1

CARTIER STREET REVIEW March 2 0 1 1

Editorial group:

Joy Leftow
Dubblex
Brad Eubanks
Thomas Hubbard
Marc Carver
Mike Finley

Cover: MIKHAIL KUDINOW: "The walk with Leopard," 60 X 70 oil on canvas

2
 Table of Contents
Note In A Bottle........................................................................................................................4
Blue Smoke................................................................................................................................5
Lunch At The Victorian Lady.................................................................................................7
"Expectation" ...........................................................................................................................8
Unauthorized Biography..........................................................................................................9
Digital Speech.........................................................................................................................11
These Leaves Getting Fat.......................................................................................................14
Iman Suligi Haiku Series.......................................................................................................18
Night-wanderer’s Plea.............................................................................................................19
An Agnostic’s Prayer...............................................................................................................21
The Blue Krishna....................................................................................................................23
"Gathering Flowers" ..............................................................................................................25
Preserves:..................................................................................................................................26
The Ritual................................................................................................................................27
Return Trip..............................................................................................................................28
"Girl With A Cat"..................................................................................................................29
Red Poem.................................................................................................................................30
Z213:exit By Dimitris Lyacos
Translated By Shorsha Sullivan.............................................................................................32
I Called You My Butter Cookie ...........................................................................................34
"Girl With The Toy"..............................................................................................................35
Featured Artist Kudinow............................................................................................................36
Review: 39 Poems, by Charles J. Butler...............................................................................37
Dali...........................................................................................................................................42
Smells Like Teen Spirit
…. For Patti Smith’s Cover Of Cobain’s Cut......................................................................43
Review: The Indian Who Bombed Berlin...........................................................................44
Toxic Gumbo..........................................................................................................................47
The Stink.................................................................................................................................50

3
Note In A Bottle

wails=hymns
to the maker of bottles
note crumpled in glassy container
message=longing
for heart-ache
heart-crush
girls from a love-boat pick up the bottle from
nether-world
scorpions crawling from the paper
love-sting
love-death

MARIO MALIVERT

Mario Malivert is the author of three collections of French poetry, the last in 2006. His
poems have also been published in Conjunction, Tanbou, Le Nouvelliste, and various
anthologies. Mario Malivert was born and grew up in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He currently lives
in Brockton, MA, where he works in the health care industry.
email: mariomalivert@yahoo.com

4
Blue Smoke

It begins at night.
Booze, sweat, dimmed lights
tobacco, liquor, lotus-eaters,

the sting of smoke

in red-veined eyes

and rapping through skull

and bones, a raw war cry—
song.

The dirge, wail, smoky, sultry,

jazz fingers cheating the keyboard
like a set of loaded dice.

Throaty voice, dark molasses

post-hypnotic suggestion
—going down slow, honey—

covering the flaws, keeping

reality just under the surface

recalled by her gaze,

besmirched with sooty lashes
begging, entreating.

The swing of her hips,

luster of a cinnabar bodice
expanding on a rumbling breath.

Through the blue swirls of smoke

her almond-colored eyes flash,
amaretto sweet, long-sustained notes.

He burns from that voice,

5
it gets inside him,
flames dance around his mind.

She pauses to breathe, the sax takes over;

it moans and scorches the air.
Hallucinations pull him deeper,
half-drunk on midnight blues.

The heat, the pain, the wailing blues

the pounding rhythm of
syncopated fibrillations,

that’s the penalty of living:

a trapped heart trying to escape
its own tightening rib-cage.

AMI KAYE

Ami's poems have appeared in various journals. She has written features, reviews and
articles. Ami is the author of What Hands Can Hold. Her next poetry collection, Singer of
the Ragas, will be released later this year. Ami is the publisher and managing editor of
Pirene’s Fountain.

web: http://www.amikaye.com

6
Lunch At The Victorian Lady

She sits in the window

Muttering her mantra
My name…my… name…
Pie a la mode two twenty five
Bus fare fifty cents
…is…name…mine…
bus will come at twelve thirty
be out side by twelve twenty two
…is my…name…?
Hides her purse in an old plastic bag
wraps herself up tight, reaching in her pocket
for the answer to her prayers, wrapped up
in rubber bands. She smiles-
is…
-lays three dollars down
…Miss Lucy. Abernathy.

HELEN PETERSON

Helen Peterson is the managing editor of Chopper Poetry Journal out of New London, CT,
and has previously published in over 100 print and online journals, both nationally and
internationally. Her work was also featured in The Work Book, an anthology put out by Poet
Plant Press in 2007, and she will be a featured reader at the Bowery Poetry Club in
November. A mother of three living in Connecticut, her blog can be found at
http://mspetersonexplains.wordpress.com/

7
"Expectation"
Kudinow, 70 X 80, oil on canvas 2006

8
Unauthorized Biography

A modest man, his property

has long been owned by others,
or been incinerated.

