"Watching the Sword Swallower"
Karrie Waarala

His long throat works like the corn snake
I watched devour a field mouse last spring.
Snake snatched that poor mouse by the head
and I couldn’t help but cry a little at those
bitty back legs kicking and scrambling and finally
just giving in to the hungry ripples pulling it down
into that snake’s belly. Those damn Hudson boys
spotted me sniffling and I ain’t lived it down since.

I stare hard at the stage, figure there’s gotta be a trick,
but he just slides blade after blade right on down
and they’re sharp, too, the barker held out a hair
for the swallower to slice before tipping back his head
and gulping down danger. I need to know
how he does that, keep trying to ask Pop but
he’s too busy talking crop prices with Mr. Granger,
keeps shrugging me off his sleeve.

So I shimmy through the crowd and right up close
until I can see the swallower’s tilted-up face reflected
in the sword’s slick edge, see the fevered glint in his eye
and smooth twist of his wrist, feel the audience
wrinkle up with nerves until they burst with clapping
as he pulls the weapon free, grinning and puffed up
on the noisy awe of the crowd pushing me against the stage,
and all of a sudden I don’t feel so bad for that mouse.

The swallower musta seen my feelings on my face
because he barks out a ragged laugh and winks at me
as a snake of something fierce uncoils itself in my belly.
I want to be gargantuan, a death-defying wonder
painted on flapping canvas signs, a spectacle to behold.
I want a crowd curled up in my hands, the Hudson boys
staring up at the sharp edges of my daring, just once
I want to be the most dangerous thing I know.

---

On this day in...
2011: "At the Public Market Museum: Charleston, South Carolina" by Jane Kenyon
2010: Weekend, no poem
2009: "The Loneliness of the Military Historian" by Margaret Atwood
2008: "A Special Theory of Relativity" by Alan Bold

There were never strawberries/like the ones we had/that sultry afternoon

"An Almost Made Up Poem"
Charles Bukowski

I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny
they are small, and the fountain is in France
where you wrote me that last letter and
I answered and never heard from you again.
you used to write insane poems about
ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you
knew famous artists and most of them
were your lovers, and I wrote back, it' all right,
go ahead, enter their lives, I' not jealous
because we' never met. we got close once in
New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never
touched. so you went with the famous and wrote
about the famous, and, of course, what you found out
is that the famous are worried about
their fame –– not the beautiful young girl in bed
with them, who gives them that, and then awakens
in the morning to write upper case poems about
ANGELS AND GOD. we know God is dead, they' told
us, but listening to you I wasn' sure. maybe
it was the upper case. you were one of the
best female poets and I told the publishers,
editors, "her, print her, she' mad but she'
magic. there' no lie in her fire.” I loved you
like a man loves a woman he never touches, only
writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have
loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a
cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom,
but that didn' happen. your letters got sadder.
your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all
lovers betray. it didn' help. you said
you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and
the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying
bench every night and wept for the lovers who had
hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never
heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide
3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you
I would probably have been unfair to you or you
to me. it was best like this.

---

On this day in...
2011: Weekend, no poem
2010: Weekend, no poem
2009: "Strawberries" by Edwin Morgan
2008: "Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem” by Bob Hicok

I repeat your name, each time different/into sand, into moonlight.//Far off, the lake crumbles at its edges,/the sky holds out its arms.

"Parents"
William Meredith

What it must be like to be an angel
or a squirrel, we can imagine sooner.

The last time we go to bed good,
they are there, lying about darkness.

They dandle us once too often,
these friends who become our enemies.

Suddenly one day, their juniors
are as old as we yearn to be.

They get wrinkles where it is better
smooth, odd coughs, and smells.

It is grotesque how they go on
loving us, we go on loving them

The effrontery, barely imaginable,
of having caused us. And of how.

Their lives: surely
we can do better than that.

This goes on for a long time. Everything
they do is wrong, and the worst thing,

they all do it, is to die,
taking with them the last explanation,

how we came out of the wet sea
or wherever they got us from,

taking the last link
of that chain with them.

Father, mother, we cry, wrinkling,
to our uncomprehending children and grandchildren.

---

On this day in...
2011: "Sunworshippers" by Cathy Song
2010: "Turning Twenty-Three" by Anne Michaels and "Birthday Poem" by Erin Murphy
2009: "Ithaca" by Constantine P. Cavafy
2008: "Lying" by Constance Merritt

the taste of mint everywhere like clean, green rain

Melanism is an undue development of dark-colored pigment in the skin or its appendages and is the opposite of albinism. It is also the medical term for black jaundice. The word 'melanism' is deduced from the Greek: μελανός, meaning black pigment.

source

In case my notes in the side bar is not obvious - if you stumble upon here from old links somewhere out there looking for art, please redirect to the following pages:

For old arts that had been posted on LJ, and some new artwork that I considered more complete pieces: http://ctcsherry.deviantart.com/
All new art and sketches, updates and other random things that I do: http://ctcsherry.tumblr.com

http://www.cartoonlabs.com/comics/index.php?date=2012-05-28&show=sinfest

Sinfest
Tatsuya Ishida