Super-Sized Series

 Dishing Out the Drama

 

 

Movie Life by Arlene Gay Levine

Before we chose
you and I sat,
discarnate,
discussed possibilities.
You: an actor.
Me: a poet selling popcorn
at the Loew’s Valencia.
 
Every day you show up to watch Gable,
the ripples beneath his shirt,
nothing escapes you except why
you don’t like yourself.
I write poems by the light
of the popcorn machine,
aluminum-lined odes
dribbled with butter.
 
One day you notice
a hastily scribbled sonnet
on your popcorn bag:
the last couplet,
my name and number.
You arrive at my star-plastered
apartment that night;
I call you
Rhett in my best Scarlett voice.
We go to a movie, some Hitchcock
thing that makes us both dizzy.
Over hamburgers
you deliver
your romantic soliloquy.
You needn’t have bothered.
I can hardly wait to get you
between the sheets; just a rerun
of my favorite feature fantasy.
I award you an Oscar.
 
I’d like to say it ended
happily-ever-after, like in the movies,
but we fizzled out before
the plot thickened.
Maybe the characters
weren’t sympathetic enough.
 
I quit the Valencia.
Got a job writing obits
for a local rag.
One day yours crosses my desk.
You jump from a fifteenth floor window.
What a mess.
Guess you never did catch on--
Gable would’ve used a gun.

 

 

 Worth the Wait by Elaine Sorrentino
Sense and Sensibility

Clutching the remote
I squelch the tendency
to fast-forward past
buffoonery and greed,
and bask in the instant
sacrifice and loyalty
are validated.
I like to think I’m Elinor,
cut from the same bolt
of moral integrity,
but who am I kidding?
I’m moony-eyed
Marianne,
shunning propriety for love.
Muddling through
Fanny’s hard heartedness,
Lucy’s nitwitted naivete,
Willoughby’s crushing cruelty
sweetens the penultimate
moment celibacy is revealed
and Elinor is free
to unburden her sensible heart;
a turn of events that justifies
two hours and fifteen minutes of angst.

 


Dear Juliet by Lynn White

Listen

to a father’s foreboding
it’s a difficult time 
when you’re half grown.
No longer a child,
but not yet an adult.

Half grown
with fully formed temptations,
and such contempt
for adults,
fathers especially,

you always know best
but listen,

the forbidden fruit
of first love
is poisonous 
not for tasting
and when the feuds of the fathers
meet the dreams of the fathered
there are no happy endings.

You always knew best
until you didn’t.

So listen
and heed a father’s foreboding.

First published in Heretics, Lovers and Madmen


The Borrowers by Jacqueline Jules
 
“I can’t find Barbie’s blue shoes!”
“Well.” Mom winked at me.
“Maybe a Borrower took them.”
It was our private joke
whenever something small
vanished unexpectedly.
Maybe Barbie’s shoes
were under the floorboards
in a cozy miniature home
on the feet of a teensy girl
sitting primly on a thimble.
 
Like The Borrowers book
we read cover to cover
at least three times.
 
We spent so many sweet hours
between eight and nine at night,
Mom snuggled beside me,
reading just another chapter
in her crisp calm voice.
 
And for as long as I live
I won’t see
a lost toothpaste cap
as merely missing
but maybe swiped
by someone dainty
who needed a new cup
to set on her tiny table.

Originally published in Your Daily Poem


Phantom at Arrowhead by Wilda Morris
. . . one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.
~ Herman Melville (Chapter 1 of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville)
 
I peered out the porthole of Melville’s office
at Arrowhead and saw Mount Greylock
pale blue in summer light. Whale-shaped,
seeming to swim, calm in tranquil green waters
along the horizon. Nothing haunting
or horrific. Nothing malevolent.
 
But when winter wraps the Berkshires
in frigid air and snow sweeps in from the west,
that creature turns phantasmagoric,
a great white poltergeist. Mist rises
from the specter like the spouting
of a sperm whale, mesmerizing, menacing.
 
That apparition disturbed Melville’s sleep,
pursued him in dreams through the dead of night
as he pursued it. Obsessed as Ahab,
he rose each day to write again about gods,
cultures, and people as changeable as the mountain,
as unpredictable and malicious as Moby Dick.
 
First published in my book, Pequod Poems: Gamming with Moby-Dick (Kelsay Books).


A Crow on Roadkill by Rachael Ikins
Beef escorts Judge from courtroom, robes fly like crows’ wings. Senator knocked down, a question, statues stand silent.
 I dwell in my house like a turtle it’s shell- all I need is just-enough. I fit my life into chicken noodle soup cans. Campbells $1.28 a can, generic $.95. Tastes close enough to five years old sick in bed, mom with lunch on a tray. Sided toast with crunchy peanut butter.
 Heat is coming, an avalanche of it, pick spinach. Hose trickles slow-filling pool as if water is reluctant to leave the dark lake depths where I was born. Into that lake before birth my mother swam curled around me. I drive past, my body craving.
 Read James Patterson, swim his surfaces, the Deep just too dark, seaweed and monsters. Watch feel-good movies over and over, like bedtime stories, enough serial killers roam weekend nightmares. 
 Childhood comforts, chicken noodle soup, toast dipped in. Peanut butter on generic saltines $1.19.I was never in love with brand names. We have to stay under this roof; we have to trim the fat. 
Eat your kale, quinoa and trendy protein. I’ll grab comfort like a crow on roadkill, my day-old cupcakes with red frosting that probably causes cancer. 
 In the anthology Unhoused 

The Tale of Three Octogenarian Grandmas Living in an Electronic Age by Sharon Waller Knutson

The Doberman chained up next door howls
as my Ring doorbell chimes but the camera
shows no one outside but the Flicker
flying by the window. Feet propped up
on my walker, I watch Prime TV.

Judge Judy peers at a cellphone where a Ring
doorbell camera captures an unleashed
Pitbull attacking a German Shepherd
on a leash while her law clerk Granddaughter
explains to her how to bring up the video.

It’s refreshing to watch a woman of my generation
who speaks my language on television.
The mother of five with multiple grandchildren
lectures and teaches her litigants
like mothers and grandmothers talk
to their children and grandchildren.
She corrects their grammar and tells them
not to slouch, uncross their arms, put
their hands down, don’t interrupt, get a job. 

“In my opinion, what’s wrong 
with this country is the new generations’
sense of entitlement,” she says.
She believes in marriage not co-habitation,
that both parents have equal rights
and about has a coronary when a parent
who can’t afford to support their own children
loans money or buys an expensive pet
or runs off with the opposite sex,
leaving their children with relatives, 
neighbors or strangers.

On Peacock, a newscaster shows a masked
gunman caught on camera at the door
of Nancy Guthrie, a grandmother
and mother of a TV show celebrity,
seconds before she is snatched 
as she sleeps alone in her home
just a hundred miles from my home
where I sleep alone unharmed. 

The sheriff says Nancy had to be kidnapped.
“She is 84, a widow, and can’t walk very far.” 
He could be describing me, I think,
so I check my locks every night. “Don’t
answer the doorbell after dark,” says my son
from a thousand miles away
who is alerted on his cellphone every time
the doorbell rings and talks to the visitor. 
“It’s safe here,” I say, but I bet Nancy told
her son and daughters that before 
disappearing without any trace.