Without question, we know

only a few of his statistics
escaped the grave.

By standards of his time,

he was already old, near infirmity
when we were born.

He talked of pleasures in his past,

but no writings survive
among his known posterity;
no mementos, no souvenirs,
no photos in his doughboy hat,
no testament, no promise,
no commitment, no evidence of trust.

And after us, who will note

9
his worn statistics on his stone?
“He lies here, after all.”

KEITH MOUL

Keith Moul has a PhD in English but hardly taught, spending most of his working life (he's
now retired) in insurance. His chapbook, Grammar of the Mind, will be published this year
by Blue & Yellow Dog Press. He also publishes photos.

10
Digital Speech

I get so fucking tired of talking to machines

say stuff and they don’t know what I mean
get so vexed I scream
push cell phone buttons
press 0 for the operator but only get voice recognition software
so I start to swear
They program it in that slightly husky partly raspy sexy computer voice
Pick your choice
From the menu list
Press 1 for English 2 for Spanish
This is what I do but still can’t get through
Press 4 for more options
You must speak proper English
This is its wish or your call will be dismissed
I listen to the options - try to press the buttons in time
put the phone to my ear to hear the next command
“I didn’t understand your response,” says the machine
so I clear my throat and try again
I need more patience be more Zen
I’ve been holding on so long
I wonder what is going on!
I get peppered with questions
The voice says it didn’t understand my response
Is that cuz I talk too black

11
Or is my speech too slurred
I stumble over words
say it the third time - a waste of time
The machine repeats the same line
Asks for my birthday social security number ID pin what I ate for breakfast
a list of all my sins
Once again my answers are revoked
I freak out - I forget the list of choices
3 for billing
4 for tech support
5 to repeat
Star to speak to a representative
6 to update your account
7 to enter your birthday
I press 8 for the hell of it and 9 to end this call
Meanwhile my call is placed on hold I get cut off and have to begin all over again

DUBBLEX

12
DubbleX has been writing & playing music his entire life. He's been published by Street
Literature Review Magazine (paper) The Cartier Street Review, the Nov. 3rd Club, Polarity,
Mad Swirl, readerjack.com, and wheelhouse magazine. DubbleX writes & plays music to
stay sane.

13
These Leaves Getting Fat

the way a child born ravenous

almost devours its mother, the bark

gaunt --with so little left over

who knows if it can last out the summer
can tell between a knife or fork
or your initials growing stronger
on the light that flows through wood

--just two initials, one already taller

already mountainsides, fires
falling into fires
into your warm breasts
as if the heart was just now fed
and understood clearly the place.

SIMON PERCHIK

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review,

The New Yorker, and elsewhere. For more information, including his essay “Magic, Illusion
and Other Realities” and a complete bibliography, please visit his website at
www.simonperchik.com.

14
15
16
Iman Suligi is an art teacher at a preschool education training facility at Muhammadivah
University in Jember. He also manages the Community Library at The Kampoeng Baca.
email: imansuligi@gmail.com

17
Iman Suligi Haiku Series

Moonlight Serenade I
Full moon peering from behind teak trees
Bamboo leaves spread enchantment everywhere

Moonlight Serenade II
Faint rustle of leaves
Whispering jealous moon gossips with clouds
Wind stunned and still

Moonlight Dream
Cloud covered moon
Nature reveals an old ancient dream
Night reawakens suddenly

18
Night-wanderer’s Plea

for Ernesto Cardenal

Brother, a prayer, if you will,

in the encroaching dark
for the lady of the night
who shares my meal of onion and tomatoes
and never finishes it, perhaps out of politeness,
though her stomach has shrunk
to the size of a walnut.
Tell me the right words to say
to take away the pain
that demolishes self and leaves only longing.

In what century do we disparage a girl

for being poor
while the baron and the banker
dine at the gala luncheon
with the business man and policy maker?
In what century do we praise the millionaire,
whilst the mother in exile,
only moments away
begs for pennies
on the subway train with her daughter?

19
Ernesto, you who have always been of the people,
a kindness for the pole dancer
in your night rosary
who lost her only son
and shares my lonely room in times of poverty.
You who have cared for so many,
a hope for the cam-girl
who I courted every night throughout April
seeking not a union of the flesh,
but a refuge from the weight of compassion.
A blessing, then, for all our sisters,
still innocent but much used,
born to servitude
and self-doubt, made to undress,
forced to endure
the endless nights of the flesh
while the pimp and the thief make merry.
These are the travesties we live by –
old friend, a plea for all the poor,
before the night swallows us all in darkness.

