The Furious Gazelle

Literary as hell.

Tag: entertainment (Page 1 of 7)

Poetry by Gabriella Garofalo

July 28, 2023 /

Let’s call it a day, shall we, as we’ve been traipsing
From waves to clouds, from clouds to waves,
Among weeds, and a fire fearing the waves,
That heartless white all over-
But they’ll soon come back to clean

Her thirst, her hunger, not now,
As they’re not listening, too busy wondering
Whose son he is the mongrel-
So, don’t ask for angels, for comets, from births,
Or days from demise, my soul’s in rehab,
Soon to be dismissed, and no goddess shall reply
While running in red hot shoes-
And when you’ll fall down, my blessed fury,
My soul gasping among vertical words,
I’d have to tie you up, my soul so young and green,
Who confuses stars for shadows, when out of fear
Her light is throwing herself to trees and seasons,
When neither maps nor sextants light up ambos,
Alarms, dross, while you keep stroking rooms,
Streets, secluded spots-
So, moon, leave it alone, if they say blue takes care
Of everything, even keeps you safe
If by any chance you are cold-
No need to ask, ‘cause the blue of the sky
Looks so disheveled, and the trees of disappearance
Can’t give you their best fruits-
She’s here, the last light coming back in small bites
Ready to fight thorn bushes if you reject fear
Or ask too much-
That’s why you pay so dearly for the sound of cicadas,
An angry summer, my October sowing ghastly seeds,
When your hands awaken your breath,
And desertion turns up, but can’t grasp light-
Father, my father, use a different clay,
You see, other fathers break forth,
Shouting you betrayed our search of clouds,
Sheets in the wind, tense times-
Now listen, why did you ask for animals
To sit next to small creatures,
Why did you give them absolute freedom,
Ever the innocent visionary artist,
And look now, we both bound to stay
Outside the garden, I fed up and sick
With all the blue shapes you handed to water,
Skies, detachment, respite, you in such a fright
That they’ll report you for being a jackal,
Both our blue minds loaded with evil,
And a bloody world.

 

______________

Born in Italy some decades ago, Gabriella Garofalo fell in love with the English language at six, started writing poems (in Italian) at six and is the author of these books “Lo sguardo di Orfeo”; “L’inverno di vetro”; “Di altre stelle polari”; “Casa di erba”; “Blue Branches”; “A Blue Soul”. You can find her here.

Poems by Kathryn Kopple

April 4, 2022 /
Epidemics 

I can’t recall why.  Or when I bought

Hippocrates’ Epidemics.  I was on  

a tangent that should have taken me east

of Athens to Perinthos on the Sea of Marmara.

To get there, I would have to stop over

in Crannon. About Crannon, I know

nothing, which is basically how I’ve

always traveled. Floundering from 

country to country.  Blind to where I was going.

After Italy, why not Hungary?

I passed the time surrounded by

Soviet architecture. Buildings

stripped of ornament uniformly at war

with old world charm.  My host, a woman

and her boy. He didn’t walk, couldn’t feed

himself.  His silence. Her patience.

I felt oddly blessed and cursed. Lightning.

I’ve been struck more than once. Spinoza’s

famous question: What can a body do?

Bite my tongue. The toll it takes

to come back from the dead.

On the phone, I hear my partner offer

his sympathies. There’s been a significant

uptick in requests for advance directives.

The neighbors left for Charlotte a week

after the schools closed. To read the mail,

we put on gloves. The house reeks of chlorine.

We’re still under orders to hunker down.

For how long, no one knows.

When this is over, I hope to visit Perinthos,

a hanging cliff-town in Turkey, overlooking

a luminous sea, harboring every

ounce of light the heavens will spare.

Continue reading

Poems by Ken Poyner

March 3, 2022 /
COMPETENCE

I was supposed to be the subject

Of a painting.  Something with a bit

Of haze, maybe a light red tint,

A background of reeds leading

To open water.  Birds – but way off,

And painted more precisely than

Anything in the foreground.  Perhaps I

Would be in a dress, or draped

Like the goddess Diana, or possibly

Delicately naked, twisted

At the hip, seen from the back.

