of your damn business. Just read the poetry and keep your hands to yourself.

NOT SO SINISTER

There are times
in spite
of everything

when my left
hand is
actually pretty
useful.

© 2010 Matthew S. Barton

ERSATZ

But when I send
them home
my body doubles and stand ins

my understudies
with their
stage props and stilted dialog

muscle bound
doormen standing behind
velvet ropes

buxom cigarette girls
with red lipstick
and starched white collars

when the stage lights
are switched off

will they notice
that the face
behind the mask isn’t mine.

© 2009 Matthew S. Barton

PENT

I sit quietly
on my perch
plucking
out my feathers.

Some days
all I hear
is my own echo.


© 2009 LaRaie Zimm

GILDED

Some days
all I hear
is my own echo

so I sit quietly
on my perch
plucking
out my feathers.

© 2009 Matthew S. Barton

EDGAR AVENUE

Title: Edgar Avenue
Author: Esteban Colon
Publisher: Naked Mannekin
Format: 7.5 x 5" Chapbook
ISBN: n/a
List Price: $10.00
Inquiries: nakedmannekin@gmail.com

Esteban Colon’s Edgar Avenue is a gloriously intense magnification of the so-often layered complexities of human relationships. His carefully chosen spotlight of words paints the outline of characters whose thoughts and observations allow the audience to create its own unique avenue of players.

-- DENA POPE

EXACT CHANGE ONLY

Title: Exact Change Only, Vol. 1:1
Executive Editor: David Hargarten
Content Editor: Esteban Colon
Art Direction: Naked Mannekin
Publisher: Exact Change Press
Format: 7.5 x 5" 'zine
ISBN: 978-1-60725-951-0
List Price: $6.00
Inquiries: exactchangepress@gmail.com

Exact Change Only is one of my proudest collaborations. Not too long ago, "Waiting 4 The Bus" was little more than a punky little open mic show meeting in the back room of Jak's Tap in Chicago. Chicago is a tough town to get noticed in, particularly for poets. When I first got involved, the show had taken some hard knocks and the organizers were struggling to shake off a mild inferiorty complex. Okay, maybe not so mild. But in time this punky bunch evolved into the Waiting 4 The Bus Poetry Collective, a collaboration of poets and peformers with a steadfast commitment to integrity and a rock solid artistic acumen that continues to attract a steadily growing number of artists commited to the same deceptively simply idea: it's about the poetry. And when enough like minded people come together, sooner or later something very interesting is bound to happen. Exact Change Only is no exception. It began innocently enough, something like this:

One late autumn Tuesday, Matt Barton, Esteban Colon and I sat down at a table in a donut joint and tried to define what the hell a poetry collective is and what it should do. We decided that poetry should be about more than memorization and rhythm, it should be about honesty and truth. But mostly about carrying exact change.

This cynical age is sending poets to the same scrap heap as full service gas stations and penny candy. I have become nostalgic for the days when you needed exact change to buy something from a vending machine, make a telephone call or ride a bus, the days when pockets were for more than cell phones and credit cards. We the upholders of an ancient tradition have become living anachronisms, bards, and matchstick men. A collection of misfit kids standing on the corner, waiting for the bus with exact change in our pockets.

--David (Buddha 309) Hargarten, April 9, 2009.

Volume One, Issue One of Exact Change Only features the work of: Esteban Colon, Matt Barton, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Charlie Newman, Shelley Nation, David (Buddha 309) Hargarten, Christopher Gallinari, Robert Lawrence, LaRaie Zimm, Michael C. Watson, Tom Curry, Elizabeth Harper, Steven Hammond, Vito Carli and Tom Roby. Time will tell, but this modest little project seems to be a success. Our sophomore attempt is currently in the works, so we'll know soon enough whether our success continues to hold.