MARK A. MURPHY

20
An Agnostic’s Prayer

When I tell you that I love your Audrey Santo:

the girl, whom, it is said, performs miracles
in her sleep, it is because I know her in my heart
as though she were my own flesh and blood,

when I knelt beside her bed in the late morning

all the world stood still, all my previous life
came to me as if in slow motion, acted out
behind the retina as though I had been given

the gift of my own memory for the first time;

I was not disturbed nor did I regret the course
my life had taken, I wished nothing then
for myself in that lonely room, but I could not help

feeling sorrow for the girl with the unfathomable

dreams, so I said to her, ‘I will pray for you, my Audrey Santo,’
and she said back to me in a voice gentle as prayer,
‘what can I do for you my brother in destiny?’

And I was not astounded nor did I find myself

disbelieving the sound of the voice inside my head,
I only wished to take the darkness she had known
these past nineteen years – away from her eyes

21
so she could see the world as I saw it, but then
it came to me more clearly than the winter sun,
perhaps Audrey Santo was blessed in ways
I could never comprehend, perhaps she really was

the waking world’s connection with God.

Mark A. Murphy

Mark A. Murphy was born in the UK in 1969. He studied philosophy as an undergraduate

and poetry in his postgraduate work. Murphy's first full-length collection, Night Watch Man &
Muse is pending from Salmon Poetry (Eire) early in 2012. Mark's poems have appeared in
Poetry New Zealand, Poetry Scotland, Quarterly Literary Review (Singapore), The Warwick
Review (UK), Istanbul Literature Review (Turkey), Paris Atlantic Journal (France), Poetry
Salzburg Review (Austria), Litspeak (Germany), Contemporary Literary Horizons
(Romania), Munyori (India), The Tampa Review (US), Del Sol Review (US), Left Curve
(US), The American Dissident (U.S.), The Stinging Fly (Eire), Crannog Magazine (Eire) and
on the deaddrunkdublin website.

22
The Blue Krishna
STORY BY SIDDHARTH KATRAGADDA

As kids, my bothers and I would climb to the top of the tall green gate and use
its heavy rusted iron bolt to grind seed with. What we used the seed for, I
don’t quiet remember. It is too far back for something so trivial.
What is not trivial, something so permanent in the mind’s eye, something I
would never have to go back for, was the view on the other side, visible only
from atop the gate.
One day, we got to the top, scratching our knees along the way, and peeped
over the wall. Nothing stirred there but for a blue mynah that sat on the
carefully laid garden and cooed some nature-orchestrated song to the hot,
windless summer afternoon. A fountain stood in the middle of the garden,
dried up, veiled in a blanket of leaf-green moss, shriveled creepers crawling all
over it. A statue of Lord Krishna danced in the middle, playing his flute to
invisible cows that seemed to materialize in our vision, a soft song rising in the
air. He had skin the color of the cloudless azure sky above. Wasn’t he dark
skinned? Why the blue? Was it euphemism, in a land where to have dark skin
was to be a sinner in a previous life, a way of repaying the curses of your
karma.
The unmoving smile etched on Krishna’s face lit up in our eyes as we watched,
the fountain springing to life around the statue.
We fell back, onto the patio.
On holiday, when we tired ourselves by spraying colored water on each other
until our bodies glimmered in all shades of rosy twilights and slategreen, and
our shirts clung to our bodies, our privates, wet and cold from the dampness –
multicolored, for that was where the colors collected, we were struck by an
idea.
We climbed the gate to the top of the wall, got onto the other side. Lord
Krishna watched us intently. We rubbed color into the palms of our hands and

23
 stepped forward, our hearts beating like Shiva’s dholak in our chests.
We aimed our water pistols filled with color at him, and four away, distance
enough for our little bare feet, if we needed to scoot, we let out a scream and
shot our pistols. The colored water hit the Lord’s face. The blue of his skin
melted down his body, mixing with the yellow, red and green. In our vision his
smile vanished, wiped away by astonishment,
Then, it reemerged and regained its stagnancy. We danced and pranced around,
clapping joyfully, a silent fear chocking our throats. What if Lord Krishna
cursed us for our crime? What if he sent his chakra flying that very moment to
take our sinful heads off ?
What if we, like him, we cursed with dark skin in our next lives?

