Arlene Ang & Valerie Fox
Scarecrow Lists of Failures and Grocery Items
1.
No salt. And dogs cover the curtains. Electricity, as in
wine on the shirt of the man who feeds crows―
survives the body it electrifies. So, this is how it feels to wear
the coat inside out with the tag curled like a cigarette
on your left shoulder. Today one more man rolls his sleeve
for a tourniquet. Today one more woman grows
her breasts into parentheses. All this hangover yellow.
If you play the tape backwards, it's still about our Woodstock.
Twenty, thirty years hence and friends lapse into illustration.
Category of cities burning. Wait. Deer crossing.
2.
Crossing without stopping to look, listen, or plan. One man’s cheap sparkling wine is
another man’s portal of doom, raspberry bushes thick and parted in an evident path,
a faulty nest. A lot of things look like a scarecrow when you’re five and a lot of things
look like a cross when you’re me. One says to the other: Write it down. Put it by the
coffee-maker. Get milk. Save it like grandma, for chocolate cake. Yellow-green, or
just perturbed, either way the curtains are dishonest and emanating the wrong
decade. A blacked out city inside a city. Why can’t we stop being all about sex and
religion, the child asked Santa. The child's violin crying out for help and recourse
and living a helplessness that won’t quit.
3.
Quitter’s cough. If we could meet again, it would be
in the pet department. One holding a kitty litter to the light,
one shelved with an imaginary bird's nest on the head.
There are names I forget and the wars I remember them by.
Chocolates. And cow meat. And it's a city again
fraught with danger. Like this moon, cracked where it was betrayed
by the company who designed it. I didn't mean to eat
in the dark. Now I've stepped on the piece of ham that leaped
from my sandwich. The squish is how we would kiss.
I've taped a drawing of your eyes on the fridge. Old Sam―
the cat—falling from the roof. Or some other ghoulish vegetable.
4.
Goulash. I never imagined life could be like that. I have failed. Invented weather
rains just as hard on a field of sticks and bones. Pass the tin cup. Camping out in your
own backyard makes you forget your family’s woe and ignorance. The feeling of this
species is extinct. I have failed. In terms of love, the scarecrow is home to twenty-six
bullets and ants. All the better, you say, for losing both ears to frostbite. The fawn
sprawled by the stone bridge had a twin, and maybe he/she will evolve into a rocky
planet. I have failed. And yes, two friends, around the corner one can almost see,
saying Remember—once we started all the way over there. Like a noose. Why did you
say that? Why now?
Arlene Ang’s latest book is Banned for Life (Misty Press, 2014). She is the author of The Desecration of Doves (2005), Secret Love Poems (Rubicon Press, 2007), a collaborative book with Valerie Fox, Bundles of Letters Including A, V and Epsilon (Texture Press, 2008), and Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu (Cinnamon Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in Ambit, Caketrain, Diagram, Poetry Ireland, Poet Lore, Rattle, Salt Hill as well as the Best of the Web anthologies 2008 and 2009 (Dzanc Books). She lives in Spinea, Italy where she serves as staff editor for The Pedestal Magazine. Website: www.leafscape.org
Valerie Fox’s previous books of poems include The Glass Book (Texture Press, 2011), The Rorschach Factory (Straw Gate Books, 2006) and Bundles of Letters Including A, V and Epsilon (a compilation with Arlene Ang, Texture Press, 2008). Recently she published Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets(Texture Press, 2013), co-written with Lynn Levin, which was a finalist in the Next Generation Indie Press Awards (education category). Her poems have appeared in Juked, Hanging Loose, Sentence, Painted Bride Quarterly, Apiary,
Ping Pong, and other journals. She teaches at Drexel University, in Philadelphia, and lives with her family in New Jersey.
Return to January 2015 Edition
1.
No salt. And dogs cover the curtains. Electricity, as in
wine on the shirt of the man who feeds crows―
survives the body it electrifies. So, this is how it feels to wear
the coat inside out with the tag curled like a cigarette
on your left shoulder. Today one more man rolls his sleeve
for a tourniquet. Today one more woman grows
her breasts into parentheses. All this hangover yellow.
If you play the tape backwards, it's still about our Woodstock.
Twenty, thirty years hence and friends lapse into illustration.
Category of cities burning. Wait. Deer crossing.
2.
Crossing without stopping to look, listen, or plan. One man’s cheap sparkling wine is
another man’s portal of doom, raspberry bushes thick and parted in an evident path,
a faulty nest. A lot of things look like a scarecrow when you’re five and a lot of things
look like a cross when you’re me. One says to the other: Write it down. Put it by the
coffee-maker. Get milk. Save it like grandma, for chocolate cake. Yellow-green, or
just perturbed, either way the curtains are dishonest and emanating the wrong
decade. A blacked out city inside a city. Why can’t we stop being all about sex and
religion, the child asked Santa. The child's violin crying out for help and recourse
and living a helplessness that won’t quit.
3.
Quitter’s cough. If we could meet again, it would be
in the pet department. One holding a kitty litter to the light,
one shelved with an imaginary bird's nest on the head.
There are names I forget and the wars I remember them by.
Chocolates. And cow meat. And it's a city again
fraught with danger. Like this moon, cracked where it was betrayed
by the company who designed it. I didn't mean to eat
in the dark. Now I've stepped on the piece of ham that leaped
from my sandwich. The squish is how we would kiss.
I've taped a drawing of your eyes on the fridge. Old Sam―
the cat—falling from the roof. Or some other ghoulish vegetable.
4.
Goulash. I never imagined life could be like that. I have failed. Invented weather
rains just as hard on a field of sticks and bones. Pass the tin cup. Camping out in your
own backyard makes you forget your family’s woe and ignorance. The feeling of this
species is extinct. I have failed. In terms of love, the scarecrow is home to twenty-six
bullets and ants. All the better, you say, for losing both ears to frostbite. The fawn
sprawled by the stone bridge had a twin, and maybe he/she will evolve into a rocky
planet. I have failed. And yes, two friends, around the corner one can almost see,
saying Remember—once we started all the way over there. Like a noose. Why did you
say that? Why now?
Arlene Ang’s latest book is Banned for Life (Misty Press, 2014). She is the author of The Desecration of Doves (2005), Secret Love Poems (Rubicon Press, 2007), a collaborative book with Valerie Fox, Bundles of Letters Including A, V and Epsilon (Texture Press, 2008), and Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu (Cinnamon Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in Ambit, Caketrain, Diagram, Poetry Ireland, Poet Lore, Rattle, Salt Hill as well as the Best of the Web anthologies 2008 and 2009 (Dzanc Books). She lives in Spinea, Italy where she serves as staff editor for The Pedestal Magazine. Website: www.leafscape.org
Valerie Fox’s previous books of poems include The Glass Book (Texture Press, 2011), The Rorschach Factory (Straw Gate Books, 2006) and Bundles of Letters Including A, V and Epsilon (a compilation with Arlene Ang, Texture Press, 2008). Recently she published Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets(Texture Press, 2013), co-written with Lynn Levin, which was a finalist in the Next Generation Indie Press Awards (education category). Her poems have appeared in Juked, Hanging Loose, Sentence, Painted Bride Quarterly, Apiary,
Ping Pong, and other journals. She teaches at Drexel University, in Philadelphia, and lives with her family in New Jersey.
Return to January 2015 Edition