J.D. Siskin | Ode to a Dung Beetle

Ode to a Dung Beetle

Imagine living the life of a dung beetle whose sole purpose in life is to push a tiny ball of coagulated kaka across a dirt path deep in the jungles of Mozambique. How amazing are the Herculean efforts of this mighty miniscule critter doing what must be done to the full extent of its God-given ability. We should all get down on our hands and knees and pay homage to this diligent determined insect capable of pushing 100 times its bodyweight in dung. How amazing the endurance of a dung beetle tirelessly toiling day after drudgery day beneath an unforgiving tropical sun with nary a whine nor a whimper while pushing a piece of poop across an obscure dirt road in the middle of nowhere??

Oh what wonders has the dung beetle wrought!!

Therefore we should all celebrate the efforts of this valiant insect who devotes 14 hour days to fulfilling its duty to Mother Nature, this beleagured beetle able to keep its cool while laboring in obscurity and anonymity. And there will never be applauding crowds on hand to herald its triumphs and recognize the unprecedented accomplishments of a creature stoically straining to propel a dollop of dung up and over the anthills.

Words are pathetically insufficient to describe this beetle's uncanny ability to move a tiny mountain of poop from point A to point B while all of humankind remains forever unaware and unappreciative of the selfless struggles of an incredible insect.

By J.D. Siskin
New York, NY

J.D. Siskin is an award winning travel writer and radio broadcaster. A former editor at Travel-Holiday and American Holiday & Life magazines, his articles have been syndicated in newspapers from coast to coast and his work has appeared in major magazines and on web sites. He has contributed to several guidebooks including Fodor's and Frommer's guides, and his travels have taken him to more than 125 countries on seven continents as well as all fifty states. In a previous lifetime he worked as a taxi driver, postal carrier, record store clerk, and psychiatric social worker at Bellevue hospital. He is also a self taught artist whose "collages out of context" are on view at http://www.jdsiskin.com/

© Copyright 2008 J.D. Siskin

E.J. Antonio | Survivor Chronicles

survivor chronicles

first sighted when i was five,
you oozed from the east 118th street gutter.
a bubbling prune colored jam of moving things
fermenting in summer’s swelter.
a mass snap, crackle, pop
like my Rice Crispies.
but i wouldn’t eat you for breakfast.
daddy picked me up
and stepped over;
mama walked around you
her face frowned in disgust
as if you were a naughty child
banished to the corner forever,
and no one ever said your name.

♫≈≈

on the 10th floor of east Harlem project buildings,
even flies have a hard time climbing the steps
when the elevators don’t work, but not you.
sent to the kitchen for something i forgot
when i saw you in hallway shadow
frozen in the middle of the brown tile floor.
a perfect disguise for you.
grandma’s WATER BUG echoes in my ear.
her order, go get the broom!
i could not, would not obey,
and you won over the fear of a nine year old.
a victory short-lived
as she slapped the stuff out of you
with that straw broom’s hard bodice;
used its skirt to sweep you into dustpan,
and flush you away. just another piece of sewage.
finally, i knew your name

♫≈≈

a new 3 bedroom terraced apartment
in a building built on Bronx landfill
would have been perfect.
but, there you were creeping on sidewalk,
in lobby, laundry room, stairwell, compactor room
(moving up meant new names for garbage disposal).
you never changed no matter how upscale the home.
you, always around in different shapes, sizes, colors
round, oval, long, short, black, brown.
in that year of being fifteen,
i walked fast every time i saw you.
content to let you be.
but, passive never stopped your invasion.
when kitty grew to cat, he used you
for toy in the darkness. slapped you around
the way the drunk upstairs slapped his wife.
i praised the cat and cursed you,
as i dumped you and the garbage
the way she wished she could have dumped him

♫≈≈

fluttering wings in a doorway,
moth i thought. no, it was you,
four inch big brown ugly you
attacked my face, landed on my green carpet
and every one, even the dog, was asleep.
i dropped an economics textbook on you;
the rug softened the blow.
you ran under my bed.
i followed moving furniture.
dropped the yellow pages on you,
12 a.m. / still you ran.
step-dad tried with a shoe
you ran, ran out of my room
into the storage closet next door.
we sprayed Raid and gave up.