Notes:
Holi: festival of color
dholak: Traditional Indian percussion instrument
chakra: A disk with serrations

Siddharth Katragadda is the author of two award-winning volumes of poetry (San Diego
Book Awards, 2002 &2003). His work has appeared in Grey Sparrow Press, South Jersey
Underground, Language&Culture, Writer’s Monthly, Chaffey Review, A Generation Defining
Itself, Boston Poet and Sulekha and his work has been reviewed in newspapers/magazines
like the Best Reviews, OneIndia.com and Suite101. Katragadda Email:
siddharthkatragadda@gmail.com

24
"Gathering Flowers"
Kudinow, 70 X 60, oil on canvas, 2003

25
Preserves:

Listenin’ to Nat Adderley

Tryin’ to follow his bread
Crumb trumpet trail like
A crumpet fails to make
Me into royalty you have
To listen deep & not just
Lick the jelly off the top
You got to stop & taste
The notes let them stain &
Spread inside your head
& try to keep the bits out of
Your bed & the jam out of
Your smile / watermelon*
Right?

KEVIN EBERHARDT

All I know how to do is write mediocre poetry & play mediocre drums & harmonica. All my
JOBS have also been mediocre, making a mediocre living in a world far from mediocre.
Also far from perfect but you got to use what you got to get what you want. Even God
performs mediocre miracles, sometimes.

web: roundingofthestone.blogspot.com/
email: ke767@hotmail.com

26
The Ritual

As he lights the candle

he thinks of laughing wood,
of miniature suns budding
in his grasp.
He dips his hand,
a galaxy of clipped nails,
towards the hesitant wax.
It catches
like the flu, like the pox
and robes itself in flame.

The candle bursts into song

a breathy tune his ears can’t catch
His eyes are swallowed,
sunken by the edge of a sunflower petal.
He presses his hand to the flame,
allows it to caress him.
He feels nothing,
no more than cloth brushed against skin
And then
in a cascading scream,
he burns.
His hand lives the tune.
The raging petals finally open,
fully bloomed.

VALENTINA CANO

Valentina Cano is a student of classical singing who spends whatever free time she can
muster up either writing or reading. She lives in Miami and you can find her here
web: coldbloodedlives.blogspot.com.

27
Return Trip
I watch you come down
from the train,
adjust your face from dreaming
and negotiate the platform with
your overnight bag.
You are wearing the silk scarf
I gave you on that special birthday
and a half remembered energy
jolts my heart.
My mind takes a taxi
to the time when the station
was a place of arrival,
a journey's end, a friend.
You reach the barrier
and we embrace like strangers.
My mind comes back today and
I curse Return tickets and
the inevitability of railway lines
for I know we can't go back
and this will soon be a place of departure.

GRANT D. MCLEMAN

Grant D. McLeman is a Scots poet born in Glasgow. he has been published in various print
and on-line outlets. He has also collaborated with photographers, musicians and a video
maker. His first collection ‘Street Magic’ was published in 2009.

28
"Girl With A Cat"
Kudinow, 50 X 40 oil on canvas

29
Red Poem

I need a name for red.

I want to tear
And bite
And bleed.

I need a name for red

because I’m leaving soon,
for Mars, and I’m afraid
of looking back at the blue.

Let me have cinnamon, paprika,

chili peppers, and cherry ice,
because the deep blue sea
might overwhelm me.

Like the zombies

with crusted fingernails,
and eyes that have lost their life.
They roam the earth, crying:

My lost dream lies

Just beyond the next crater,
over the waxing moon.

So give me a name for red.

30
So that I can swirl in a brand-new
Christmas dress, red, so I can
flit with the cardinals.

JEANNE DICKEY

Jeanne Dickey's latest poems will appear in Issue 4 of the The Lineup: Poems on Crime.
Her fiction and poetry have appeared in the journals Poet Lore, RE:AL, Passages North,
and Amherst Review, among others. She is working on a novel entitled A Fanciful Glamour,
a short excerpt of which is forthcoming in the anthology, The Unbearables Big Book of Sex,
to be released this spring.