There could be a tree, perhaps Spanish

Moss.  The painter is yet to decide.

But I have been cut out of the production.

The figure now is to be nondescript,

The light all second hand.  There will be

Something ominous closing in.  Had I been

The subject, the painting’s elements

Would have conspired against me.  My own

Children, regarding the painting in place of

Lunch, would not have recognized me.

But for me to have known that the effort

Was mine, who the misty unrecognizable

Woman was, and the effort to gather it all

Together, would have been comforting.

Continue reading

Nothing More Than a Visit a poem by R. Nikolas Macioci

November 23, 2021 /

Nothing More Than a Visit

I reached out and touched her hand, a simple

gift in a nursing home.  Her old skin was soft

as spring grass.  Others watched with suspicion,

She placed her other hand over mine

as if to forestall my leaving.  I had decided

in an instant when I heard of her change

of habitat to visit this former neighbor

without family.

 

She is a woman with an endless heart.

Once, when I asked her to describe

herself, she answered, “My loneliness

is indestructible.”  

 

The smell of dinner drifted in from the

dining room.  She claimed not to be

hungry except for company.

I asked about her husband. She said

they had had an arrangement which lasted

sixty years.  She had no children, claimed

to be standing on the back porch of life

waiting for death.  I assured her

there would yet be moments of happiness.

Her face remained stolid.  

 

I stood, my signal for departure, walked

across flowered carpet toward the exit,

emerged into the welcome glare of late

sunlight.

 

___

R. Nikolas Macioci earned a PhD from The Ohio State University. OCTELA, the Ohio Council of Teachers of English, named Nik Macioci the best secondary English teacher in the state of Ohio. Nik is the author of two chapbooks: Cafes of Childhood and Greatest Hits, as well as eight books: Why Dance, Necessary Windows, Cafes of Childhood (the original chapbook with additional poems), Mother Goosed, Occasional Heaven, A Human Saloon, Rustle Rustle Thump Thump, and Rough.  Critics and judges called Cafes of Childhood a “beautifully harrowing account of child abuse,” but not “sentimental” or “self-pitying,” an “amazing book,”  and “a single unified whole.”

Three Poems by Martina Reisz Newberry

September 20, 2021 /

A LITTLE GLINT, A SLASH OF COLOR 

The apartment is so still just now. 

It is cool and gray outside. The news 

speaks of spring, but that seems like a lie

as so many things do these gray days. 

 

The cats, 8 paws touching, are asleep

on our bed. They release everything 

when they sleep. The city is awake 

but quiet. Lawns and dandelions 

 

are the same, concrete and asphalt are the

same, glass doors and windows are the

same. I will pretend that the cells of 

my body are sunlight making the 

 

dishwater sky show a little glint, 

a slash of color. The truth is a 

rebuke because, in truth, my body 

is a box emptied of secrets and 

 

emptied of the slim, crescent moons of my

dreams. That said, I have always loved

pretending. The cells of my body 

will have to ignore the realness 

 

of another year about to pass, 

the dreary fear of what comes after, 

the mirror image that is not, can 

not be right. I’ve learned so much less than 

 

I thought I would, garnered less respect

than I hoped for. My underground is 

rising to the surface. I defer to 

what I have become and admire all 

 

that I am not. I’ve been given a 

quiet day; I will give up “what ifs,” 

I will give up what I know is true, 

pretend color and music then—shine.

Continue reading

“End Times in the Produce Aisle” By Gene Twaronite

July 19, 2021 /

As I reached for the organic cucumber, a woman wearing 

a polka dot dress over pajama bottoms and bunny slippers 

grabbed for the same one. 

With our hands clutching opposite ends of the vegetable

as if it meant the difference between survival

and a slow wasting death, 

we locked eyes in a grim battle 

of foraging supremacy. 

 

“Go ahead, take it,” she said, shaking her head. 

“What does it matter? Who needs a cucumber? 

Haven’t you heard? It’s the end times.”