1 a.m. / me, awoke on the living room couch
trying to watch Don Kirschners rock concert.
you inched up the white drape.
step-dad swatted with newspaper;
i aimed the can of Raid to finish you off.
still, you escaped between floor and red carpet edge.
you darted across the room.
we pounced, newspaper, shoe and broom
damn wall to wall your protector.

4:30 a.m. / still you ran.
mama, me, oldest brother, step-dad
cornered / you took flight like a kamikaze.
it was us or you, and we were losing.
hiding behind upturned sofa and chairs.
i couldn’t figure out why you wouldn’t die.
even the damned Raid was no match.
could you have taken Ali in one round?
did you gloat climbing the dining room wall
at 5 a.m. to survey the hard won battle field?
were you gloating when baby brother finally got up
tired of the noise / took five minutes
to calmly climb a step ladder
and crunch you with a length of 2”x4”?
this time, you died a warrior.

♫≈≈

out of college
on my own
saw you scurrying
in Parkchester streets.
summer nights found you peeking
up at the world from the drain cover.
your antennae sensing for danger.

autumn leaves from the oak covered the ground.
i heard the pop as my booted foot crushed you.
i cringed. your relatives took revenge two days later.
one nervy S-O-B walked unannounced
under my apartment door during a dinner party.
my friend reached for the broom the way grandma did.
now my secret was out, my fear was out,
and i reached for the wine
my hands shaking / DAMNED BUG!
i will not stay where you are;
stay where you are
cause i know you.

♫≈≈

too many dry winters
and hundred degree summer days
draw moisture from earth,
and you from Mount Vernon sewers.
birds and skunks are happy to feast.
the exterminator in my basement is happy.
my pocket book is not.
you and the pesticides grow stronger

you followed me to Jersey, Virginia,
Florida. even Disney couldn’t hide you.
maybe i should call you Abraham’s freed man;
cause there’s no safe place for you either
and you live and die hard just like us.
DAMN BUG!
will you follow me to the grave,
follow me to the grave,
to the grave??????


By E.J. Antonio
Mount Vernon, NY

E.J. Antonio is a Cave Canem-NY Regional Fellow and a 2006 Pushcart Prize nominee. A frequently featured reader in the Tri-state area, her work appears in various literary journals, anthologies, magazines and online poetry sites.

© Copyright 2008 E.J. Antonio

J. Bradley | Boardroom

Boardroom

Her right hand
is a nervous tarantula.
Each leg beats
today's agenda.

Her left hand skitters over
to eat seconds coughed up
by trampled 12 point
Times New Roman.

Afterward, they cuddle
a coffee cup
and scratch each other's
phantom itch.

By J. Bradley
Orlando, Florida

Photo Credit: Jelian Morales

J. Bradley is the founder of the Broken Speech Poetry Slam, Orlando's longest running poetry slam. His work has appeared in edifice WRECKED, Idiolexicon, Orlando Sentinel, Look Up At The Sky: Poems About Comic Books, MungBeing Magazine and Word Riot. Visit him online at myspace.com/jbradley


© Copyright 2008 J. Bradley

Evie Ivy | Bugs

Bugs

I decided to go and release the mind
in nature's openness, dispel it
from the I told you so
and should have knowns of life
that time always seems to drag
along, to move away from bricks

and cement, to see the foliage,
birds fly across an open sky,
and the birds in the water.
Realizing I wasn't properly attired,
soon feared, "I don't want bug bites,"
to hear, "It is not the season for bugs."

I wasn't wearing long pants and socks
and felt safe on the main road
winding along. The blooming
tempted, but I stayed on that path
and kept hearing, "It's too windy
anyway - there are no bugs."

More properly attired I went back
to the fresh air, the greenery now
laced with more of gold, and walked
into the hidden paths. On the way
home noticed in a mirror a red spot
on my cheek - already swelling.

Some will say, "It is not the season
for bugs." I can tell you,
there's a bug for every season,
and always an "I told you so."

By Evie Ivy
Brooklyn, NY





Evie Ivy, a poet and dancer, hosts the Green Pavilion Reading Series the last Wednesday of each month in Brooklyn, New York with Sol Rubin. She produces her Dance of Word program, incorporating bellydance, tango, Irish step and other forms of dance as well as spokenword and traditional poetry at the Bowery Poetry Club, Tribes Gallery, The Cornelia Street Cafe and other highly regarded poetry venues in NYC. Her critically acclaimed collection The First Woman Who Danced: A Tribute to an Ancient Art (PetitPois Press) was published in 2000.