email: jeannedickey@hotmail.com

31
Z213:exit By Dimitris Lyacos
Translated By Shorsha Sullivan
REVIEW BY MARC CARVER

Lyacos has emerged as one of Greece’s leading contemporary poet and playwright.
His highly acclaimed trilogy Poena Damni (Z213: EXIT, Nyctivoe, The First Death),
written over the course of eighteen years, has been translated into English, Spanish,
Italian and German and has been performed across Europe as well as the USA. His
works cross boundaries of literary form, so when I undertook to do this review, I
began with some trepidation. Reviewing other people’s work is always something that
fills me with a certain dread; I always fear I won’t be able to understand exactly what
this poet or writer, or in this case mixing in the translator’s view too.
Only the writer truly understands his own work and what he or she is trying to say,
therefore my review is subjective. That said, I think that there are some universal
truths as much so in poetry as in great art. Great writing will always be great writing
no matter what people say or don’t say about it.
I picked up this text and examined the words. To be honest I could not understand
what the writer or perhaps the translator meant. What was obvious was that he was
trying to get some points across and that he was experimenting with form. This
confused me somewhat but it was not just this.
I wondered if the translator was true to Lyacos' form and ideas since I found the
translation adds a power to the words and poems. There was a great deal of strength
to the writing that unsettled me as, I feel sure, was what Lyacos meant it to do.
For example, “Uncertain images of the road and thoughts mumbled words, and if
you read them without the names you won’t understand, it could have been anywhere,
and then I spoke with no one and those who saw me no chance that they remember
me. “ This short quote uses the metaphor of the road which I'd interpret as being in
charge of one's destiny but when you combine that with mumbled words and names
you won't understand - well then it brings us to being out of control or perhaps in
the hands of fate. This made me consider how many faces I pass daily thinking that
they look familiar yet I’m quite certain I’ve never seen them before.
Of course the literalness here could be assumed as being not exactly what the writer

32
wished to say. However, the qualities of the overview of the poems gave them an
almost Beckettesque feel. It reminded me of very minimalist writers of old.
I had an appreciation for layout of the book. I imagine that the book probably looks
very close to how Lyacos envisioned it. It's a book one can be proud of, substantial
and thought provoking. After I finished I still wondered if I’d understood it or were
my thoughts about it all the reaction needed. I recommend it because Lyacos is a true
talent. You’ll not find his works an easy read but most of the hard things in life –
provide us the biggest and most valuable rewards. There is little doubt to the quality
sealed within these pages and I look forward to seeing more of this poet’s works.

MARC CARVER

33
I Called You My Butter Cookie

i know them way back, packed

in the supermarket, stacks after stacks
labeled blue, each blue can
our big city's favourite, wrapped in red
spring's warmest gift.

it must have been your baby blues, or me

overwhelmed in a scent
so flattering, in a way
so sweet, it caters my court,
your ship.

crunchy touches, sugar on top, taste

on my tongue, the best flavor
unlocked - the best thing i know from your country -
all these golden pieces of loveliness
sink in memories.

CHERRY RAO

Cherry Rao, a 20-something writer, graduated from the University of Hong Kong, with
majors in Fine Arts and English Studies. She works in galleries and areas of art education,
cannot stop loving art, and will never stop writing poetry. She writes, therefore she is.
blog: http://cherryrao.blogspot.com
email: cherrylovenicky@hotmail.com

34
"Girl With The Toy"
Kudinow, 50 X 40 oil on canvas

35
Featured Artist Kudinow

Kudinow’s art training was classical. Later he became involved in an international

arts exchange project between Russia, Denmark and Germany. This exchange
project exposed Kudinow to many different styles and ideas. Kudinow says that
the most important source of inspiration is in the artist himself and literature,
pictures, nature and especially his own imagination. It is the combination of these
things that motivate him to his peak performance. Kudinow will tell you he is
driven by imagination and that the virtuosic sophisticated images he creates
express his joy of life. He feels the joy of life is a fundamental prerequisite for the
artist’s creativity. He uses his artistic means to struggle to find the good in the
picture to enable him to enchant and distract the viewer from his daily grind.
Kudinow tells his viewers the viewers that his work is not a language to be
unencrypted and that one need not seek for hidden content. His work is easily
read with its enormous wealth of aesthetic emotions and moods for each of us.
Many of his works, particularly his works on paper are currently very inexpensive
and certainly a good long-term investment. In Denmark there is a collector's
circle for his art and now German art lovers have also begun to collect his works.

36
REVIEW: 39 Poems, by Charles J. Butler
ISBN 978-0-9772718-8-7
Publication date 2010
74 pages
No Shirt Press, Brooklyn, NY

REVIEW BY JOY LEFTOW

Reading through the 39 Poems brought to mind Hitchcock’s movie, The 39 Steps
because each poem stretches the reader and the page towards the next poem and set
of steps
without explaining where he is going. Also the poems on the pages of the book are
laid out in emulation of climbing up and down steps so that while reading I felt like I
was skipping steps. Each poem relates to life’s struggles; the various ways love affects
us and how meaningful respect is. He writes about everyday things moving us up and
down steps lyrically and emotionally.
Butler describes how one can be oblivious to a murder and walk across bloodstains
on our big city streets without recognizing them in the book’s first poem, Crimson
Stroll. Suddenly while stepping over the red brown stains, the author recognizes it for
what it is, seeing a stark vivid beauty of someone’s life bled out on the streets.

