full of crow poetry, july 2010

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Full Of Crow Poetry is a quarterly, online collection of poetry edited by MK Chavez for Full of Crow Press And Distribution. For more information, please contact Lynn Alexander at [email protected].

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Page 1: Full Of Crow Poetry, July 2010
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Lia Mastropolo

The Organ Grinder

“Extortion to keep quiet,” the side note says,the monkey balanced, birdlike,on epauletted shoulder.The organ has a grate like the frontof a nineteen-fifties Cadillacof a nineteen-fifties Cadillacand now I see the error—braille nubs of the music boxlulling the child to sleepThe song’s a dirge,the monkey’s weak with fleas.A child, feeling blindlyfor the edges of the world,for the edges of the world,I grasped upon my father’s sausage-making(wine, friends, football)The recipe: shoulder, liver, a bit of cheese.The source: A piglet down the street,weaned and grown.I watched him suckle,watched the plow of earswatched the plow of earsand blindness of the young—fat, hairless, skin the color of my own.After the first scareit gets easier to dine on flesh,digesting as the earthdigests itself: meat to dirt.And so I imagined the organ grinder—And so I imagined the organ grinder—input of liver and heart, music the product,like sausage, to be savored as lifeBut years, it seems, foldlike an accordion—now I call it humanthe dirge:creased cheek, the skin’s the first to go.creased cheek, the skin’s the first to go.Father in his armchairsmoke suspended in the waiting air.A few cells grind this body’smeat, their canonthe athlete’s trope: fightOf all I’ll remember, this:A 10th street vendor’s counterA 10th street vendor’s counterand dad gulping tripeafter the first scaleslow down, I tell him,its feathered edgesghostlike in the blood-greasedmeat sauce of the market

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Grant Hackett says about himself: “When not writing poems, I index books. I have been writing one line poems for about two and a half years. I have published one line poems in Lilliput Review, Roadrunner Haiku Journal, Presence, and tinywords. Several of my poems will soon appear in Four and Twenty.”

I am a helmsman by what I see in the light that revolves around you

What I see left in your dove-rendered absence is how to be at peace with myself