© Copyright 2008 Evie Ivy

Nancy Ellis Taylor | On the Patio

On the Patio

You attempt to cause
My capitulation here amid
A phosphorescence of gnats
A fizzle of mosquitoes

Ants clump and crackle
The door to the kitchen must remain closed
Sprinklers mist at the edges of the concrete
Oh the fountain with the gnome
I remember this is not my home

Exposed by a yellow bulb
This night the neighbors can see
You put down the flyswatter
And come to me

By Nancy Ellis Taylor
Los Angeles, California


Nancy Ellis Taylor is an L.A.-based writer and gives readings locally several times a year. She used to work at the L.A. County Natural History Museum and her office was right next to the Insect Zoo.

© Copyright 2008 Nancy Ellis Taylor

Madeline Artenberg | Buzz

Buzz

From his lifeguard chair
he watches her emerge
from the ocean,
golden skin bedecked with seaweed.

It stings she won’t say
I love you.

The buzzing in his head
becomes bees swooping,
leave him quake
in the chair.

If he could nail bees
to the sky,
test each one’s intentions,
he’d regain the throne.

His thoughts fly dizzy:
All he wants are her forevers,
no more just nows.

Approaching,
she leans in to kiss him,
whispers something he can’t discern
over the unceasing buzzing.

By Madeline Artenberg

Madeline Artenberg’s work appears in many print and online journals including Caprice, Margie: The Arican Journal of Poetry, Vernacular, Big City Lit and The Absinthe Literary Review. She’s garnered several poetry awards including the Lyric Recovery performance poetry award. Her book Awakened, a collection of poetry by her and by Iris N. Schwartz, was published in 2006 by Rogue Scholars Press. Catch her reading poetry backed by blues and jazz musicians!

© Copyright 2008 Madeline Artenberg

Jorge Evans | Lady Bugs

Ladybugs
—After James Richardson, after Keats

I.
Though you seal every shuttered
window, brace every door,
they come every year with fervor
in late October
through helpless windows,
a kiss or slip below the pane.
That month, filled with one
ended fights, constant fuzz
of a TV on channel one,
could be our undoing.

II.
Like ghosts they aren't there,
holding level in stale fall—
but look in late October,
they form in small pockets,
              in rooms
with purposes, agendas.

They would go home if they had one,
but the cold dead concede,
              and pass.

By Jorge Evans

Jorge Evans was born and raised in central and southern Illinois. He earned two BA degrees at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale—one in Philosophy, one in English. He is currently working on his MFA in poetry at Minnesota State University, Mankato.

(This poem appeared in a previous version in The Allegheny Review)

© Copyright 2007 Jorge Evans

Gerald Schwartz | Trichoptera (Caddis fly)

Trichoptera (Caddis fly)

My hairy legs are not downy, not moth in miniature; are incise, wrinkled mouths. With limited time, I compound the wet and wait for sedge. I came from an egg laid in georgette, in a skein of bald-faced mucus, unsupported. I am a larvae spiral in an eddy, alone, portable, an enclosed hangnail, a pupa, my membrane affixed to rock, in a stupor and some kind of life. More life's at stake in my cocoon divide, here in this starry pool of emergence, emerald most moist. What has gone before shakes in the midst of my dizzy hatch of invisible sift surface. My liquid phase is soon ending. In service to air, I no longer burrow: twig, sediment, needle. I am as a leggy fig now, rising on moving waters, shuddering. In trailing ballast, whiter, am dropping my catch net. See me as a silver flier, beading and alighting, attired in provision and superfluid. Clean, I have two tailless months, near colorless, green, not knowing how it will all go, although I will live as though I might.

By Gerald Schwartz

Gerald Schwartz, born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania,is the author of Only Others Are: Poems (Legible Books), as well as World (Furniture Press). He has extensively collaborated in performance with Damian Catera, Steve Swell, Flaming Lips, Nick Cave, Eugene Chadbourne, Ed's Redeeming Qualities, Tibetan Monks, as well as a host musicians and dancers. He is co-founder of Solomons Ramada, as well as Faking Trains.