Someone’s life bled out

At your feet
Think on it
Times you bled
Times you made others bleed
Look on it
Big dark path on 8th ave
Brooklyn side
in your way

look on it
the fuel that moves us all
dried out on a dirty sidewalk
who bled …

are they dead

a dark stain

beautiful

37
a bit of Canada
flashes up your neck
and ears
back in the world you move around it
and move on
wishing for cold rain
to wash away the stain human sin
most of all
your own

look at it

it’s almost…

We’re all here – all human and suffering – and this is the grist for this author to
describe how we’re all the same and different at the same time, but he wants to show
us that we have the capacity to be and do more that drives us and of course this is
what drives this poet to create poetry. The stains our lives create must contain beauty
otherwise why do we exist? Butler’s struggle is to align himself with the humanity in
all of us, despite the murder the chaos, the beauty the differences between rich and
poor, black and white, and he struggles with it all, climbing up and down, retreating
and coming to terms with wrongs and rights and even the grays and imperfections.

The problem is that our climbing stretching and reaching is never done. You go up
you descend and then you begin all over again because that’s the way life is, it’s never
done until you’re done - or dead and gone - is more like it - or if you’re a quitter.
Butler is no quitter and no matter how far down he’s gone – he bounces back to
reexamine his roots and the course of his life, fighting to stay in touch with his
spiritual side. This spiritual side is at the root of Butler’s talent, as he controls his
anger hurt and humiliation when he’s experienced racism. For any of you who have
never experienced racism, normal is a good place to start to understand what it’s
about when you get stopped on the street because of the color of your skin.

nature of the beast

now

I’m not gonna say I’ve lost

count o’the many times I’ve been blackstopped
but
it’s more than a few

38
remember
I’m 16
walkin’ on a bed-stuy street
goin’ noplace fast
blue n’ white rolls up on me
unis pile out …
nicely they ask me if I’m carryin’
a gun
nicely I say no
nicely
they ask if I would submit
to a search
mind you
they don’t have
to ask me
a goddamn thing
and they know it
I know it
An’ the brother
watchin’ this
who wishes right now
he was

someplace else

knows

it

nicely

I say

go ahead

I can relate to this struggle and suffering. All my life as a Jew and especially in my
childhood I was called a Christ-killer. The recent advent of the Mel Gibson movie
and his ensuing drunk arrest and slurred comment about Jews brought it home to me
again. But this is a tactic of the upper echelon. They want to keep us all at each
other’s throats so we will keep our busy bee status and keep making the rich richer.
It’s a means of control and humiliation and it makes us hurt. Mr. Butler knows this
hurt intimately and writes about it poignantly.

39
39 Poems covers a range of experiences; awareness of the haves and have-nots, racism,
love, hurt, abandonment and loss, and more importantly the urge to understand and
come to terms with it and explain what it’s all about. After all this everyday stuff is
the mesh of our lives. The ability to sublimate sets humans apart from other species,
to take our hurts and pain and transcend them for the greater good – to create beauty
in ugliness is the work Mr. Butler attends to.

In DMV rag, Butler speaks for all of us who have ever been to the DMV.

We’re in the dmv now

Hundreds of black
And brown faces
some whites
all of them wanna be someplace else
but here we are …
it’s all mad
gotta be
half the world is on fire
an’
the other is on line waiting for their number to be called
lookin’ for a place t’ sit
an empty seat
is like
fool’s gold

Don’t we all feel like this when we visit official offices, public school registration,
social
security, Medicaid, even the closed down US passport passport bureaus, and welfare’s
the worst. I have a poem about it called, “Welfare’s Still A Bitch!”
The searching and questioning never stop just like in the movie The 39 Steps, there is
always another side to examine to analyze understand and conquer. His poems speak
to maturity and growth and show how youth and mistakes although unavoidable are
only part of climbing and descending those steps, a poem for each step.
In word one baby, Butler explains why a writer writes.

why
write?
writing

40
 thru

since he was eleven

good days
and dark times
the pain of living
the come hither call
of death
and madness inbetween
even hung
‘em up for a time
didn’t last
why write?
he’s free

Is the author describing himself here or is he speaking for everyone? We all know
writers write about what they know and well, … if they write about what they don’t
know … everyone knows that doesn’t work. Artists from time immemorial have been
known to describe angst which often spurs their creative urges. Does every writer
experience angst? I can’t speak for every artist. Many writers have spoken and written
about their angst yet angst alone doesn’t make a man an artist. There is some other
indistinguishable indefinable something that inspires a writer to create, that makes his
writings stand out among others, something that prods him to spend his time writing
while others commune, have sex, watch tv or do other things while writing remains a
lonely task which takes time.