Continue reading

Q&A With Bill Posley on his new show “The Day I Became Black”

April 5, 2019 /

As a child, Bill Posley thought of himself as both white and black. However, he was told repeatedly that his biracial identity was invalid, such as when his teacher told him he couldn’t check both the “black” and “white” bubbles for race on a standardized test; he had to fill in just the black one.

Posley, who currently writes for CBS sitcom The Neighborhood, is a multifaceted performer with a gift for delivering serious messages wrapped in comedy. He tackles his quest to understand his own identity in his new one-man play, The Day I Became Black. When you’re biracial, he says, “you find yourself battling to maintain an identity that makes sense to you but the world is kind of forcing their identity on you.”

We spoke to him about his new play, his writing process, and how radical empathy can change the world.

Continue reading

“Barbie’s Going to Hell,” an essay by Bethany Hunter

September 28, 2018 /

Jenny lived across the street and down three houses. Precocious, with white blonde hair in a bowl cut and a tendency to run around the neighborhood in her swimsuit, she was the first friend I had when we moved in.

My father was a fundamentalist evangelist and along with my mother, we had been traveling around the country in our big 1983 burgundy Buick, state to state, church to church, revivals, tent meetings and summer camps for the last seven and a half years. After years of pleading from my mother for a home of our own and empty promises from my father, he had finally found a church to pastor and we were going to “settle down.” The church was in a Phoenix suburb and had a small, struggling congregation that needed Jesus as much as they needed jobs and money to pay bills that were due last month. With little more than a pittance, a rental house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, a front and backyard, as well as the long promised formal dining room, was found for us fifteen miles away in a largely Mormon part of town. As a homeschooled, only child whose friendships came on visiting preacher’s kid status and the backseat of the Buick that was the most permanent personal space I had, the move to a house in a neighborhood with an elementary school around the corner was new, exciting and often a culture shock.

Jenny’s family was what my mother called “rough around the edges”, but Jenny was friendly and curious and no cold shoulder from my mother seemed to discourage her interest in me. We walked the two blocks to school together in the mornings and rode our banana seat bikes around the neighborhood in the afternoons. Roughly the same age and in the same class at school, the thing that really cemented our friendship was a love of Barbie dolls. Barbie, Ken and her friends were my favorite, though they were generally given different monikers and often after various pastor’s wives or children I had liked best; small and compact, they were easy to pack up and play with in the backseat of the car. Barbie’s long hair, big breasts, tiny waist, plenty of dresses made out of my father’s old ties and tiny plastic high heels made her the perfect wife, mother and lover of Jesus in all the scenarios that I placed her. I was never aware that Barbie had a dream house or career aspirations. My Barbie had been baptized in the bathroom sink in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of her sins and cooked dinner for her family before going to church three times a week. Jenny’s Barbie dolls moved in different circles; they wore mini skirts, some cut their hair off and drove Corvettes. Regardless of our respective Barbie’s differences, Jenny and I loved to bring our haul together and spent countless hours in our imaginary worlds with them. Continue reading

Riding The Red-White Caterpillar by Penelope Hawtrey

January 26, 2017 /

Park and Ride and I. January 26th. Ottawa. This is how we meet.

I park my car and then grab my overstuffed knapsack that rests on the seat beside me that holds various snacks and workout clothes. I turn and reach behind me, and blindly grapple to locate my brown leather purse that I flung on the floor of the backseat. My second bag weighs more than any Army Cadet has ever had to carry during a march.

“Ah! There you are!” I say to no one in particular. Locating both bags, I push my car door open as white snow whips against my face feeling like hundreds of pin pricks against my cheeks. The snow enters my Honda civic and dances around inside. With that, I stick my foot out. And that’s where we meet.

Snowbank and I; SNOWBANK 1, ME 0.

Snow worms wiggle between my hiking boot and ankle and then, smoothly shimmy their way down to my heel. When my feet hit the pavement, the cold ice crunches against my sock and bottom of my boot until it is pulverized into a puddle. And now, I have a puddle at the bottom of my boot. Continue reading

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