© Copyright 2008 Gerald Schwartz

Bob Quatrone | The Rape of the Queen

THE RAPE OF THE QUEEN


You are the one

I am all lust for you savage and unholy queen

I am all lust for your round and bonneted bottom

I know not what the gods had in mind

when they made you such a furry and corseted delight

Though I slave in the galleys among the wretched workers

I am all lust for those recesses my stinger would love to enter

Tell me my queen when will you favor me among all the unfortunate

I have buzzed my brawny back on endless nights but we all know

You can only choose one, only one can have the infinite delight

Of all your treacherous words for we have been taught

From early in your schools that only one can be enfolded

In the steep thrilling sanctum of the hive, that only one

Is somehow turned after you have peppered our fractious bums

With stings of orgiastic pleasure too deep for any to comprehend

But by the profoundest osmosis of your Queenly female will

We the skunk-like workers may at last emerge as drones

Worthy to p--k your highness into happiness

I know you Queen Bee and your raucous female proclivities

I have observed how you have been long upon the couch taking the pokes of all your gallant studs

Each waxing more glassy-eyed than the last, stumbling out into the lonely precincts of the hive

In noxious dreams of affluence and power, the devilish proboscis of each worked totally into silly

Exhaustion, poisoned nearly to death with your love and pleasure

And though I clearly see the fate of each of these stuffed and potted drones

I can in no way resist the same lusting after you, the same pining for your treasures

Of doom and devastation

Yet another drone has passed in a state of near collapse down the sulfurous corridor

But we are all breathless with anticipation as again your highness roams

The galleys looking for who shall next merit her condescension

Her extraordinary vituperative embrace, let it be me queen, let it be me

I am ready to pound your wild bottom for love and splendor

I shall have you screaming shamelessly in the night

My little stinger inserted all, all the way up, even into your Queenly snout

Perhaps I shall do what no little f------g bee has ever done

Give you the final f-----g night of your life Queen Bee and make you squeal out

Secrets you have never thought and can never undo once they are done

At the command of my holy rod

So you see queen bee, even the most lowly of your workers

Keeps verily the possibility that one day you shall be undone

By the mastery of a good working class f--k

and no amount of royal repentance or remorse will ever undo it

The hive on that day will buzz no more

All the bees will have finally been set free

To go find their own honies in the world of flowers

By Bob Quatrone

Bob Quatrone graduated from Columbia College in 1965 and was Woodrow Wilson Fellow in 1967. He served as Program Host and Director for the Walt Whitman Poetry Society during the mid-1980's. He was a featured poet for the St. Mark's Poetry Project in 1997. He currently hosts The 4 Horsemen Reading at The Cornelia Street Cafe in New York City and lives in New Jersey.

©2006 Bob Quatrone

Ray Pospisil | Running Circles

RUNNING CIRCLES

The middle of the night I woke
and wandered to the kitchen for
a drink of water, flicked a switch
and shuddered as the light revealed
a couple dozen roaches running
circles on the burner rings,
to lick off all the grease, I guess.

Without a plan, I reached and flipped
a burner on. At first I only
smelled the gas, but then a flame
exploded blue and popped the roaches
up into the air a foot.
They fell back down and scattered on
the white and gleaming surface of
the stove-top, on their backs, with legs
up, twitching till they folded in
their legs and curled around themselves.

Amazingly, the roaches on
the other rings continued running
circles, for the grease, I guess.
Methodically, by cold fluorescent
buzzing light, I flipped the burners
one-by-one: a hiss at first
of gas and then a hiss at first
of gas and then a hiss at first
of gas and then a pop . . . pop . . . pop
as flames exploded, catapulting
roaches in the, catapulting
roaches in the, catapulting
roaches in the air until
they fell, until they fell, until
they fell onto the white and gleaming
stove, onto the white and gleaming
stove, onto the white and gleaming
stove with little ping . . . ping . . . pings
against the metal and they sizzled.


By Ray Pospisil
Brooklyn, NY


Ray Pospisil is a strong advocate of poetry as a verbal, performing (and listening) art, and he appears in various clubs around the city. His work has been published by The Barefoot Muse, Census, The Lyric, Iambs & Trochees, The Newport Review, Rogue Scholars and others. His chapbook, Some Time Before the Bell is available from Modern Metrics Press. A collection of his poetry is being published by Seven Towers.

Ray lives in Brooklyn and works as a freelance journalist, covering environmental and energy issues for publications in the US and the UK.



© Copyright 2007 Ray Pospisil