Words don’t miraculously appear on the page. Writing is what gives Butler the
freedom he speaks of above. His words create a freedom that exists nowhere else
around in our world and he helps the reader to feel it too. Through that freedom we
see what he sees; a stark world filled with fertility and barrenness that provides us not
only with a place to survive but a place to grow and thrive. The growth in Butler’s
poetry and words inspires me too. I recommend 39 Poems sincerely and without any
reservation.

41
Dali

All of a sudden
there she was
in front of me
holding two big melons
in her open hands
as if
they were an offering
to me.

She walked straight past me

as if she were offering
her melons to another man.

I felt jealous
and confused
for a little bit
and when I turned around
she
and her melons
were gone.

MARC CARVER

Marc Carver has been writing poetry for three years and has been published two hundred
poems in some fifty publications around the world. Carver strives to strike a balance
between truth and the irony of life in his poetry.

42
Smells Like Teen Spirit
…. For Patti Smith’s Cover Of Cobain’s Cut.

The hard reality of the small crease she made on the hardened heart swelling a
serene violence on the petal of her angular smile turned inside out, she walked
with a bristling quiet, rocking that savage clap of heels on her lover's gowned
patience, derailed ever so sweetly in the oven cool off kisses forged in sluggish
shadows...how I can see you dancing, even now after all your instinctual death,
naked to the bone child erected as memorial, a crystalline heart beating till it's
raw in my mouth...I found that evil was a convenient goodness collapsing neatly
to the nostalgic cover collection, there you could be easily and distinctly heard,
the twang of your ever distant guitar approaching like a ghost perpetually
reminding me the time has come, has always come, as we continually ignore the
passage of its allowance, our interactivities diabolically spread over sweaty skins
on the post fuck joke....can't get it on the platter like reality, can you? Only off a
CD semblance, tinny and hollow, lacking any spiritual pizzazz; that's the mystical
abeyance, inner folding off the masculine and pretty cool of sexy smiles melted
for a party favor...smoked for bad weed cut with baby lies...that I could find the
truth she sheds as a criminal vibe, yeah, how could I forget? The time's not my
friend. I forget too many things too quickly. Of course she's there...always will
be, shimmying the absolute note she taught me in a place I keep neatly packed in
an earth awaiting its next world...a dapple of the threaded stream of heat
interwoven on a strain, melodic and dissonant, wild like rapids in an old painter's
sink swirling the last colors down to a black n white depth...not to be touched
but imagined on a key of unholy raptures...fruit of the forbidden tree, how neat,
stuffed for the next millennium's grace in the brain boot, closed as a dead man's
secrets whispered to a deaf priest...ah...

DAN BERKEY

Dan Berkey is an actor and writer. He lives in New York City.

email: berkey.dan@gmail.com

43
Review: The Indian Who Bombed Berlin
by Ralph Salisbury
Published by Michigan State University Press
©2009, Trade Paperback, 210 pages
ISBN 978 087013847 8
Price $24.95

BOOK REVIEW BY THOMAS HUBBARD

A little boy's life is sometimes scary. A little boy who must

walk in two worlds lives a life even more scary. The lead
story in Ralph Salisbury's short story collection, The
Indian Who Bombed Berlin, gives readers an idea just
how scary it can be.
In these stories spanning more than half a century,
Sallisbury introduces us to a world of mixed-blood
characters and their families, with the opening story
presenting eight-year-old Seek (Sikwaya) as he runs down
a snowy hillside. He's trying to reach the safety of his
school and his beloved teacher, Miss Smith, before three
farm-dogs-gone-wild catch up to him.
Seek ran, sobbing, "Mith Smi-ith, Mith Smi-ith," wind
chilling his tongue, while the thud of paws and click of
toenails against frozen gravel drew closer, and fierce baying grew louder with
expectation of the kill.
Seek and his older brother, and in fact, his whole family, have to face wild dogs and
racist bullies the best way they can, as is most often the case for Indian kids in a
mainstream — even back country mainstream — school. And so they do, with help
from Seek's veteran father.
Salisbury, in this stellar collection, includes several stories of Indians in the U.S.
military, dealing not only with the enemy, but also facing racial discrimination and
hatred (it's not only for blacks) from fellow soldiers in the same army. A prime
example is his first-person story in which the protagonist is getting a pre-assignment
physical exam.

44
Eighteen and strong, I had humped forty pounds of gear forty miles and completed
training for battle, but noting a slightly erratic heartbeat, already recorded from
previous exams, the medical captain shook his head. "A month ago, I'd have sent you
overseas, and it'd of been a bullet that killed you, not a heart attack. I've worked on
an Indian reservation and seen how you people take advantage. Now the war's damn
near ended you might be costing our government a disability pension for a few days
of combat."
Consequently the eighteen-year-old gets a non-combat assignment.
Other stories tell of Indians who come home from battle with wounds both physical
and mental. These Indian veterans, just like white or black veterans suffering Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder or other mental dysfunctions, bring the war home to their
families, along with its ruin and disruption. The father of Parm and Juke and Ann is a
prime example. He's a great guy except when he periodically comes home drunk and
shoots up the house with his pistol.
Salisbury's prose dances toward poetry as he explores his protagonists from the inside
out, with a flow of sometimes disparate images jammed up against one another like
slices in a bread loaf. And like poetry, it sometimes requires closer reading than prose
might. The experience is worth the extra effort, however. And he doesn't just tell you
about his characters, he lets you experience their reality. This may be as close a view
as most folks will ever see, into mixed-blood reality.
The question of why Indian men fight for the same army that killed (massacred?) so
many of them is asked by inference and remains unanswered except by inference in
these stories, as generation after generation of Salisbury's characters go off to war
and return home dead, crippled or disturbed. Families and friends must then share
the pain and disruption, which echoes across successive generations.
In "The Indian Who Bombed Berlin," Salisbury's title story, the protagonist recalls
his relationship with the racist pilot with whom he'd flown as bombardier on
missions over Germany. He then skips forward to a time when he's returned home
from the war, married, earned a degree and raised a family, and subsequently found
himself in Germany, on a teaching fellowship. His colleague, a former British bomber
pilot, hates Americans — especially Native Americans. So walking to class one day,
the protagonist is pulled into a march of dark-skinned protesters in the streets of a
post-war German city.
...I found my route blocked by thousands of dark-skinned demonstrators, who were
marching under Turkish and a number of other Near East and Middle East banners,

45
to present the city government with a demand for justice. Caught between the river
and a fortress wall, whose stones had echoed to the footbeats of Roman invaders, I
was just one among dozens of spectators, but my British colleague, who was standing
nearby, shouted something in fluent German to a group whose signs called for holy
war.
Pulled into the march, I thought the group wanted another dark-skinned man to add
to their numbers, and I tried to protest, in my not-very-fluent German, that I would
soon be due to teach a class.
"Murderer! Satan American! Murderer!" a tall man shouted and slapped my jaw....
Suffering the violent rage of mistreated immigrants, Salisbury's protagonist finally
comes to terms with his own involvement in war, after the demonstrators pummel
him and toss him into the river.
In these stories Salisbury shows us a side of First Nation life generally ignored by the
mainstream. Threaded through this collection of observations from the receiving end
of racial bigotry and military mayhem, the reader will see a strong fiber of honest,
day-to-day courage — the kind that stares, squarely and hard, back through
generations of loss before continuing resolutely into the future.

Thomas Hubbard, a gray-haired renegade halfbreed, invents cusswords about American

repression, but also writes poetry, fiction and book reviews in his Ozark hideout.
Sometimes he runs off to Mexico for a dose of reality, but he always comes back ... so far.

46
Toxic Gumbo

there's nothing sadder

than looking at the paper
and seeing a picture of brown pelicans
covered in progress
this summer, kids will collect tar balls
like they collect seashells
the flood that came to new orleans
came to nashville, too
but it was just god's tears
he cried in anger
as he exacted his revenge on us
karma is a bitch
and she always wins
so, taste this toxic gumbo
and enjoy it
we won't care if
if the headphones from
our cell phones give us
cancer in a few years
it's just a small price to pay
for keeping up with the joneses
isn't that what cancer is
anyway, a growth that doesn't
stop?

47
enjoy your oyster po-boy
while you can...

ERREN GERAUD KELLY

A poet based in New York City, by way of Louisiana, Maine, and California, Erren Geraud
Kelly has been writing for 21 years. She’s been published in print and online in several
publications including Hiram Poetry Review, Mudfish, Poetry Magazine, Fertile Ground, and
Beyond The Frontier, with her most recent work in In Our Own Words, a Generation X
poetry anthology. Kelly has a B.A. in Creative Writing from Louisiana State University in
Baton Rouge.

48
49
The Stink

Does not understand

it is the problem:

Brothers, sisters
where are you going?

MIKE FINLEY

Mike Finley, who does the layouts for Cartier Street Review, is author of over 100 books.
Free downloads of his incredible collected works, Yukon Gold: Poemes de le terre, are at
http://mfinley.com/pdf/poemes.pdf. It is the largest chapbook ever published.

50